A few days ago, the Secretary of the Treasury, announced “punishing sanctions on countries and entities that do business with Iran, aiming to further isolate the Iranian regime and disrupt its financial connections globally. He emphasized that no one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions and warned of consequences for those who continue to engage economically with Iran.” An “economic D-Day,” if you will. And this just a few weeks after the President had announced “total victory.” Pete Hegseth described it more colorfully as "Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital-V military victory," he said during an April 8 Pentagon press conference. "Epic Fury decimated Iran's military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come." I guess it wasn’t enough and now we need economic sanctions, remembering, of course, that tariffs are form of economic sanctions and have been applied all around the world already, albeit in a rather haphazard manner.
Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, has been writing about sanctions and their effect for a long time, and recently he’s been interviewed practically ad nauseum regarding sanctions and the “escalation trap.”
One of the curses of being a librarian is that one feels compelled to research EVERYTHING. Naturally, Pape’s comments about sanctions fit that compulsion.
Pape wrote a couple of articles in 1998 in response to a study that defended sanctions as a alternative to war. In “Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work,” Pape offered a convincing defense of his skeptical view that economic sanctions are effective tools to win conflict, His original piece was “Why Economioc Sanctions Do Not Work” “[2] a critique of a large study done in 1987 entitled Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (HSE)[1] that offered sanctions as a viable alternative to war.
Pape wrote that sanctions are not a safe alternative to war or diplomacy. They often do great damage to innocent civilians without changing the behavior of the regime. Also, an over-reliance on sanctions can prompt leaders to adopt belligerent rhetoric, — it’s hard to avoid the hyperbole of Bessent, Hegseth, and Trump — increasing the chances of a military response if sanctions don’t work. Pape concludes that politicians need to be honest about the limits of economic pressure and military force, and instead rely on traditional diplomacy or accept that foreign policy objectives cannot always be achieved at a price that people are willing to pay.
“Now is the time to apply economic sanctions rather than go to war.” Sanctions have become a middle ground between doing nothing and sending in the Marines. Sometimes governments use sanctions as a way politely to get another country to change its behavior, stop an invasion , stop a nuclear program , or remove an unpopular regime. Pretty good. Hurt the economy. Don't kill anyone. Wait till the target understands. The problem, as Pape wrote in his 1997 piece “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,”[2] is that the past is not very encouraging. There are few cases where economic pressure alone has achieved great political concessions. Many of the celebrated cases of 'successful' sanctions were in fact resolved by military force, political upheaval or other factors, not economic pressure.
Pape’s denial was meant to be controversial because it challenged Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Elliott’s Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, one of the most-cited studies on economic coercion. Between 1914 and 1990, Hufbauer et al. examined 115 cases and found that sanctions contributed to the achievement of the objective in roughly 34% of cases. That number became pretty common knowledge. Sanctions weren't always successful but they were successful enough of the time to make them a useful tool for foreign policy.
One of the key problems with sanctions is this. High demand gives the target more incentive to resist. Sanctions can lead to a compromise if Washington tells a government to stop a minor trade practice. If Washington wants the government to give up territory, give up a nuclear deterrent, give up a vital security interest, or agree to a change in the government, the target has a whole lot more reasons to believe that resistance is better than giving up.
Pape’s research indicates that sanctions are a poor alternative to military force when the issue at stake is one that the target state considers to be of paramount importance to its security. A government that feels its very existence is at stake might tolerate dreadful economic problems rather than concede. Just look at Iraq, perhaps the most dramatic case. Iraq's GDP had fallen a huge amount, about 48% according to Pape, due to years of sanctions, but Saddam Hussein's government did not give up. So why use them if they don’t work?
One answer is that sanctions provide the appearance of action without the instant bad political consequences of war. But a president can say an enemy will be punished without asking Congress for permission to invade or send troops to fight. Sanctions also satisfy domestic pressure to “do something,” which makes them attractive even when policymakers have little reason to believe they will achieve the stated goal.
Pape himself said that policymakers may always overestimate the power of sanctions to get people to do what they want. Leaders considering the use of military force may also think that economic sanctions may improve their credibility to threaten military force: first apply economic pressure on the other side, then threaten to use military force if they do not comply. But it makes a bad possibility, a possibility. If sanctions do not work and the target does not budge, the government that imposed the sanctions must decide whether it will accept failure or increase pressure. Thus, what begins as an alternative to war can become a step toward war.
History of sanctions is replete with examples of this. Sanctions against Iraq failed to make Saddam Hussein concede the key political objectives that Washington disapproved of. The opposite was true, the struggle went on for years and ended with the invasion in 2003. To say that sanctions “caused” the Iraq war would be too simplistic. They didn’t. But they didn't end the war either. Then, as the conflict escalated, it was economic pressure, then military threats, then military action. That’s how the sanctions regime was brought into play.
