The west is in love with sanctions. Problem is, they don’t work

Last week, the United Nations Security Council announced a relaxation of sanctions on Afghanistan. It was an attempt to smooth the flow of humanitarian aid into one of the world’s most benighted nations and curb the suffering of millions of people dependent on international help for food and medicine. Nearly 23 million Afghans face acute food insecurity and 8.7 million are on the verge of famine, according to the Red Cross.

The easing of sanctions was welcomed by relief organisations worried they would run afoul of international law by having dealings with the country’s new Taliban masters. “Without a clear humanitarian exception, UN sanctions will remain an obstacle to the major humanitarian scale-up that the Afghan people need right now,” aid groups said.

The sanctions were put in place to punish Afghan warlords and extremists. Instead they were very clearly hindering aid to ordinary people, worsening their plight. But it’s not just Afghanistan. In many of the countries subject to sanctions, they bring about the opposite result. The efficacy of these sanctions merits serious scrutiny.

The US and its western allies seem to have fallen in love with sanctions as a foreign policy tool. Led by Washington, hundreds of sanctions every year are announced against countries across the world to punish the actions of their leaders. Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Myanmar and many others are slapped with sometimes harsh sanctions meant to punish and coerce. According to the Center for the New American Century, US sanctions have mushroomed over the years. European and UN sanctions are also widespread.

It’s easy to see why. Sanctions are good domestic politics. Without the costs and risks of war, a politician can appear to be tough on Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Just like in Afghanistan last week, policymakers occasionally acknowledge that such embargoes can also hurt ordinary people. But they hold out hope that a population abroad that is hungry or under severe repression will rise up and punish their own leaders for the misery caused by other governments.

Despite an almost religious belief that sanctions will somehow bring about change, that’s rarely the case. Just look at Cuba, under US sanctions for six decades, with no improvements in human rights or change of regime. American political scientist Robert Pape reckoned only five sanctions had worked in achieving US foreign policy objectives out of 115 in much of the past century.

Rummaging through the literature on sanctions, there is a clear distinction between well-funded pressure groups and think tanks in Washington and other western capitals arguing for sanctions and serious academic scholars and social scientists who provide countless examples and case studies showing sanctions generally don’t work.

To many scholars, sanctions are more a political communications strategy than a useful tool of foreign policy. “The bottom line for me is that they don’t work, because they don’t have any measurable goals,” says Nicolai Petro, a political scientist at the University of Rhode Island. “If you listen to the stated objective, it’s something remarkably vague and imprecise, like, ‘We’re sending a message’.”

Indeed, as often as not, sanctions have the opposite effect. They get a proud country to dig in its heels on a human rights issue or a territorial matter. The Saudi and UAE blockade of Qatar resulted in the country becoming more resilient and independent. The US has been sanctioning Russia for years but Moscow’s international posture has grown more aggressive and its human rights atmosphere more dismal. Similarly, Iran’s nuclear programme has grown, its missiles have got better, its allied regional militias have become more entrenched and its prisons have become more full of dissidents, even as sanctions grew dramatically.

“Even if a country wanted to undertake the reforms that Americans wanted, how could they do so under pressure?” says Petro. “It would be the end of that politician or political party and it would be the end of sovereignty.”

Another problem, says Petro, is that the longer the sanctions are in place, the less effect they have. Over the months, governments shift assets, find mechanisms to circumvent restrictions and become partners with other sanctioned nations. China has effectively become Russia’s banker, solidifying ties. Cut off from European markets because of sanctions, Iran has further entrenched itself in regional countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, undermining the US policy goal of reducing Tehran’s influence in those countries. “The longer you impose sanctions the more bulletproof the country becomes,” says Petro.

Sanctions are often sold as an alternative to war. Oppose them and you are either a warmonger or an appeaser. Petro believes such attitudes are rooted in the west, “a mechanism to convince itself that it is still in charge of the world and that it is leading the world toward democracy”.

But the real alternative to war is not sanctions but engaging in diplomacy and compromise – the kind of thing Britain, the US and France were once so good at but have since ceded to other countries. While Washington and other western capitals are engaged in useless moralising, other nations are weaving complex, nuanced, tapestries of diplomatic relations and partnerships. Of nations around the world, only the US seems to have permanent enemies, seeing the world in stark, Manichean and almost childish terms.

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In recent months, archrivals Iran and Saudi Arabia have been engaged in dialogue. Even Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia, licking the wounds of their war last year over Nagorno-Karabakh, are making modest amends and reopening supply lines.

Meanwhile, for the US and its allies, diplomatic endeavours are more often than not about presenting a list of demands and red lines. “Many people, even some diplomats and politicians, no longer understand the actual purpose of dialogue,” Petro writes. “They think it means communicating one’s desires to another party. But a prison warden does that with his inmates.”

It’s about time for the west to behave in a more businesslike manner when it comes to foreign adversaries. Yes, condemn human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the Tehran suburb of Karaj. By all means, name and shame war criminals in Ethiopia and rights abusers in Belarus. But perhaps leave the heavy lifting on such matters to credible human rights organisations and media outlets and avoid public relations stunts that actually worsen the plight of people already suffering repression and deprivation.