As the Trump Administration prepares to depart office and give way to that of Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden, its foreign policy legacy is intimately tied to the policy of sanctioning foreign governments for perceived misbehavior. President Donald Trump’s displeasure with the Obama Administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a landmark nonproliferation treaty that all but eliminated Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons, led him and a cadre of Iran hawks from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to former National Security Advisor John Bolton to level various sanctions against Iran. The so-called “maximum pressure” campaign has crippled Iranians’ standard of living while doing preciously little to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities or its various destabilizing efforts in the Middle East. In total, the Trump Administration has also either strengthened existing sanctions or levied new ones on thousands of people, countries, or entities. Furthermore, President Trump has revelled in his capacity to deploy sanctions against adversaries of his “America First” foreign policy, threatening to “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)” in October 2019 in response to Turkish aggression against Syrian Kurds.
Like never before, Washington has adopted sanctions as its foreign policy tool of choice. Given America’s financial dominance, place in the international system, and numerous allies, this is perhaps natural. But in the age of the novel coronavirus, it is well to ask whether the immense humanitarian costs of sanctions coupled with the existing crises of climate change and pandemics are justifiable or even tolerable in the pursuit of American foreign policy objectives.
The Purposes of Sanctions
Traditionally, economic sanctions are best understood as efforts by governments or multilateral bodies to shape the strategic decisions made by state or non-state actors in the international system. In their practical application, sanctions may take numerous forms ranging from travel bans and asset freezes to arms embargoes and foreign aid reductions. Targets of sanctions can range from terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda to states. States and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations (UN) may impose sanctions for a variety of reasons. In the statist context, a state may impose sanctions on another nation or actor that undermines their interests whereas both states and multilateral institutions may deploy sanctions in response to perceived or recognized violations of international law or norms. For example, the UN sanctioned North Korea after its first nuclear test in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the U.S.’s Global Magnitsky Act freezes the assets of Russian officials alleged to have committed grave human rights violations and bans them from entering the U.S.
Sanctions are valued by their supporters because, as Benjamin Coates of Wake Forest University writes, “Sanctions have served as both the idealist’s dream and the realist’s cudgel. They have promised to the powerless a world free of war and discrimination while giving the powerful tools for domination.” Coates also notes, however, “The legitimacy and appeal of sanctions rest on blurring the lines between these two outcomes; the more Washington turns to unilateral sanctions, the less legitimacy the practice may have,” which will be explored more later in this piece.
In more recent times, there has been a debate over the efficacy of so-called targeted sanctions compared to broader economic sanctions. The Global Magnitsky Act is an example of targeted sanctions, which apply only toward certain individuals so as to minimize the suffering of innocent civilians. Human rights advocates argue that targeted sanctions address what they view as the fundamental problem with the international sanctions regime- that they are poorly conceived to change state behavior and instead subject civilians to needless suffering even as oligarchs and dictators evade their impact.
Do Sanctions Work? If So, Are They Worth It?
The practice of economic statecraft more or less emerged not when the U.S. became the undisputed leader of the global economy or during the Cold War, but rather is likely as old as economics and statecraft in their own right. The early 20th century, however, is as close as one can get to the genesis of international sanctions, defined neatly by Coates as “a collective denial of economic access designed to enforce global order.” An increasingly interdependent world during and after World War I served to illustrate the intersection between military and economic warfare. After all, the British Empire was constructed around British financial and commercial dominance reinforced by the world’s preeminent navy. During World War I, Britain put this to work in a crippling blockade of Germany that led to malnourishment that would ultimately take the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The establishment of the ill-fated League of Nations after the war included in its covenant a provision mandating that any nation that started a war of aggression be punished with an embargo. Facing complete isolation from the global economy, the theory as supported by President Woodrow Wilson went, nations would be deterred from invading their neighbors. This provision enshrined into international norm sanctions as the preeminent multilateral tool of enforcement for world peace.
League of Nations sanctions ultimately failed to deter Italy from invading Ethiopia, a League member-state, and from subsequently falling into the orbit of the Nazis. Though the U.S. government would enact the Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA) during WWI barring trade with Germany, TWEA would ultimately prove unsuccessful in deterring the Nazis from territorial conquest. In 1941, after Japan invaded Indonesia, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked TWEA to seize all Japanese assets held in the U.S. Britain followed suit and the sanctions cost Japan access to 75 percent of its total foreign trade and 88 percent of its imported oil. Japanese hardliners then used the sanctions as justification for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead of coercing Japan to renounce its territorial conquests as Roosevelt had hoped, the sanctions emboldened Japanese hardliners aghast at an aggressive use of American economic power to the point of deploying military force.
