Those against Iran may have been focused on its Revolutionary Guard, banks that help finance the regime’s nuclear ambitions, and so on, but they have hit ordinary Iranians hard
in its airspace and arresting an opposition activist who was onboard, the European Union had agreed on a series of retaliatory measures, including cutting the east European country’s aviation links to the EU. Further sanctions are in the works against oligarchs who bankroll the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s president. Sectors the dictator relies on for hard currency, such as potash and oil, could also be targeted. The reaction will have surprised no one.
The surge in the use of sanctions dates back to the 1990s. As their use has increased, so has their scope. Where once they tended to be fairly straightforward country-wide trade embargoes, they have grown into a dizzying array of measures covering whole countries, whole or partial sectors, individuals, or groups of officials or cronies. The tools, in short, have been sharpened. However, sanctions often fail to meet their goals.
Sanctions often have unintended consequences. . Targeted governments can use sanctions as a rallying cry at home: as fed up as many Venezuelans are with the nasty, incompetent regime of Nicolas Maduro, more than half of them oppose Western sanctions against it, according to one poll. Sanctions can also inadvertently help adversaries to advance their interests abroad. China has signed a $400bn energy-and-infrastructure deal with Iran.
Another danger is escalation. Sanctions beget counter-sanctions and less-direct forms of retaliation—and the bigger the target, the more power it has to strike back. Russia’s options are limited in terms of direct retaliation, but American sanctions encourage it to ramp up asymmetrical warfare, such as cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns. China no longer just shrugs when targeted.
The final danger with sanctions—and perhaps the most corrosive over the long term—lies in heavy use encouraging targeted countries and entities, and others who want to trade with them, to look for ways to reduce their reliance on the West’s economic networks. China, Russia and others are, for instance, exploring ways to circumvent the dollar and SWIFT, the main interbank messaging service for cross-border payments.
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