The Problem With Sanctions
When the U.S. Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, was asked in 1996 whether the death of half a million Iraqi children was worth it, she didn’t hesitate to answer. “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” She was discussing the UN’s sanctions on Iraq after the Gulf War. The sanctions were supposed to pressure former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, to cooperate with weapons inspections. They stayed in place for over a decade. Hussein remained in power the entire time, and half a million children still died.
In her 2003 memoir,, Albright said she regretted the comment, but the logic behind it didn’t change. Economic sanctions remain the go-to tool whenever a government wants to punish another country without going to war or ruining its image. They’re presented as a middle ground between doing nothing and full-scale conflict. Sanctions are meant to be smart and effective; however, they’re rarely either of these things.
The numbers back this up. Since 1970, unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States have achieved their stated foreign policy goals in just 13 percent of cases. The Peterson Institute for International Economics examined 115 cases of sanctions from World War I through 1990 and found that only 35 percent were even partially successful. Sanctions only worked when the target country was small and economically dependent on the country imposing them, and when the demands being made were limited and achievable.
Source: Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Economic Sanctions
Sanctions are supposed to create pressure that forces a government to make a change. The way that pressure works in practice is that it hits the whole economy. Ordinary people feel it before the government does. Make life difficult enough, and the regime will crack. But governments don’t crack easily, and when they do crack, it’s the population that breaks first
Although Iraq is the most clear example of this, it’s not the only one. Iran has been under various sanctions for decades. The sanctions were meant to either pressure the regime to abandon its nuclear program or pressure the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. Nothing has happened. Iran still enriches uranium. The regime is still in power. The government founds workarounds and frames the sanctions as proof of Western hostility. Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians can’t get the medicine they need, can’t send money to relatives abroad, and watch their economy collapse.
Iraq and Iran aren’t exceptions. Venezuela faced heavy U.S. sanctions starting in 2017, targeting the country’s oil industry and financial sector. The Venezuelan economy contracted by 80 percent between 2014 and 2021, and over seven million Venezuelans fled the country. Economist Francisco Rodríguez calculated that more than 4 million of those refugees left specifically because of the economic damage caused by sanctions. A 2024 study found that Western multilateral sanctions increase emigration from targeted countries by 22 to 24 percent on average. The same pattern showed up in Venezuela. The migration crisis spilled into Colombia, Peru, and the United States
None of that moved Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions didn’t remove him from power either. They didn’t restore democracy. They only created a refugee crisis that destabilized the entire region. The people who could afford to leave did, but the rest had no way out to deal with hyperinflation and the collapse of basic services.
There’s a consistent pattern across all these cases. Ruling elites find ways to insulate themselves from sanctions. The rest of the population bears the cost. The government blames foreigners for the suffering, and the suffering is enough to make the blame stick.
That’s simply how sanctions work. The logic behind sanctions requires economic pain severe enough to force political change. Developing countries with undiversified economies are particularly vulnerable: research shows that a sanction affecting just 1 percent of GDP can cost these countries up to five percentage points of GDP growth. Island nations that depend on imports and low-income countries have it worst, because they have no alternative suppliers to turn to and no financial cushion to absorb the shock. The sanctions that are most likely to succeed are comprehensive sanctions that strangle entire economies, but comprehensive sanctions are also the ones that cause the most civilian harm.
Financial sanctions can be even worse than trade restrictions. Cutting a country off from international payment systems like SWIFT—the global network that banks use to transfer money across borders—or freezing its foreign assets can destroy up to 10 percent of GDP. When the United States targeted Iranian financial institutions in 2012, Iran’s economy shrank by roughly 20 percent over three years. These measures make it nearly impossible for regular people to conduct basic transactions like paying for imports.
The costs don’t all fall on the sanctioned country either. The United States loses $15 billion to $19 billion annually in exports because of its own sanctions, and around 200,000 American jobs in the export sector disappear. Foreign companies start designing American goods out of their supply chains to avoid future sanctions risk. The long-term competitiveness of U.S. exporters erodes. Still, these losses are minute compared to what happens in the targeted countries, where people can’t afford food or get treatment for life-threatening diseases.
