![]() ![]() Policymakers should treat them like a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. Sanctions are a specialized instrument best deployed in controlled circumstances, not an all-purpose tool for everyday use. But most important, they would remember that there are other tools at their disposal. Under a more disciplined approach to economic statecraft, officials would clarify the goal of a particular measure and the criteria for repealing it. Washington should use sanctions surgically and sparingly. dollar less central to global finance, reducing the effect of sanctions that rely on that dominance. Together, these developments will render the U.S. allies and partners tire of the repeated application of economic pressure. Future sanctions are likely to be even less effective as China and Russia happily swoop in to rescue targeted actors and as U.S. ![]() To make matters worse, the tool is growing duller by the year. Thus, sanctions not only reveal American decline but accelerate it, too. They strain relations with allies, antagonize adversaries, and impose economic hardship on innocent civilians. The problem, however, is that sanctions are hardly cost free. presidents are left with fewer arrows in their quiver, and they are quick to reach for the easy, available tool of sanctions. Two decades of war, recession, polarization, and now a pandemic have dented American power. In relative terms, its military power and diplomatic influence have declined. No longer an unchallenged superpower, the United States can’t throw its weight around the way it used to. The truth is that Washington’s fixation with sanctions has little to do with their efficacy and everything to do with something else: American decline. Officials at the Treasury, State, and Commerce Departments, the report noted, “stated they do not conduct agency assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving broader U.S. A 2019 Government Accountability Office study concluded that not even the federal government was necessarily aware when sanctions were working. The most generous academic estimate of sanctions’ efficacy-a 2014 study relying on a data set maintained by the University of North Carolina-found that, at best, sanctions lead to concessions between one-third and one-half of the time. This reliance on economic sanctions would be natural if they were especially effective at getting other countries to do what Washington wants, but they’re not. ![]() ![]() Activists have also clamored for sanctions on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs, on Hungary for its democratic backsliding, and on Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. To punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration sanctioned certain Saudi officials, and yet human rights activists wanted more. He has not fundamentally altered any of the Trump administration’s sanctions programs beyond lifting those against the International Criminal Court. President Joe Biden, in his first few months in office, imposed new sanctions against Myanmar (for its coup), Nicaragua (for its crackdown), and Russia (for its hacking). That figure nearly doubled over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency. During President Barack Obama’s first term, the United States designated an average of 500 entities for sanctions per year for reasons ranging from human rights abuses to nuclear proliferation to violations of territorial sovereignty. Sanctions-measures taken by one country to disrupt economic exchange with another-have become the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem. foreign policy for the past decade, it has become obvious that the United States relies on one tool above all: economic sanctions. In theory, superpowers should possess a range of foreign policy tools: military might, cultural cachet, diplomatic persuasion, technological prowess, economic aid, and so on. ![]()
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