The same thing, says Pape, about the blockade of Germany in the First World War. The Allied blockade certainly weakened the German economy and military. But that doesn’t mean it worked as an economic sanction. Germany surrendered because its leaders realized that the military situation was hopeless. It was not because the German government or people were poor and therefore willing to accept the political demands of the Allies. Pape distinguishes between economic warfare and economic sanctions. Economic warfare is intended to reduce an enemy’s ability to fight, while economic sanctions are intended to induce an enemy to change its behavior without losing a war.
There is another reason why sanctions can make the relationship between countries worse. Economic pressures don’t always lead to people rebelling against the government that implements the policy. It can have a "rally round the flag" effect instead. Leaders can say sanctions are an attack on the country, and the economy is bad because of foreigners. The nationalism that arises from this may strengthen rather than weaken the regime.
Sanctions may also increase authoritarian regimes’ incentive to tighten political control. When it is difficult to import goods, investments and money from elsewhere, governments can channel the tiny resources they still have available to them to groups they can politically rely on. That means that economic isolation may consolidate patronage networks and make the regime more reliant on its security forces. The economic cost is borne by regular people, whereas political elites may be able to escape it.
The US now sanctions — it’s important to remember that tariffs are a form of sanction — much more often than it used to. As part of its foreign policy, the U.S. often utilizes economic sanctions, export controls, asset freezes, secondary sanctions, technology controls, and banking restrictions. The US plays a very large role in the world financial system so these actions may have very large negative effects on the economy.
Indeed, sanctions may be less effective when directed at countries that view the problem as a matter of their own survival. A clear modern example is Russia’s willingness to suffer severe sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine. Another is Iran’s continued pursuit of policies Washington dislikes, despite decades of sanctions. North Korea has maintained its nuclear stockpile despite some of the toughest sanctions in the world. These cases don’t show that sanctions don’t work; they do show that economic pain doesn’t always trump what a government thinks is best for security.
And strategically, it is also bad to assume that sanctions will ultimately lead to surrender, because targets shift. Countries search for other suppliers, develop their own industries, create networks to evade sanctions, find other currencies, set up other payment systems, and try to get along with other powers. The longer the sanctions are in place, the more probable that the target will change. New research also finds that coalition unity problems, rally-around-the-flag effects, circumvention, and the difficulty of keeping everyone on the same page are big reasons why sanctions don’t always work.
The United States has a particularly hard time adapting to this. Washington may be economically powerful, but there’s plenty of reason for the rest of the world to want to pull away from US-run financial and technological systems when they’re used to force people to do what the US wants. That is why every large-scale sanctions campaign makes the target country (and sometimes neutral countries) want to find alternatives.
This doesn’t mean sanctions can’t work under some circumstances. Pape did not say that economic pressure can never accomplish anything. He arrived at a more cautious conclusion: sanctions make most sense when the target is small and the issue is not vital to the target’s safety or the survival of the regime. If a country drops a small policy that gets trade going again, that is rational. It is much less willing to cede land, give up its nuclear weapons, or accept what it sees as a threat to its political survival.
That is the difference that needs to be at the heart of sanctions policy. Sanctions can be a punishment, a signal, a bargaining chip, or part of a larger diplomatic strategy. They can increase the cost of bad behavior. Sometimes they can help make possible the negotiations. But what they usually can't do is wave a magic wand to determine what a government decides are its most important interests.
The biggest threat is when policymakers blur the lines between punishment and power. The first type of coercion is “We will stop you from doing this”, the second type is “We will punish you for doing this”. The first type can be used without changing the behavior of the target. For the second one the calculation for the target has to be changed. These are two very different goals.
Pape’s work should not be read as evidence that all punishments have always failed, but rather as a warning about the seductive logic of economic coercion. Sanctions appear peaceful because there are no troops, bombs, or immediate invasions. But if the issue at stake is of great importance to the target, sanctions may lead to nothing more than a long struggle of wills. The sanctioning state keeps ratcheting up the pressure on the target and the target keeps fighting back. As time goes by, both sides become more determined not to surrender. Ultimately, it’s up to the sanctioning government to decide whether to let failure take its course or escalate.
This makes the historical lesson less comforting than the usual lesson in sanctions. Economic pressure is not a substitute for military force, even if it is less violent. It also isn’t always a road to a peaceful settlement. In big disagreements, sanctions can hurt without forcing surrender, reinforce the resolve of nationalists to fight, help economies adjust, and force policymakers to confront the choice they wanted to avoid: capitulate or use force.
The main thing Pape did was to insist that the question should not be whether sanctions hurt. They can, yes. It is important to know whether the pain makes the target government give up an important goal, and whether it does so because of the sanctions or because of another force at the same time. On that much narrower and more important question the past is no good. His research is one of the strongest warnings against the use of sanctions as an easy way out of war or diplomacy.
