"The editorial board is a group of
opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and
certain longstanding values. It is separate from the
newsroom.
There is nearly universal consensus
that certain egregious violations of international laws and norms demand a
forceful and concerted response. Think only, for example, of events in Ukraine
or the development of nuclear weapons capabilities in Iran and North Korea.
Harsh economic sanctions have long been viewed as the answer.
The eternal question, though, is:
What comes next? When do sanctions stop working? Or
worse, when do they start working against
the United States’ best interests?
These are important questions
because, over the past two decades, economic sanctions have become a tool of
first resort for U.S. policymakers, used for disrupting terrorist networks,
trying to stop the development of
nuclear weapons and punishing dictators.
The number of names on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets
Control sanctions list has risen steadily, from 912 in 2000 to 9,421 in 2021, largely
because of the growing use of banking sanctions against individuals. The Trump
administration added about three names a day
to the list — a rate surpassed last year with the flurry of sanctions that
President Biden announced after Russia’s conflict with Ukraine started.
Given their increasing use, then, it
is useful to understand not only how sanctions can be a tool for successful
diplomacy but also how, when not employed well, they can ultimately undermine
American efforts to promote peace, human rights
and democratic norms across the globe.
The
Invisible Costs of Sanctions
Policymakers turn to sanctions so
frequently — the United States accounts for 42 percent of sanctions imposed
worldwide since 1950, according to Drexel University’s Global Sanctions Database — in
part because they are seen as being low cost, especially compared with military
action.
In reality, the costs are
substantial. They are borne by banks, businesses, civilians and humanitarian
groups, which shoulder the burden of putting them into effect, complying with
them and mitigating their effects. Sanctions can also take a toll on vulnerable people
— often poor and living under repressive governments, as academics are
increasingly documenting.
Officials rarely factor in such
costs. While sanctions are easy to impose — there are dozens of sanctions
programs administered by multiple federal agencies — they are politically and
bureaucratically difficult to lift, even when they no longer serve U.S.
interests. What’s worse, sanctions also escape significant public scrutiny. Few
officials are held responsible for whether a particular sanction is working as
intended rather than needlessly harming innocent people or undermining foreign
policy goals.
Mr. Biden came into office promising
to rectify that lack of accountability. The Treasury Department conducted a
comprehensive review of
sanctions in 2021 and released a seven-page summary that October. The review
process was an important step. It concluded, among other things, that sanctions
should be systematically assessed to make sure they are the right tool for the
circumstances, that they be linked to specific outcomes and include our allies
where possible and that care should be taken to mitigate “unintended
economic and political impacts” on American workers, businesses, allies and
other innocent people.
The Treasury Department is making
some progress in carrying out the review’s recommendations, but Treasury is
just one of many government agencies responsible for
fulfilling sanctions. Every one of them should conduct regular, data-driven
analyses to ensure that the benefits of sanctions outweigh the costs and that
sanctions are the right tool, not just the easiest one to reach for. It is also
important that the results of such analyses are communicated to Congress and
the public.
Sanctions
Need Clear, Achievable Outcomes
What is already known is that
sanctions are most effective when they have realistic objectives and are paired
with promises of relief if those objectives are met. Perhaps the best example
is the 1986 law targeting apartheid-era South Africa, which laid out five conditions
for sanctions relief, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Sanctions by the
United States and other nations helped convince South Africa’s
whites-only government that its policies mandating racial segregation were
unsustainable.
Sanctions on Communist Poland in 1981
in response to the crushing of the Solidarity movement are another example of
how this can work. The United States and its allies gradually lifted sanctions
with the release of most imprisoned activists, helping usher in a new era of
political freedom in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
It’s notable that the sanctions
against South Africa and Poland were aimed at bringing about free and fair
elections, not regime change. Sanctions aimed at regime change often
incentivize defiance, not reform. They have a terrible track record, as the
cases of Cuba, Syria and Venezuela make clear.
In Venezuela, open-ended sanctions
with sweeping ambition — to oust the dictator Nicolás Maduro
— have so far achieved the opposite. After he dissolved the democratically elected
National Assembly in 2017 and was declared the winner of a sham presidential election in
2018, the Trump administration imposed maximum-pressure sanctions on
Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to cut off a crucial source of funds to the
Maduro dictatorship.
While harsh individual sanctions
against Mr. Maduro were necessary, the blacklisting of Venezuela’s oil sector
has exacerbated a
humanitarian crisis: As this editorial board warned,
cutting off oil revenue deepened what was already the worst economic contraction in Latin America in decades.