Following Harry Truman’s invocation of national emergency powers during the Korean War to activate TWEA, the emergency remained in power for decades to follow, leading to the imposition by future presidents of sanctions on Cuba, Cambodia, and others. Then in the 1990s, the use of sanctions really began to take off, The UN Security Council, now bereft of the Soviet veto power, imposed sanctions some 12 times during the decade compared to only twice (against Rhodesia and South Africa) in the previous four decades. Human rights abusers in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and state sponsors of terror like Sudan and Libya were some of the notable targets, and the efficacy of the sanctions remains suspect.
Iraq
But the most noteworthy target of the 1990s sanctions boom was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Just four days after Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990, the UN passed Security Council Resolution 661, imposing the strictest sanctions up to that point in history on Iraq. Interestingly enough, even as the U.S. led the Gulf War coalition and the effort to sanction Iraq, it had supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War just a decade earlier and just two years earlier had refused to sanction Hussein for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds.
The Gulf War sanctions, which imposed a nearly complete arms, trade, and aid embargo, absolutely crippled every sector of the Iraqi economy while exacting an unfathomable humanitarian toll. When partnered with the U.S. aerial bombardment of the country’s energy and sanitation facilities, the sanctions brought about a public health crisis. The arms embargo was so broad so as to include anything that could conceivably be weaponized, including computers and tractors, goods with a clear civilian need in a nation whose electrical grid was destroyed and whose access to food was inhibited. Limitations on Iraqi exports (namely oil before the OIl for Food Programme was introduced) made it more difficult to fund humanitarian aid, while the ban on the importation of chlorine effectively made water purification impossible.
In total, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) the average Iraqi’s caloric intake dropped to a low of just 1,093 per day by 1995, with “the vast majority of the country’s population...on a semi-starvation diet for years.” Food rationing enacted in the mid-1990s by the Iraqi government in response to the sanctions left Iraqis deficient in nutrients critical to fetal development, leading to sharp increases in stillbirths and congenital heart disease during the decade. Mortality rates for children under five years old increased fivefold between just 1991 and 1995. The public health system lost 90 percent of its funding, overturning half a century of progress.
By any measure, the Iraq sanctions, to say nothing of more than thirty more or less consecutive years of war, completely destroyed the standard of living and physical health of multiple generations of Iraqis, all as Saddam Hussein remained in power into the 2000s and long after Iraq had ceased its WMD programs. The only change spurred by this act of economic coercion was that the Iraqi people who had suffered for decades under a dictator now found themselves suffering under the twin terrors of both that dictator and the full weight of international economic punishment.
Cuba
The Iraq sanctions program was a multilateral, decade-long endeavor. On the other hand, America’s ongoing sanctions war with Cuba is the exact opposite: a six decade, all-encompassing campaign of economic warfare imposed unilaterally. Initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, the program of economic and political isolation of Cuba is now the longest-enduring trade embargo in world history. The Cuban sanctions program is the byproduct of five major statutes and a hodgepodge of executive actions. The 1962 Foreign Assistance Act was cited by President Kennedy when he enacted a complete trade embargo between the U.S. and Cuba and amendments that same year to TWEA allowed for Kennedy to expand the embargo to cut off travel to Cuba. George H.W. Bush and a bipartisan majority in Congress expanded the embargo in 1992 with the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), preventing foreign subsidiaries of the American government from trading with Cuba and preventing vessels from loading and unloading freight in America if they had conducted trade with Cuba within the preceding 180 days.
The Clinton and Bush administrations further sanctioned Cuba via the Helms-Burton Act and the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, which codified the embargo into law, prevented the embargo from being lifted without congressional approval and confirmation that Cuba had sufficiently democratized, and effectively prohibited private financing for exports to Cuba and restricted tourist travel to Cuba. Despite the Obama Administration’s “Cuba thaw” that re-established diplomatic relations, relaxed trade and travel sanctions, and removed Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism (SST) list, the Trump Administration ratcheted the trade and travel sanctions right back up and they threatened to add Cuba back to the SST list.
Six decades after Cuba traded an American-friendly corrupt dictator with no regard for human rights (Fulgencio Batista) for a brutal dictator allied closer to Moscow in Fidel Castro, the sanctions have made Cuba no more democratic and the people of Cuba have been made much poorer. The UN estimates that sanctions have cost the Cuban economy $130 billion in total and U.S. sanctions force Cuba to source medicines and medical devices outside the U.S., inducing additional transportation costs on Cuba’s most precious export. Even the American economy is hurt by the embargo and other Cuba sanctions. A 2017 economic analysis performed by Engage Cuba, a pro-engagement group, concluded that the Trump sanctions and diplomatic rollbacks could adversely affect more than 12,000 American jobs in manufacturing, tourism, and shipping, and that the embargo costs U.S. businesses and farmers almost $6 billion a year in lost export revenue.
Moreover, the head of the office that handled SST issues during the Obama Administration justified Cuba’s removal from the SST list in the fact that, “it was legally determined that Cuba was not actively engaged in violence that could be defined as terrorism under any credible definition of the word.” And when President Obama sought to have Cuba removed from the list, he invited Congress to review the decision during a 45-day period, and they could have stopped the removal with a joint resolution, but even the completely Republican-controlled House and Senate of the time refused to take action.