And that may be the most important lesson for policymakers today: if a government is willing to fight over an issue, it’s likely willing to lose money over it as well. Sanctions can make war more expensive. They do not necessarily reduce the chances of war. Sometimes they can have the exact opposite effect, by making a political argument last for a long time and making it impossible for either side to back down.
From my own observation, the more current and obvious examples of sanction failure would have to include Cuba whose economy has been devastated by sanctions yet Trump now feels compelled to use troops to effect the regime's collapse. Other examples abound including Russia, Iraq, Iran, of course, where even massive bombing seems to have strengthened the regime's spine. Biafra is an even more tragic example of sanction failure. Although nearly 2 million Biafrans starved, the blockade did not break their morale or lead to economic coercion. Biafra only collapsed after two and a half years of intense warfare when over 180,000 Nigerian troops overran their strongholds.
I'm not sure where this leaves us. From an ethical position there have supposedly always been "laws of war" intended to protect civilians. Wars of the last century would seem to have blown that concept out of the water given the use of massive bombing campaigns against civilians. Curtiss LeMay's famous line, "Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." *
Critics argue that broad economic sanctions are not a peaceful alternative to war, but rather economic warfare—the modern equivalent of a medieval siege. Just War Theory mandates that civilians (non-combatants) must not be directly targeted. Broad trade embargoes and financial blockades inevitably degrade a nation's healthcare, water sanitation, and food supply chains. The primary victims of economic collapse are typically vulnerable civilians—children, the elderly, and the poor—rather than political or military elites who retain access to resources.
Sanctions often function by deliberately impoverishing a civilian population to incentivize them to pressure or overthrow their leaders. Ethicists like Michael Walzer** argue that this uses innocent human beings merely as a means to a political end, violating core Kantian moral principles -- not that anyone cares what Kant thought anymore.
Indiscriminate and Prolonged Harm: While kinetic military operations have defined temporal and geographic boundaries, sanctions can choke an entire national economy for decades (e.g., long-term embargoes), causing slow, structural death through malnutrition, preventable disease, and poverty.
*Reflecting on the 1945 firebombing of Japanese cities, General LeMay made the remark during a 1978 military history symposium hosted at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
**See Chapter 10 of his book Just and Unjust Wars (1977) titled “Noncombatant Immunity and Military Necessity” and where Michael Walzer talks about the thin line between legitimate targets and innocent bystanders in war. He starts off by talking about what a person really is, that everyone has a basic right to life and freedom that can't be taken away for military reasons. -- wishful thinking, surely-- “Once soldiers are armed and pose a real threat to others, they lose this protection and become legitimate targets on the battlefield,” says Walzer. But civilians are not involved in the direct violence . Their fundamental human rights remain respected during a war . He doesn't deal with civilians' labor to produce weaponry.
Walzer applies the rule in the worst possible circumstances, when commanders argue that urgent strategic goals outweigh the protection of civilians. He looks at naval warfare tactics such as the infamous Laconia incident and German submarine operations during World War II, to show how necessity can be stretched to its limits. When U-boats sank enemy ships the submarines were in great peril while taking the survivors to safety. Commanders said that in a total war it was necessary to leave or attack those who could not defend themselves. Walzer strongly contests this line of thinking. He says that once an enemy combatant is disarmed, rendered helpless or thrown into the sea, his right to life is restored. There are military reasons alone for not turning a fight into a massacre.
The chapter also touches on the ethical dilemma that is always there in the killing of civilians during legitimate attacks. The Doctrine of Double Effect is a key concept in moral theory. It holds that it is permissible to kill civilians as long as the killing is an unintended side effect of achieving a legitimate military goal. Walzer thinks the old version of this rule is way too permissive . Commanders can easily say that they didn 't intend to hurt civilians when they launched destructive attacks into populated areas . He cites historical examples such as the Allied bombing of occupied French infrastructure and heavy artillery bombardments in the Korean war to show how easily this doctrine can be abused.
Walzer suggests a radical revision of the Doctrine of Double Effect that would close this loophole . Military planners cannot just hope that civilians will survive an attack; they must take active, positive steps to ensure that as few civilians as possible are killed, even at the cost of greater operational risk for their own troops. Walzer ensures that noncombatant immunity is a real defense rather than a simple excuse for killing innocent people by raising the risk to the military in an effort to protect innocent people. (I note Walzer has a 2015 updated version. My copy is the 1977 edition)
[1] Pape, R. A. (1997). Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work. International Security, 22(2), 90-136. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539368?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
[2] Hufbauer, G. C., Schott, J. J., Elliott, K. A., & Oegg, B. (2008). Economic sanctions reconsidered. Columbia University Press.
The book was originally published in 1985 ,but, now in its third edition, even the book’s promotional blurb suggests sanctions fail “But poor design and implementation of sanctions policies often mean that they fall short of their desired effects.”
Pape’s substack discussion of current economic pressure: https://escalationtrap.substack.com/p/the-economic-d-day-illusion-why-massive
