Key Points
International sanctions are a tool in the strategic arsenal of states to inflict economic pain on a target foreign nation, specific individual, or a non-state organization by means of collective, coordinated action to deprive it of economic, commercial, and financial access. This includes asset freezes, trade and investment embargoes, increased import costs, and travel and monetary restrictions.
Historically, they are used in trade disputes between otherwise friendly nations as a tactic to force negotiation on economic disagreements. Another common approach is to deploy them against global threats such as transnational terrorist organizations. In recent decades, however, they are employed with increasing frequency by economic powerhouses in the West against adversaries outside their alliance networks, especially by leveraging the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. This is often done to express moral outrage at a rival states’ domestic politics or political system as a means to force diplomatic concessions, general compliance to the liberal international order, or possibly instigate regime change.
The sharp rise in frequency of sanctions within the past two decades is truly staggering. Taking the United States—the country most likely to leverage its great power status and the alliance network to impose unilateral sanctions—as an example, a former baseline of 8 new sanctions per year under the Clinton Administration gave way to on average 525 new sanctions per year in the Obama Administration and a whopping 975 per year average under the Trump Administration. Frequently, nations allied to the United States also either enforce these U.S.-driven ‘international’ sanctions or impose sanctions of their own.
With such a massive turn to sanctions as the coercive measure of choice by the North Atlantic bloc, one would presume that they are empirically shown to be extremely effective at influencing regime behavior. Yet, evidence for their success is scant. And when they do modify behavior, it is often to make their target more aggressive and confrontational, raising the potential for conflict.
When a targeted country is sanctioned, the level of economic pain it experiences will vary based on how connected it is to the international economy and how dependent it is on trade as a percentage of its GDP. Given globalization and the interconnected nature of the global economy, few countries today are entirely self-sufficient; rather, they need access to foreign commodities, products, or markets and, in turn, the U.S. Dollar. Accordingly, sanctions’ real effects can range from minor inconvenience all the way to severe deprivation that would approximate siege warfare. This variance inevitably invites a cost-benefit analysis of the sanctions policy as a whole to determine its efficacy.
In the 1990s, sanctions gained increasing prominence due to the perception of their indispensibility to the fall of the Apartheid government of South Africa. Writing for the publication International Security in 1998, Robert Pape argued, however, that despite some apparent successes, the odds of getting any concessions through sanctioning was less than a third, and the odds of getting all of the desired policy changes was about 5%. Even the supposed success story of the role of international sanctions in ending the Apartheid regime appears tenuous when one notes that the imposition of international sanctions actually accelerated economic growth. Arguably, the regime’s collapse had much more to do with the end of the Cold War and the internal dynamics of South Africa, namely the growth of an educated Black middle class and the inevitable rise in economic synergy and cooperation between the races in that country.
What is more, the 90s also witnessed some of the most crushing sanctions in diplomatic history be inflicted on Iraq–a de facto blockade that would last until the toppling of the Baathist state by the United States and its allies in 2003. During this interwar period, living standards in Iraq plummeted and Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus became more draconian, ramping up its surveillance of ordinary Iraqis. The result of the crippling sanctions and the Oil-for-Food Programme (OIP) instituted by the United Nations was a humanitarian disaster on all fronts. At least, a third of children in the country suffered from malnutrition by 1997 and hundreds of thousands of people died over the course of the blockade.
The Iraq War may have turned public opinion in NATO-allied nations against military intervention and regime change wars, but it was a godsend in that it ended the ruinous and ineffective sanctions regime against Iraq. Ironically, the very disillusionment toward armed intervention and nation-building (coupled with the equally-disastrous humanitarian intervention in Libya later in 2011) was to lead to a growing use of sanctions against so-called “rogue states.” Coercive economic statecraft was now to be preferred to militarism. This was, in many ways, a return to the 1990s, when the United States routinely employed its unquestioned hegemony in the unipolar international order to confront and quell “the backlash states” that would challenge it. Significantly, the overall increase in the practice of sanctions does not seem to have improved the odds of their effectiveness.
By studying a handful of countries most subjected to international sanctions, it becomes apparent that the intended objectives of these policies seldom occur. Moreover, many unintended consequences have also revealed themselves.
U.S. sanctions on Venezuela began back in 2002 at the time of Hugo Chavez. Over time, they became more cutthroat and intense, culminating in a truly devastating impact under the Trump Administration in 2017 and 2019. Almost every aspect of international trade with Venezuela now falls under some kind of restricted guideline listed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Following the trend established by sanctions placed on Iraq in the 1990s, Venezuela has seen an increase in mortality and food shortages among the general population; yet, the government’s grasp on power remains as firm as ever. If anything, given that sanction mitigation necessitates greater centralization, Maduro enjoys a stronger position today as his government controls a larger share of the country’s economy.
