Opinion | The Risks of One of the Most Severe Tools in America’s Foreign Policy Arsenal

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 Russia’s invasion of 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 invasion of Ukraine.

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 Russian invasion of 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.