When Do Sanctions Work?

There’s a great and timely post at Defense One from Jonathan Schanzer, pointing out just how limited sanctions are in effecting changes of behavior from foreign governments:

There is a rare and growing bipartisan consensus in Congress about the need to smack Saudi Arabia with human-rights sanctions, or perhaps even tougher penalties, for its role in the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month but never walked out. Sanctions seem inevitable.

The only problem is that many of the same experts pushing for sanctions against Saudi Arabia have previously argued, in other contexts, that sanctions don’t work. That was the near-unanimous conclusion of top policy experts who supported the Obama administration’s decision to drop sanctions on Iran, which had brought its economy to the brink of collapse, in exchange for a nuclear deal. It’s just one example of a broader trend: analysts suddenly discovering the Middle East is more complex than they’d previously admitted.

Read the whole thing. Here’s his conclusion:

Implementing effective policies in the Middle East is complicated. If nothing else, that’s now clear. We may never get justice for Jamal Khashoggi. But we would be lucky if this incident yielded a little more humility and a little less cocksure certainty among the pundit classes. Analysts who are enamored of their own wisdom and who routinely sneer at challengers in condescension have suddenly discovered that their tweets haven’t aged well. Sanctions are not always bad, engagement is not always good, and transactional policy cuts both ways.

But let’s dig a little deeper. When do sanctions work and when do they not? Let me suggest a model. They worked against South Africa but not against Russia or Iran. And it’s very unlikely they would work against Saudi Arabia or China. Why? It wasn’t that the stakes are higher. South Africa ended apartheid even though it was a political (and possibly physical) death sentence.

But South Africa was an essentially European country with values similar to our own. They knew that apartheid was wrong. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China are countries with values genuinely different from ours and they’re convinced that what they’re doing is right.

There is no universal system of values. Cultures really are different. When cultures are genuinely incompatible with ours or even antithetical to ours as that of Saudi Arabia certainly is, the choice is between exterminating our values or theirs or dealing with them when we must and otherwise limiting contact with them to the bare minimum.

2 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    Broadly agree. Would maybe differ a bit on Iran as the sanctions may’ve helped them decide to negotiate. (If you believe they never really wanted nukes anyway, a belief some people hold, it at least got all of the plutonium and enriched uranium out of the country in case a new regime with different ideas comes along.)

    Steve

  • Andy Link

    Perhaps a minor point, but I wouldn’t assume the purpose of sanctions is necessarily to change the behavior of foreign actors. It can also be virtue signaling and gives policymakers a way apply pressure or express displeasure short of something more serious.

    We also need to look at the effects. To add to what you said, people are likely to be reactionary to sanctions they feel are unjust, especially if a core interest is at stake. That can cause them to entrench their positions. In that case, sanctions can actually be counterproductive.

Leave a Comment