In contrast to Venezuela, economic sanctions on Iran have occasioned a true international coalition united to punish Tehran for its nuclear program as well as its regional machinations (such as its support for Hezbollah). In the first instance, sanctions remain attractive because they are presented as an effective way to increase pressure on Iran to resume negotiations on its nuclear program and possibly accept compromises.
Of course, raising foreign pressure on a rogue state could well create a backlash of support for the government among its people, in this case by inducing ordinary Iranians to rally behind their flag in the face of severe economic challenges as well as their perception of foreign injustice and oppression. As such, this is likely to galvanize public support for the nuclear program and its framing as vital to Iran’s national security, further incentivizing Tehran to take a more uncompromising stance on the issue. It is a classic catch-22.
One could argue that restricting Iranian commerce internationally will put additional constraints on the country’s budget for defense and undermine Tehran’s infamous proxy-based deterrence strategy. Such an assumption remains unsupported as the Iranian defense spending has not decreased even as more sanctions target that nation. Overwhelmingly, it is Iran’s innocent population that has borne the brunt of these sanctions, even impeding their access to life-saving coronavirus vaccines. Although defenders of sanctions claim that such pressures would alienate the average citizen from their national and political leadership, the harmful and potentially deadly impact of sanctions would undoubtedly antagonize the local population against the U.S. and its allies.
Yet another case in point in the futility of sanctions is the war-torn nation of Syria, close to Iran in both geopolitical alignment as well as in being heavily targeted by the U.S. alliance. After a decade of efforts by various domestic and foreign actors to topple the government in Damascus, Assad remains in power having recaptured many parts of the country that were lost to him in the early stages of the civil war. The multiple accounts of human rights violations in that conflict coupled with Damascus’ alliance with Iran and Russia and its long-term hostility to Israel have turned Syria into a prime target for punitive international sanctions by the North Atlantic nations looking to secure its compliance.
This effort culminated in the Caesar Sanctions, a crippling and controversial program designed to isolate and devastate the Syrian economy. In reality, such practices have only succeeded in hindering postwar reconstruction in Syria and possibly exacerbating the conditions that fuel extremism.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is perhaps the most consistently sanctioned nation on earth in the Twenty-first Century, and yet the barrage of sanctions do not seem to have lessened its resistance to the liberal international order or compelled it to change its policies or reform its political system owing to international pressure. Not only has the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal only grown under the present economic blockade, but the DPRK’s nuclear testing seems to peak and turn more aggressive when the regime perceives a threat to its sovereignty.
Here again, the costs of international sanctions imposed on Pyongyang are borne almost entirely by the general populace, causing droughts, medical shortages, and humanitarian disaster as well as reinforcing regime narratives that blame the country’s woes on foreign interference and hostility. The sanctions regime is ultimately so ineffectual that the West has failed even to prevent the DPRK elites from importing luxury goods.
The most clear takeaway from the above case studies is that international sanctions’ unintended consequences for the civilian population appear to be the norm rather than the exception. Many of these devastating outcomes can be shown as part of a pattern that is almost predictable–where the political leadership generally escapes the huge toll of sanctions and even uses them to strengthen its grips on power.
Indeed, the sense of nationalism and rally-’round-the-flag effect instigated by the various crises international sanctions unleash on target nations might well be their most paradoxical effect, rousing public support for the regime and lionizing its ‘resistance’ to and ‘independence’ from the hegemonic Western order. In other words, the ‘crisis’ mentality often bolsters the state’s sovereignty in the eyes of its people with the state portraying itself as the people’s last line of defense against foreign domination.
Moreover, with international sanctions characterized as acts of war, the national emergency of war and spirit of patriotic resistance are routinely and easily abused to crack down on the opposition (often, urban middle classes who are seen as Western sympathizers). Thus, sanctions, ironically, strengthen the bonds between the political elites and the lower classes that suffer most under the weight of sanctions, while disempowering the very groups that might in time challenge the regime internally through civil disobedience, demands for openness, or acts of rebellion.
If a political system is already fragile, then sanctions could be useful in accelerating its collapse. Such a scenario would require a general belief and consensus among domestic opposition groups, envisioning that a regime’s days are numbered and that there exists an acceptable alternative. Otherwise, sanctions often provide a reprieve for the existing government to boost its legitimacy.
