When Sanctions Worked, When They Failed, and Why the Difference Matters

Sanctions are Washington's favorite diet. It is going to be painless. It is going to be quick. It is going to work without anyone having to do anything hard. Then a decade goes by, the target is still there, the waistline of the problem has not changed, and somebody on a cable panel says we should try the diet again, only stricter.

Sanctions are not a joke, though, and I do not want to treat them like one. They are a real tool. Sometimes they have changed the behavior of a government, and sometimes they have only changed the bank account of a grocer in the wrong country. The question worth asking is why. If you can tell the first kind from the second before the Treasury Department starts drafting, you save a lot of money, a lot of credibility, and occasionally a lot of lives. This post puts five famous cases side by side and pulls a conservative checklist out of them.

What we are actually talking about

A sanction is a penalty one government imposes on another country, its leaders, or the people and companies that do business with it. It can be a ban on trade, a freeze on assets, a cutoff of banking access, an arms embargo, or a travel ban on named officials. The legal machinery in this country runs through statutes and executive orders, and I walked through how an order becomes a frozen account in How Sanctions Work, From a Presidential Order to a Frozen Bank Account. Here I want to ask the harder question: when does the pain translate into a policy change?

Here is the argument I am going to make, in four premises.

1. Sanctions are a means, not an end. They only work when they are tied to a specific, achievable demand.
2. They work best when many countries enforce them, because a penalty with a loophole the size of a neighbor's border is a suggestion.
3. They work best when they are aimed at the people who make the decisions, or at the money those people depend on, and not at a whole population.
4. They fail most reliably when they are used because the government wanted to be seen doing something and had run out of other ideas.

Now to the cases.

The scorecard

Five cases do not make a science. But they make a pattern, and the pattern is the point.

Rhodesia: the first lesson in leaks

In November 1965 the white-minority government of Rhodesia declared independence from Britain rather than accept majority rule. The United Nations Security Council responded the next year with mandatory sanctions, the first the body had ever ordered, and broadened them in 1968. On paper it was a model of international unity.

In practice it leaked like a screen door. South Africa and Portuguese-ruled Mozambique were next door, and neither was going to shut the border. Even the United States wobbled: in 1971 Congress passed the Byrd Amendment, which let American firms keep importing Rhodesian chrome and some other strategic materials, and it stayed on the books until 1977. A sanctions regime that the sanctioning country itself pokes holes in is not much of a regime.

What ended white-minority rule in Rhodesia was a long guerrilla war, the loss of Portuguese control of Mozambique in 1975, the shift in South Africa's calculations, and a negotiated settlement at Lancaster House in London in late 1979. Zimbabwe became independent in April 1980. Sanctions were part of the pressure. Nobody serious claims they did the job alone.

What to learn: a sanction without enforcement at the neighboring border is a speech. And when a sanction is one of five pressures, be careful about giving it all the credit.

South Africa: the one that worked, and the president who vetoed it

This is the case the other side loves, and fairly. It is also a case where a Republican president and a Republican-led Senate faction were on opposite sides, which is why every conservative should know the story.

Ronald Reagan's policy toward South Africa was called constructive engagement. His argument was that quiet pressure and economic contact would do more good than a punitive embargo, and that sanctions would hurt the black workers they were meant to help. That was a serious argument made in good faith, and some South African black leaders had said versions of it.

Congress disagreed. In 1986 it passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. It banned new American investment and loans, imposed import bans on several South African goods, and set out conditions for lifting the measures that included releasing political prisoners and unbanning the main opposition parties. Reagan vetoed it on September 26, 1986. The House voted to override on September 29, and the Senate followed on October 2. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Republican who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, was one of the leaders of the override. A Republican Senate joined with Democrats to overrule a popular Republican president, which is the kind of thing that happens when members think the president has the policy wrong.

Look at what made this one work.

• A clear, written demand. The statute said what would end the sanctions. It was a checklist, not a mood.
• Broad participation. Banks, universities, pension funds, and other governments joined in, which meant South Africa's access to capital tightened across the board.
• Aimed at the economy that supported the regime, not at ordinary households by embargoing food and medicine.
• A regime that could change. The government was under internal pressure, and it had an exit.

Nelson Mandela was freed on February 11, 1990. The apartheid statutes were repealed in 1991, and the American sanctions were lifted that year after the conditions were met. Democratic elections came in April 1994.

I will not tell you sanctions alone did it. South Africa's own economy, its internal resistance, and the end of the Cold War all mattered. But if you want to know what a sanctions success looks like, there it is. The demand was spelled out, the exit was spelled out, and the pressure was shared.

Cuba: the longest-running lesson

Now the case where a conservative has to be honest. The United States has had some form of embargo against Cuba since 1960. The Eisenhower administration restricted most exports to the island that October, after Fidel Castro's government had seized American-owned property and moved toward the Soviet Union. In February 1962 John Kennedy proclaimed a broader embargo. In 1996 Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which wrote much of the embargo into statute and made it harder for a president to ease it by order.

The motives were good. Castro's government jailed dissidents, took property without compensation, and aligned itself with a hostile superpower ninety miles from Florida. Cuban Americans who fled that government have a real stake and a real grievance, and they deserve to be heard, not lectured.