Within the context of the coronavirus, Cuba’s pandemic response has been hindered by the embargo, which has obstructed the delivery of ventilators, facemasks, diagnostic kits, and other vital medical supplies. As President Obama declared “It is clear that decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous, and stable Cuba. At times, longstanding U.S. policy towards Cuba has isolated the United States from regional and international partners, constrained our ability to influence outcomes throughout the Western Hemisphere, and impaired the use of the full range of tools available to the United States to promote positive change in Cuba. Though this policy has been rooted in the best of intentions, it has had little effect…[W]e should not allow U.S. sanctions to add to the burden of Cuban citizens we seek to help.”
Venezuela and Iran: The Failure of Maximum Pressure
“Maximum pressure” has been the Trump Administration’s policy of choice for both Iran and Venezuela. In the case of Iran, the approach of an inundation of sanctions was meant to be a sharp contrast from the Obama Administration’s detente centered around the landmark Iran nuclear deal. Iran had been in full compliance with the nuclear deal and remained in compliance for more than a year and a half of American sanctions after the U.S. withdrawal, and those sanctions have proved to accomplish precisely none of their goals, be they regime change, bringing Iran back to the negotiating table for a “better deal,” or Iran abandoning its nuclear program. Instead, Iran has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium eightfold and exported a significant amount of its petroleum despite the sanctions, all as Iran’s hardliners have seen their credibility at home increase thanks to the sanctions campaign.
Rather than succumbing to American pressure, Iranian hardliners found it a useful talking point to rally against, finding themselves in common cause with human rights activists who noted that the sanctions denied many Iranians access to life-saving medical treatment. All of the failures of the maximum pressure campaign can be summed up in the words of a statement made by Iranian womens’ rights activists, “While sanctions proponents claim to care for the Iranian people, their policies have left an entire nation weary, depressed and hopeless. Sanctions, and economic pressure, target the fabric of society.”
In Venezuela, maximum pressure took the form of a more explicit regime change effort against the dictator Nicolas Maduro. But while before 2019 U.S. sanctions against Venezuela targeted Maduro, Trump’s newest sanctions focused on the state-owned oil and natural gas company PdVSA, which provides the country with thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue, as well as other major sectors of the economy. The economy-wide suffering brought on by these sanctions (in distracting from his corruption and domestic crackdowns) gave Maduro greater credibility when he claimed that the U.S. was a foreign power seeking to destroy Venezuela and its people. All the while, Maduro has tightened his grip over the country, his opposition has been weakened, and Venezuela has drawn closer to American adversaries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
Conclusion and Policy Recommendations
These cases are indicative of a broader problem in U.S. foreign policy. Too often, sanctions have become Washington’s default foreign policy weapon of choice, as it slaps sanction after sanction on governments with which it disagrees without the slightest concern whether American objectives would actually be achieved by them and whether humanitarian suffering would be exacerbated. While targeted sanctions and arms embargoes occasionally serve American interests well in combating global human rights violations and war crimes, more generalized economic sanctions “are too often designed to inflict maximum pain on civilians, not empower them,” in the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). This reliance on sanctions has undermined Washington’s ability to pursue diplomatic solutions to global problems, undermined international solidarity with its foreign policy objectives, and far too often ends up hurting the very people Washington claims to be supporting.
The overwhelming majority of academic studies have concluded that sanctions rarely achieve their stated goal, with one paper estimating odds of only even partial success as low as 34 percent. Moreover, the longer sanctions last, the less effective they tend to be, as fatigue sets in for the imposing party while the target becomes more adept at evading sanctions.The pain of sanctions is widely dispersed and deeply felt by the people in sanctioned countries even as they bear no responsibility for the actions of their governments. Similarly, even in cases where sanctions are meant to combat tangible and concrete human rights abuses, such as in the cases of Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and North Korea, research suggests that even more human rights abuses occur when widespread (non-targeted) economic sanctions are in place than without them. As strongmen face foreign economic pressure campaigns that threaten to topple them, they try to cling to power by any means necessary, including by doubling down on repression of critics.
While there remains a future for targeted sanctions and arms embargoes to more effectively promote human rights and de-escalate conflicts, the constant reliance on harsh, generalized economic sanctions ought to be reconsidered and questioned. Any strategy to promote human rights and democracy that far too often augments the positions of strongmen and incites famine is inherently counterproductive and unnecessarily cruel. If this lesson cannot be understood now, in the midst of a global pandemic as the humanitarian impacts of sanctions prevent citizens of foreign governments from accessing food and vital medical care, then Washington’s obsession with sanctions will never be broken. For those advocating for a foreign policy that emphasizes diplomacy and puts human security at the center of global initiatives, there can be no path forward that prioritizes warfare- military or economic.