Moreover, sanctions are less effective vis-à-vis non-democratic governments than liberal democratic ones. This means they impose more burdens on states with a robust civil society than they do on more authoritarian societies where individual rights and civil liberties are either nonexistent or less engrained. Illiberal regimes are also far less integrated into the global economy and remain more isolated diplomatically from liberal international order and its institutional arrangements. Sanctions only reinforce this isolation further not only by design but also because elites soon realize the protective benefits of that isolation as key to their survival.
On a related note, some studies have found that the added domestic prestige (and hence security) a regime gains by resisting sanctions offsets the costs of its non-compliance to foreign demands, suggesting that sanctions would generally stunt rather than encourage political reforms abroad.
Lastly, one major consequence of the Anglosphere’s over-reliance on sanctions is it precipitates or hardens diplomatic realignments that disadvantage the North Atlantic and empower rival alliance networks. As the U.S.-led bloc attempts to besiege and cut off what it considers rogue states from international finance and trade networks, rival great powers such as China and Russia provide these sanction-ridden states with a lifeline and a workaround to the sanctions resulting in closer relations forged in solidarity against Western hegemony.
Not only would these new alliances likely harm the long-term interests of the North Atlantic countries, they could also evolve into a big-tent entente in the name of national sovereignty against what is perceived as Western overreach, interference, and imperialism. This was perfectly illustrated in 2014, when NATO allies and partners, led by the U.S., coordinated to sanction Russia in the wake of its annexation of the Crimea and invasion of the Donbass region of Ukraine. While Moscow was already moving closer to Beijing, the West’s enactment and implementation of the more stringent sanctions regime against Russia noticeably accelerated this trend.
Even outside the specter of great power politics, international sanctions make for strange bedfellows amongst smaller nations. Iran and Venezuela, for instance, have very little in common other than being made pariahs of in the West, and yet they feel compelled to band together in resistance to the U.S.-led blockades and sanctions. Hence, new connections are formed, where they likely would not otherwise, due to what the sanction-victim-states view as their shared struggles of resisting U.S.-driven economic warfare.
In addition to studying the effect of sanctions on targeted countries, it is also important to examine their unintended consequences for the states that impose them. Given that international sanctions require close multi-country coordination to prevent their easy circumvention by target states, their overuse essentially changes the international operating environment for private and multinational firms and non-governmental organizations leading to increased costs and barriers that disproportionately impact/harm Western entities.
With sanctioning now a ubiquitous practice, neutral nations in the Western alliance are also adversely affected either by having their commercial and financial relations with targeted countries disrupted or feeling as if their hand is forced due to diplomatic peer pressure and moral grandstanding. This can destabilize otherwise healthy trade networks and undermine the financial credibility of the nations pushing and imposing the sanctions.
Washington’s ability to enact unilateral sanctions but enforce them internationally is only possible because of currency unipolarity creating a dollar-based global system of finance. America’s obsession with sanctions and its weaponizing of the dollar’s reserve currency status (especially for purposes the rest of the world views as narrow-minded, rather tactical, geopolitical tussles) has already led countries in Europe and East Asia to consider constructing alternative workarounds to bypass Washington’s unilateral sanctions, with China and Russia working in tandem to end the dollar’s primacy. The serious drawbacks to Washington’s dollar deterrence strategy—which underwrites the sanctions policy—risks potentially undermining U.S. dominance of the global monetary order, even diminishing U.S economic power and splintering the world’s unified financial system into multiple regionally-differentiated capital markets.
Without urgent course correction, the United States could soon become a cautionary tale about how an obsessive, ideology-driven sanctions policy with doubtful efficacy could ruin not only America’s own financial dominance but also unravel the global financial system in the process. In the context of great power competition and deepening multipolarity, such a course appears especially unwise and imprudent.
Institutional inertia, ideological motivations, and intransigence of elites could all be to blame for the surge in sanctions, even as preponderance of evidence proves them, on the whole, ineffectual.
Governments must therefore aim at structural reform to the decision-making process to guard against reflexive enactments of sanctions and raise accountability. They must implement and incentivize checks in the policy process to flag potential costs and strategic fallout from sanctions and to systematically educate North Atlantic foreign policy personnel to recognize that punitive economic measures against rogue regimes and entities are often perceived by these groups as coercive attempts to effectuate system-level change by an outside power through economic warfare.
If military action is to be the last resort where diplomacy fails, sanctions should be framed as the penultimate option–an economic war absent the armed forces that nevertheless entails excessive costs and undesirable consequences.
Like most coercive measures, the threat of using sanctions is likely more effective than their actual enactment. In dealing with adversarial states, their role as a psychological deterrent within the broader context of constructive engagement and diplomacy is likely to be more valuable than their direct imposition.