United States product exports (2019) Data source: OEC – United States Product Exports (2019)Datawheel, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
People who defend sanctions argue that the alternative to them is worse. War kills more people faster. Doing nothing is morally indefensible when a government is committing atrocities or building nuclear weapons. Sanctions occupy a middle ground that allows for pressure without violence. That argument would be more compelling if sanctions worked consistently, rather than in a narrow set of circumstances that rarely apply to the countries they’re actually used against.
Russia offers an illuminating case. After annexing Crimea in 2014 and invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia was met with extensive international sanctions. The sanctions froze hundreds of billions in Russian foreign reserves, cut major Russian banks off from SWIFT, and triggered a wave of Western companies pulling out of the country. These had real economic effects, but so did falling oil prices at the time. This has made it difficult to identify which factor had more of an impact. Instead, Russia adapted and found new trading partners. If anything, the sanctions gave Putin a useful enemy to blame for economic problems and helped him rally domestic support against Western aggression.
Russia isn’t the only complicated case. The Iran nuclear deal showed that sanctions combined with patient diplomacy can produce some results. Years of economic pressure helped bring Iran to the negotiating table, and the resulting agreement limited Iran’s nuclear program. However, the deal came only after years of suffering for ordinary Iranians, and the United States withdrew from the agreement anyway. Every coin has two sides. Sanctions demonstrate both the potential to drag a government to the negotiating table and the limitations of what happens to everyone else while you wait to see if that works.
Ali Khamenei, who has served as Iran’s s Supreme Leader since 1989. Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
After UN reports and public pressure made it impossible to ignore the humanitarian damage of comprehensive sanctions, policymakers shifted to ‘smart’ or ‘targeted’ sanctions aimed at specific individuals and entities. The idea was to punish decision-makers while excluding the general population. In practice, targeted sanctions are easier to evade through political connections and shell companies. Still, they have spillover effects. Banks become risk-averse about any transaction involving a sanctioned country. Humanitarian aid gets blocked because financial institutions don’t want to go through the compliance burden.
In Venezuela, aid organizations reported that sanctions made their work extremely expensive. “In theory, humanitarian action is exempt from sanctions, but in practice this is not the case because banks do not take risks,” one worker explained. Every payment required extra scrutiny; the costs of delays and complications reduced the amount of aid that actually reached people.
There’s also the problem of what happens after sanctions end. Infrastructure that hasn’t been maintained for years doesn’t fix itself. Trade relationships take time to rebuild. The public is uncertain. The social and economic damage can be permanent even after the political situation that triggered the sanctions has been resolved.
The strangest thing about sanctions is that they’re still being used despite their track record. A 13 percent success rate should disqualify sanctions as a serious policy tool, yet they’ve become more common rather than less. The explanation has little to do with effectiveness; sanctions let politicians look decisive without the political cost of negotiation or the risk of military action. They satisfy domestic constituencies who want something done. They’re easier than diplomacy and less bloody than war.
There’s also the problem of getting out. Once imposed, sanctions are hard to lift. Removing them looks like a weakness. So they stay in place for years, creating permanent humanitarian crises that eventually fade from headlines but never really end. The suffering becomes normalized and a fact of life for millions of people whose main crime was being born in the wrong place, the wrong country.
This creates serious questions about international law. The principle of distinction in humanitarian law requires that military attacks distinguish between civilians and combatants. Sanctions make no such distinction. They’re designed to harm an entire economy in the hope that economic pain will translate into political pressure. The civilian population becomes the mechanism through which that pressure operates. Whether this violates international humanitarian law is debated among lawyers, but the ethical problem is harder to argue away. UN officials warned about the humanitarian consequences in Iraq, and the suffering was predictable. But the sanctions continued anyway, as oil politics and geopolitical calculations mattered more.
The future will probably bring more sanctions rather than fewer. As great power competition intensifies and multilateral bodies like the UN Security Council become increasingly deadlocked—with vetoes blocking collective action—unilateral sanctions will become more attractive. Governments will keep using them as a first response rather than a last resort, imposing them quickly and lifting them slowly if at all.
If governments are going to keep using sanctions, they should at least be transparent about it. After all, they’re choosing to impoverish populations in the hope that economic suffering will somehow create political change. More often, sanctions are what governments do when they don’t know what else to do. Madeleine Albright said the price of half a million dead Iraqi children was worth it. Worth it for what, exactly, is still unclear. Hussein stayed in power. The sanctions stayed in place. The children stayed dead. The people who pay for this kind of logic are always the ones who had the least say in any of it.