Sanctions on the oil industry, which accounts for about 90 percent of the
country’s exports, caused dramatic cuts in government revenue
and significant increases in poverty, according to a study last
year by Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the Josef Korbel School
of International Studies at the University of Denver.
The policy, meanwhile, failed to
push Mr. Maduro out of power. He instead consolidated his grip on Venezuela,
blamed its economic misery on American sanctions and drew his country closer to
Russia and China. Sanctions are deeply unpopular in
Venezuela, according to numerous opinion polls. Even the representative of
Venezuela’s opposition in the United States, a group that previously supported broad sanctions,
recently called on Mr. Biden to lift oil
sanctions.
Since taking office, Mr. Biden has
taken steps to modify the sanctions against Venezuela to add specific,
achievable objectives. His administration lifted some oil sanctions by giving Chevron
permission to do limited work in the country, prompted by the spike
in oil prices after the events in Ukraine.
The White House has promised
additional relief if Mr. Maduro takes steps toward holding free and fair
elections next year. Francisco Palmieri, the State Department’s
chief of mission of the Venezuelan affairs unit in Bogotá, Colombia, recently
released a detailed list of
what has to be done in order for sanctions to be lifted. It includes setting a
date for next year’s presidential election, reinstating candidates who have
been arbitrarily arrested and releasing political prisoners.
Mr. Maduro hasn’t complied so far.
On June 30, he barred yet another well-known opposition
figure from holding office. Nevertheless, this more modest policy, which
supports a gradual return to democracy rather than abrupt regime change, is a
better approach.
The Biden administration should be
more explicit about which sanctions in Venezuela would be lifted and when,
especially those on the state-owned oil company. That would make American
promises more credible. An agreement in
November between Mr. Maduro and the opposition to use Venezuela’s frozen assets
for humanitarian purposes was another promising step, but it is in limbo
because the funds have yet to be released.
The delay is causing Venezuelans to
lose hope in a negotiated solution to the crisis, according to Feliciano Reyna, the president and
founder of Acción Solidaria, a nonprofit organization that procures supplies
for public hospitals in Venezuela. Although he has a special license to import
supplies, he said he still had trouble obtaining what he needed. Some
companies, he said, preferred not to sell to Venezuela rather than deal with
the headache of making sure it was legal — a phenomenon known as
overcompliance.
“The situation internally is really
dire,” Mr. Reyna said.
The loss of hope is, in part, why more
than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, with more
than 240,000 arriving
at the U.S. southern border in the past two years. Many experts view sanctions
as an important driver of
migration from Venezuela because they worsen the economic
conditions that push people to leave. In response, a group of Democratic
lawmakers — including Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who co-chairs
Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign — implored him to
lift sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.
In addition to making good on its
commitments in Venezuela, the Biden administration can do much more to show
that the United States is changing its sanctions policy to make it more humane.
The first step would be to follow through on the recommendations of its 2021
review and formally take the humanitarian cost of any sanction into account
before it is imposed. The Treasury Department in May hired two economists to take
on that task; that should become standard practice for any agency
with the responsibility for carrying out sanctions.
Sanctions
Need to Be Reversible
Once the government begins
conducting systematic reviews of existing sanctions, it’s crucial to ensure
that any sanction imposed can be reversed.
Consider the most glaring failure to
do this: the open-ended trade embargo against Cuba. President John F. Kennedy
put the embargo in place in 1962 with the stated goal of
“isolating the present government of Cuba and thereby reducing the threat posed
by its alignment with the Communist powers.”
In the years since, American
presidents have sent wildly different messages about what it would take to
remove sanctions. Barack Obama moved to lift many of them
in 2014 — an effort that Donald Trump reversed three years later. Last
year Mr. Biden lifted some of the Trump-era
sanctions. Yet only an act of Congress can end the embargo.
Peter Harrell, who served on the
National Security Council staff under Mr. Biden, argues that
sanctions should automatically expire after a certain number of years unless
Congress votes to extend them. That would cut down on cases of zombie sanctions
that go on for decades, long after U.S. policymakers have given up on the
sanctions’ achieving their goals.
For sanctions to incentivize change
rather than merely punish actions in the past, the United States should be
prepared to lift sanctions — even against odious actors — if the stated
criteria are met.
Sanctions, as attractive as they
are, rarely work without specific goals combined with criteria for sanctions to
be lifted. That applies to current as well as future sanctions. Without goals
and relief criteria, these measures — among the most severe in the U.S. foreign
policy arsenal — risk working against American interests and principles in the
long run."
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