Washington is sanctioning 12,000 entities. It’s backfiring.
Last week, the U.S. military released a video
of a Chinese jet fighter flying dangerously close to a U.S. Air Force
RC-135 surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea. On Saturday, a
Chinese warship maneuvered perilously close to a U.S. destroyer
in the Taiwan Strait. Imagine the crisis that would have resulted if
either incident had resulted in a collision. These near misses
demonstrate why it is so important to establish lines of communication
between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chinese Ministry of
National Defense to prevent a dangerous escalation.
Yet Beijing angrily rebuffed
a request from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet his Chinese
counterpart, Li Shangfu, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore this past weekend.The two men shook hands
but did not have a substantive discussion. The Biden administration is
upset with Beijing for refusing to talk, but it has no one but itself to
blame.
In 2018, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on Li, then in charge of weapons procurement, for buying combat aircraft and missile-defense systems from Russia. President Biden could have dropped that designation, but he hasn’t, even though the Financial Times reports
that “China had told the U.S. there was little chance of a meeting as
long as Washington maintained sanctions on Li.” The sanctions clearly
haven’t worked — China-Russia military ties remain close — yet Biden refuses to relax them, presumably for fear of looking insufficiently tough on China.
This
is only the latest example of how Washington’s addiction to sanctions
has gotten out of control — and is hurting the United States. The
Treasury Department estimated
in late 2021 that it had sanctions on 9,421 organizations and
individuals, a roughly 900 percent increase over the past 20 years. In
2022, the Treasury Department added 2,549 new designations while delisting only 225. That means nearly 12,000 entities were under U.S. sanctions as of the beginning of this year.
Most of the recent designations relate to Russia, but U.S. sanctions cover countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Every week seems to bring a fresh slew of designations, with news releases
announcing “Treasury Sanctions Military-Affiliated Companies Fueling
Both Sides of the Conflict in Sudan,” “Treasury Sanctions Syrian
Financial Facilitators Under the Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act,”
“Treasury Sanctions China- and Mexico-Based Enablers of Counterfeit,
Fentanyl-Laced Pill Production,” and the like.
And
looking only at Treasury Department designations substantially
understates the pervasiveness of sanctions. The U.S. government now
increasingly uses export controls, tariffs and foreign investment
reviews as a de facto form of commercial sanctions. The Commerce
Department, for example, recently imposed tighter controls on exports of
advanced microchips to China — to Beijing’s great annoyance.
This move might be justified by the need to limit China’s military
threat, but the backlash it has provoked in China is heightened by all
of the other sanctions and tariffs Washington has imposed on China in
recent years.
Nobody
can deny that the targets of U.S. sanctions are deserving of censure,
but it’s not clear what, if anything, all these sanctions are achieving.
A study
by the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that
unilateral U.S. sanctions between 1970 and 1997 had achieved their
objectives in only 13 percent of cases while costing the U.S. economy
$15 billion to $19 billion annually. In the years since, the cost of
sanctions has only grown as their use has expanded, but they are not
getting any more successful. In many instances — as in the case of
China’s defense minister — they are downright counterproductive.
“Sanctions
can be a useful tool of economic statecraft, but the problem is that
when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so sanctions
become the tool of choice when few good options exist to combat foreign
aggression,” Jason Bordoff,
a former Treasury Department and White House official who is now the
director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told
me. “The problem is that overusing sanctions can backfire, imposing
economic pain on ourselves or, over time, encouraging trading partners
to seek other allies and alternatives to the U.S. banking system and
dollar, which risks undermining America’s geopolitical and economic
leverage.”
History
is full of examples of U.S. sanctions that proved woefully ineffective.
The U.S. government began imposing sanctions on Cuba in 1960 and
expanded those to a full trade embargo in 1962. Declassified documents
show that the intent was “to bring about hunger, desperation, and the
overthrow of [the Castro] government.” Yet more than half a century
later, Cuba remains a Communist dictatorship.
The U.S. sanctions on North Korea
are even older: They date to the start of the Korean War in 1950.
Sanctions were greatly expanded following North Korea’s first nuclear
test in 2006. Yet the Kim dynasty remains in control of North Korea, and
it has a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles.
More
recent sanctions have failed to foster regime change — or even
significant changes in regime behavior — in Myanmar (also known as
Burma), Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen and other countries.
International sanctions did persuade Iran to conclude an agreement in
2015 restricting its nuclear weapons program, but then-President Donald
Trump’s unilateral decision to exit the deal in 2018 and launch a
“maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Iran backfired badly. Nuclear
expert David Albright warns that Iran could produce enough nuclear material for seven bombs in the next six months.
The
sanctions on Russia, massively (and rightly) expanded last year
following the invasion of Ukraine, have inflicted damage but not as much
as hoped: The Russian economy contracted by 3 percent
last year, but the International Monetary Fund expects a slight
recovery this year. More important, sanctions have not deterred Russian
President Vladimir Putin from continuing his evil war of aggression. The
sanctions might eventually constrain Russia’s war-making ability, but
that will take a long time. For now, Putin is still able to procure Western microchips for his weapons.
The
leaders of rogue nations are usually insulated from the impact of U.S.
sanctions while ordinary people, who have no say over government policy,
are hurt the most. It is difficult to disaggregate the impact of
sanctions from the ruinous economic policies pursued by many regimes,
but there is little doubt that U.S. sanctions have contributed to the
immiseration of Cubans, Iranians, North Koreans, Syrians, Venezuelans
and others who have the misfortune to live under anti-American
dictatorships.
That’s
not an argument for forgoing sanctions altogether — sometimes there is
no better alternative — but Washington should be much more cautious and
strategic in their application.
In her 2022 book “Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests,”
Agathe Demarais of the Economist Intelligence Unit concluded that
effective sanctions are typically temporary (“If penalties have not
yielded results within two years, the target country usually has no
intention of giving in”); aim to achieve a narrow goal (i.e., freeing a
prisoner rather than overthrowing a regime); target a country that has a
substantial trade relationship with the United States; and have the
support of the international community.
Unfortunately,
most U.S. sanctions have vague and ambitious goals, last a long time
and don’t have much international backing. Accordingly, Demarais writes,
“Many U.S. sanctions programs are doomed to fail.”
The
Biden administration needs to rethink U.S. sanctions policy after
decades of exponential growth. It can make a start toward a more
rational and effective approach by lifting the sanctions on China’s
defense minister to enable badly needed communications with the world’s largest military.
Max
Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale
and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.” Twitter