Sanctions are much in demand these days as a tool of American foreign policy.
Members of Congress want tough new sanctions against Russia for its interference in American elections. Sanctions will remain in place against North Korea, the White House says, until Pyongyang shows progress toward denuclearisation. After tearing up the Iran nuclear accord, the Trump administration restored sanctions against Tehran in an effort to get a better deal on restricting its weapons and a change in its behaviour. And even NATO ally Turkey faces sanctions for imprisoning several US citizens and employees of its diplomatic mission.
Policymakers claim that sanctions are an effective means of achieving policy goals, but is that true? Are new measures against Moscow and Tehran likely to be successful?
Allies supporting and reinforcing sanctions are usually pivotal to making them stick.
Unilateral sanctions such as the proposed measures against Russia and Iran are seldom successful. Although the European Union has placed sanctions on Russia because of its actions in Ukraine, the latest legislative measures proposed in Congress would be unilateral.
In an increasingly globalised world, unilateral sanctions face huge obstacles – even when imposed by the largest economy. A landmark study published in the 1990s by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that unilateral US sanctions achieved their foreign policy goals only 13 percent of the time.
The rare instances when unilateral sanctions work involve countries that have extensive trade relations with the US, clearly not the case with Russia or Iran.
In addition, when a country faces sanctions, it can often seek commercial ties elsewhere. This was the case with Cuba. When the US imposed sanctions on its former trading partner after Fidel Castro came to power, Havana turned to Moscow for help and became a part of the communist bloc.
Iran, for its part, has diversified its economy in the face of sanctions from the US and other Western countries, shifting trade to the East and increasingly selling oil and buying goods in China, India and other Asian countries.
Washington is responding to Tehran’s circumvention strategy by threatening to impose secondary sanctions against foreign companies that trade with Iran, barring them from doing business in the US Extraterritorial sanctions such as these are opposed by other countries as a violation of international law.
European nations especially disagree with this approach and have vowed to maintain trading relations with Iran despite secondary sanctions. Russia and China also oppose the new US policy.
This raises a second factor that influences whether sanctions work: Is the country issuing the sanctions willing and able to assure compliance with those measures?
The prospect of losing Iran’s 2 million barrels of oil a day is already roiling global markets. To calm investors, the US State Department quietly announced in early July that Washington would allow countries like China, India and Turkey to reduce oil imports from Iran “on a case-by-case” basis, signaling the US will allow some states to maintain imports, thus limiting the impact of the sanctions.
In other words, the desire to mitigate the potential impact of new sanctions on global financial markets may outweigh the goals of imposing them in the first place.
A similar problem of weak compliance is affecting continued UN sanctions against North Korea.
If the US and major allies are unable or unwilling to pay the price of sanctions enforcement, effectiveness diminishes.
A third factor affecting success is the need to combine sanctions with diplomatic bargaining.
My research with George Lopez, a professor emeritus of peace studies, shows that sanctions work best within a bargaining framework in which the imposition of coercive measures is combined with incentives for compliance.
The irony in the case of Iran is that precisely this form of sanctions-based diplomacy was successful in achieving the 2015 nuclear deal. Rigorous US, UN and European Union sanctions were combined with an offer to lift them if Iran complied with demands to restrict its nuclear program and accept intrusive inspections. The International Atomic Energy Commission verified on 10 separate occasions from 2016 through the early part of 2018 that Iran kept its side of the bargain, and sanctions were removed.
For all these reasons, I believe the new US policy of reimposing unilateral sanctions abandons a multilateral approach that was working in favor of a unilateral policy that has little chance of success.
The US and EU sanctions on Russia for its policies in Ukraine may have some continuing effect, but the new measures under consideration in Congress are unlikely to have a major impact.
The Trump administration may think that it can go it alone in foreign policy, but on sanctions, as on nonproliferation and other policies, multilateral cooperation is often the key to success.
The writer is the Director of Policy Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
(This was first published on The Conversation and has been republished with permission.)
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