A grand strategy rooted in “sovereignty” rather than “interventionism” recognizes that the world as it is will not entirely align with the values and political standards of any one nation or civilization. A restrained realism advises that no nation can police the world or demand compliance with its way of life without risking overreach and self-destruction. Still, diplomacy can often be more effective and less risky than bans, sanctions, and embargoes at persuasion.
The Western powers have failed to effectively manage the increasing threat of proliferation in the Middle East. While the international community is concerned with Iran’s nuclear program, Saudi Arabia has moved forward with developing its own nuclear program, and independent studies show that Israel has longed possessed dozens of nuclear warheads. The former is a member of the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), while the latter has refused to sign the international agreement.
On Middle East policy, the Biden campaign had staunchly criticized the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal and it has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier since assuming office in January 2021. However, serious obstacles remain for responsible actors in expanding non-proliferation efforts toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
This panel will discuss how Western powers and multilateral institutions, such as the IAEA, can play a more effective role in managing non-proliferation efforts in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Peggy Mason: Canada’s former Ambassador to the UN for Disarmament
– Mark Fitzpatrick: Associate Fellow & Former Executive Director, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
– Ali Vaez: Iran Project Director, International Crisis Group
– Negar Mortazavi: Journalist and Political Analyst, Host of Iran Podcast
– David Albright: Founder and President of the Institute for Science and International Security
Closing (5:45 PM – 6:00 PM ET)
What is the current economic landscape in the Middle East? While global foreign direct investment is expected to fall drastically in the post-COVID era, the World Bank reported a 5% contraction in the economic output of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries in 2020 due to the pandemic. While oil prices are expected to rebound with normalization in demand, political instability, regional and geopolitical tensions, domestic corruption, and a volatile regulatory and legal environment all threaten economic recovery in the Middle East. What is the prospect for economic growth and development in the region post-pandemic, and how could MENA nations promote sustainable growth and regional trade moving forward?
At the same time, Middle Eastern diaspora communities have become financially successful and can help promote trade between North America and the region. In this respect, the diaspora can become vital intermediaries for advancing U.S. and Canada’s business interests abroad. Promoting business diplomacy can both benefit the MENA region and be an effective and positive way to advance engagement and achieve foreign policy goals of the North Atlantic.
This panel will investigate the trade and investment opportunities in the Middle East, discuss how facilitating economic engagement with the region can benefit Canadian and American national interests, and explore relevant policy prescriptions.
Panelists:
– Hon. Sergio Marchi: Canada’s Former Minister of International Trade
– Scott Jolliffe: Chairperson, Canada Arab Business Council
– Esfandyar Batmanghelidj: Founder and Publisher of Bourse & Bazaar
– Nizar Ghanem: Director of Research and Co-founder at Triangle
– Nicki Siamaki: Researcher at Control Risks
The Middle East continues to grapple with violence and instability, particularly in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Fueled by government incompetence and foreign interventions, terrorist insurgencies have imposed severe humanitarian and economic costs on the region. Meanwhile, regional actors have engaged in an unprecedented pursuit of arms accumulation. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have imported billions of both Western and Russian-made weapons and funded militant groups across the region, intending to contain their regional adversaries, particularly Iran. Tehran has also provided sophisticated weaponry to various militia groups across the region to strengthen its geopolitical position against Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel.
On the other hand, with international terrorist networks and intense regional rivalry in the Middle East, it is impractical to discuss peace and security without addressing terrorism and the arms race in the region. This panel will primarily discuss the implications of the ongoing arms race in the region and the role of Western powers and multilateral organizations in facilitating trust-building security arrangements among regional stakeholders to limit the proliferation of arms across the Middle East.
Panelists:
Luciano Zaccara: Assistant Professor, Qatar University
Dania Thafer: Executive Director, Gulf International Forum
Kayhan Barzegar: Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Science and Research Branch of Azad University
Barbara Slavin: Director of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council
Sanam Shantyaei: Senior Journalist at France24 & host of Middle East Matters
The emerging regional order in West Asia will have wide-ranging implications for global security. The Biden administration has begun re-engaging Iran on the nuclear dossier, an initiative staunchly opposed by Israel, while also taking a harder line on Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen. Meanwhile, key regional actors, including Qatar, Iraq, and Oman, have engaged in backchannel efforts to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia to the negotiating table. From a broader geopolitical perspective, with the need to secure its energy imports, China is also expected to increase its footprint in the region and influence the mentioned challenges.