But look at the scorecard by the test we set. The demand was vague: in practice it became regime change. The multilateral support was thin, since most other countries traded with Cuba anyway and the United Nations General Assembly has voted for years to condemn the embargo. The same ruling family held power from 1959 until Fidel handed over to his brother Raul, whose leadership became formal in 2008. And the regime found it useful. A government that cannot feed its people can blame the Yankee embargo for every empty shelf. It is hard to design a better propaganda gift than a sanction that never ends and never gets results.

Here is the strongest defense of the policy: it denies a hostile dictatorship hard currency, it signals that the United States does not reward the confiscation of property, and lifting it without anything in return would hand the regime a victory. That is a legitimate argument, and I take it seriously. The answer is that a policy has to be judged by what it produces, not by how good it feels. When a measure has been in place for more than sixty years without achieving its stated goal, the burden belongs on those who want to keep it unchanged. The honest conservative position is to ask for an updated, specific list of demands, release of political prisoners, free elections, compensation for stolen property, and to tie every tightening or loosening to those items. That is not softness. It is the South Africa model applied to the Caribbean.

Iran: sanctions that bought a table

In July 2010 Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, usually called CISADA. Its innovation was to go after the banks. Foreign financial institutions that knowingly dealt with certain Iranian entities, including the Revolutionary Guard, risked losing access to the American financial system. For a global bank, that is a threat you cannot shrug off. The statute also targeted Iran's imports of refined petroleum products.

It was not alone. The UN Security Council passed a new round of sanctions the month before. The European Union followed with its own measures, and later American law went after Iran's central bank and its oil sales. The point is that the pressure was multilateral in effect, since foreign banks and foreign buyers had to choose between Iran and America.

The result is that Iran's economy was hurt, and its leaders came to the table in 2013. That is a real success if the goal is "get them talking." Whether the talks produced a good deal is a separate argument, and I think they did not. I laid out the case in Why Republicans Said the Iran Deal Should Have Been a Treaty: the agreement left sunset clauses, left the missile program mostly aside, and left regional behavior alone. For this post the lesson is narrower. Sanctions bought leverage. What a government does with leverage is a different test, and the next case shows what happens when it never gets used well. For the longer history of why Tehran behaves the way it does, see From the Shah to the Hostages, the Real History of America and Iran.

North Korea: when the target has already crossed the line

North Korea first tested a nuclear device in October 2006. Since then the UN Security Council has passed round after round of sanctions, including major packages in 2016 and 2017 that targeted coal, textiles, seafood, and oil imports. Everyone reading this knows how it ended: the program kept advancing.

Why the failure? Look at the checklist.

• The demand was the one thing the regime considered existential. A government that believes nuclear weapons are the guarantee of its survival will not trade them for relief on coal exports.
• The enforcement had a very large leak. North Korea's trade runs overwhelmingly through China, and Beijing enforced when it wanted to and relaxed when it didn't.
• The regime had already shown it would let its people suffer. A sanction that works by inflicting economic pain has less force against a government that does not care how much pain its own population feels.

That last point deserves a moment. Sanctions rest on the theory that leaders will respond to costs. Some leaders will not, or will pay the costs with other people's money.

The best case for sanctions, and the answer

Let me state the supporter's strongest argument. Sanctions sit between words and war. They let a country register serious disapproval without sending soldiers. Even when they fail to change a regime, they can make bad behavior more expensive and slower. And the real alternative, doing nothing, is worse.

That argument is right as far as it goes. A conservative does not have to oppose sanctions. We have to oppose sanctions used as a substitute for a policy. The test is whether the measure is a step in a strategy or a replacement for one. If the answer to "what happens if they don't change?" is "we add another round," you do not have a strategy. You have a ratchet.

There is also a cost that rarely makes the press release. Sanctions can push a target country toward the very powers we want it to avoid, build up black markets, and give governments an excuse. They can also cost American farmers and manufacturers their customers. The farmer in Kansas who loses an export market for the sake of a gesture is part of the bill, and he never gets a vote on it. Trade Is Foreign Policy and Every President Has Treated It That Way gets into that tension.

A conservative checklist for the next proposal

Next time someone in either party says "We should sanction them," ask these seven questions, in this order.

1. What exactly do we want? Write it in one sentence. "Send a message" fails.
2. What would make us lift it? If nobody can say, you have designed a punishment, not a pressure.
3. Who else is enforcing it? Count the neighbors, the big trading partners, and the banks.
4. Who actually pays? The ruling circle, or the shopkeeper? Does it hit food and medicine?
5. Can the target change? A government with an exit can take one. A government that is cornered may dig in.
6. What does it cost Americans? Name the farmers, workers, and firms that lose.
7. What is the next step if it fails? If the honest answer is "more of the same," go back to question one.

The bottom line

• Sanctions are a real tool and sometimes a successful one, but only when the demand is specific, the exit is clear, and other countries help enforce them.
• South Africa worked in part because Congress wrote the conditions into law; Cuba and North Korea show what happens when the goal is vague or the leaks are wide.
• Be suspicious of any proposal that cannot say what would end it. That is not a policy, it is a mood.
• Ask who pays: if the answer is the family in the target country and the farmer here at home, push for something sharper.
• When your representative promises tough sanctions, ask for the one-sentence demand and the exit condition. You are entitled to both.