Among the many perennially frustrating – and essential — questions in U.S. foreign policy today are the many variations on “Do sanctions work?”
The question is frustrating because it is overly simplistic and shifts focus from the far more critical questions in any sanctions context: “What is our policy? Are there clear and realistic policy goals? Can the sanctions tool actually help achieve those policy goals?” Instead, that singular query and its variants invite an up/down assessment of one of the more complex and nuanced tools that policymakers use.
But the question is also essential because, if past is prologue, sanctions have and will continue to be one of the most relied-upon tools in the toolkit of 21st century policymakers, in Washington and around the globe, even likely in the next Trump administration.
When sanctions get excoriated as having “failed,” the actual problem is more likely that either the tool (the sanctions regime) doesn’t match the policy goals (assuming they exist) or the circumstances are just not ripe for the tool to work. All too often, it is then the tool, rather than the policy or the choice of tool, that is characterized as “failed.” Blame the hammer and nail, rather than the carpenter, so to speak.
A secondary problem is the standard assertion that, in order to be deemed to “work,” sanctions should “change behavior,” as that too often is what policymakers claim as their intent. This rarely happens and almost always is the wrong way to evaluate them. Diplomacy and negotiations (or jail) change behavior; when sanctions work best, they disrupt behavior to create leverage for those other processes to take hold, often over frustratingly long periods that require excruciating patience.
The Biden administration will principally be remembered for sanctions against Russia, and much ink has been and will be spilled assessing whether they have “worked.” The next Trump administration undoubtedly will use sanctions extensively, as he did during his previous term in office. His new appointees, such as Secretary of State-nominee U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, are strong proponents of the use of sanctions, and they could benefit significantly from learning from those assessments as they emerge, whether the internal memos that the departing administration will leave behind or external opinions from key experts.
Two sanctions programs, in quite differing contexts and largely under the radar, can be instructive: Burma (Myanmar) and the West Bank. They provide examples of the types of policy objectives and circumstances in which the disruption tool can more consistently “work.”
Lessons From Burma
The Burma sanctions program was created early in President Joe Biden’s term, following the military coup in February 2021. The policy response was swift and the objectives clear, i.e. support the will of the Burmese people to live in a peaceful and democratic society and disrupt the activities of the military junta that took power after the coup. A steady and broad set of economic sanctions began to be imposed by the United States and allies on a range of key leaders, private companies, and state-owned entities dominating all sectors of the economy and enabling the military junta’s control and horrific violence against its own people. After more than two years of consistent designations, now totaling more than 140 targets, the Biden administration sanctioned two banks central to the regime’s access to foreign exchange and imposed lesser restrictions on the state-owned oil and gas company.
Sanctions cannot stop a war or ongoing violent atrocities by a regime against its own people, nor can they unilaterally convince a military junta to choose democracy. But they can and have disrupted this junta’s access to cash and materiel in a way that has meaningfully degraded their control and their battlefield performance. Some key factors:
- Wealth concentrated in specific resources and industries
- Limited number of banks handling foreign exchange
- Clear United Nations and NGO reporting from both local and international NGOs, enabling engagement with, and action by, intermediary countries
- Consistent and coordinated, if not identical, actions taken by allies
The situation in Burma remains dire and terribly overlooked, and much remains to be done to achieve the policy goals, but as a form of disruption that may slowly begin to encourage and enable diplomacy, sanctions have started to work.
Lessons from Sanctions in the West Bank
This past February, Biden issued a new executive order targeting both Israelis and Palestinians over instability and violence in the West Bank. Since then, there has been a remarkable and escalating series of eight rounds of actions, leading to a total of 27 individuals and entities being designated. These are mainly extremist settlers, farms they have established, and organizations enabling the settlers and farms to engage in violence and land seizures. Sanctions also targeted one violent Palestinian militant group, Lion’s Den (many Palestinian actors have been sanctioned previously in other programs).
The situation in the West Bank is becoming “an environment where violence and instability thrive,” according to the State Department. As above, sanctions cannot stop individual settlers from attacking Palestinians, nor, in just over seven months, change Israeli policy on settlements more generally, which the State Department has called “deeply troubling.”
But sanctions can and have disrupted the underlying system. If you listen to the settlers and their supporters, they will tell you this has been a “shocking” series of actions that is disrupting how they raise money, resigning them to plead for cash. The sanctioned organization created to disrupt humanitarian deliveries shut down, and one of the key settler support organizations has produced videos designed to energize their supporters to oppose sanctions and filed a preemptive lawsuit in Texas to prevent them from being sanctioned and to challenge the constitutionality of the measures. The Israeli Knesset is even considering a bill that would require the Bank of Israel to engage in sanctions evasion.
Some notable factors in the early success:
- Consistent, persistent, and escalatory approach
- Extensive U.S. financial and political connections for many of the targets and the overall system
- Clear, focused, and narrow policy objective
- Targeting problematic policy of an ally, who may take the actions more seriously
It remains to be seen whether these sanctions can lead to deeper diplomatic efforts by the United States and other like-minded countries to change the course of Israeli settlement policy. But the groundwork of disruption has been firmly laid.
These comparatively modest disruptions may not match the grandiose and hyperbolic rhetoric on sanctions, but policymakers (and analysts) would do well to keep these types of cases in mind as a means of ensuring that the tool remains a tool and not a replacement for policy. With this kind of approach, the question of whether sanctions “work” may become far less frustrating and, in turn, their use that much more effective.