In this evolving landscape, Western powers will be compelled to redefine their strategic priorities and adjust their policies with the new realities in the region. In this panel, we will discuss how the West, including the United States and its allies, can utilize multilateral diplomacy with its adversaries to prevent military escalation in the region. Most importantly, the panel will discuss if a multilateral security dialogue in the Persian Gulf region, proposed by some regional actors, can help reduce tensions among regional foes and produce sustainable peace and development for the region.
Panelists:
– Abdullah Baabood: Academic Researcher and Former Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies, Qatar University
– Trita Parsi: Executive Vice-President, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
– Ebtesam Al-Ketbi: President, Emirates Policy Centre
– Jon Allen: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Israel
– Elizabeth Hagedorn: Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor
Military interventions, political and economic instabilities, and civil unrest in the Middle East have led to a global refugee crisis with an increasing wave of refugees and asylum seekers to Europe and Canada. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, exacerbated and contributed to the ongoing security threats and destabilization of the region.
While these challenges pose serious risks to Canadian security, Ottawa will also have the opportunity to limit such risks and prevent a spillover effect vis-à-vis effective humanitarian initiatives in the region. In this panel, we will primarily investigate Canada’s Middle East Strategy’s degree of success in providing humanitarian aid to the region. Secondly, the panel will discuss what programs and initiatives Canada can introduce to further build on the renewed strategy. and more specifically, how Canada can utilize its policy instruments to more effectively deal with the increasing influx of refugees from the Middle East.
Panelists:
Erica Di Ruggiero: Director of Centre for Global Health, University of Toronto
Reyhana Patel: Head of Communications & Government Relations, Islamic Relief Canada
Amir Barmaki: Former Head of UN OCHA in Iran
Catherine Gribbin: Senior Legal Advisor for International and Humanitarian Law, Canadian Red Cross
In 2016, Canada launched an ambitious five-year “Middle East Engagement Strategy” (2016-2021), committing to investing CA$3.5 billion over five years to help establish the necessary conditions for security and stability, alleviate human suffering and enable stabilization programs in the region. In the latest development, during the meeting of the Global Coalition against ISIS, Minister of Foreign Affairs Marc Garneau announced more than $43.6 million in Peace and Stabilization Operations Program funding for 11 projects in Syria and Iraq.
With Canada’s Middle East Engagement Strategy expiring this year, it is time to examine and evaluate this massive investment in the Middle East region in the past five years. More importantly, the panel will discuss a principled and strategic roadmap for the future of Canada’s short-term and long-term engagement in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Ferry de Kerckhove: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Egypt
– Dennis Horak: Canada’s Former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia
– Chris Kilford: Former Canadian Defence Attaché in Turkey, member of the national board of the Canadian International Council (CIC)
– David Dewitt: University Professor Emeritus, York University
While the United States continues to pull back from certain regional conflicts, reflected by the Biden administration’s decision to halt American backing for Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen and the expected withdrawal from Afghanistan, US troops continue to be stationed across the region. Meanwhile, Russia and China have significantly maintained and even expanded their regional activities. On one hand, the Kremlin has maintained its military presence in Syria, and on the other hand, China has signed an unprecedented 25-year strategic agreement with Iran.
As the global power structure continues to shift, it is essential to analyze the future of the US regional presence under the Biden administration, explore the emerging global rivalry with Russia and China, and at last, investigate the implications of such competition for peace and security in the Middle East.
Panelists:
– Dmitri Trenin: Director of Carnegie Moscow Center
– Joost R. Hiltermann: Director of MENA Programme, International Crisis Group
– Roxane Farmanfarmaian: Affiliated Lecturer in International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, University of Cambridge
– Andrew A. Michta: Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at Marshall Center
– Kelley Vlahos: Senior Advisor, Quincy Institute
The security architecture of the Middle East has undergone rapid transformations in an exceptionally short period. Notable developments include the United States gradual withdrawal from the region, rapprochement between Israel and some GCC states through the Abraham Accords and the rise of Chinese and Russian regional engagement.
With these new trends in the Middle East, it is timely to investigate the security implications of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy. In this respect, we will discuss the Biden team’s new approach vis-à-vis Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The panel will also discuss the role of other major powers, including China and Russia in shaping this new security environment in the region, and how the Biden administration will respond to these powers’ increasing regional presence.
Panelists:
– Sanam Vakil: Deputy Director of MENA Programme at Chatham House
– Denise Natali: Acting Director, Institute for National Strategic Studies & Director of the Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University
– Hassan Ahmadian: Professor of the Middle East and North Africa Studies, University of Tehran
– Abdulaziz Sagar: Chairman, Gulf Research Center
– Andrew Parasiliti: President, Al-Monitor
