Sanctions are judged on the wrong scoreboard

LONDON —

The standard critique of sanctions is empirically strong and analytically misleading. Decades of scholarship find that economic coercion seldom produces the concession it publicly demands: targeted governments adapt, reroute trade, absorb costs, and frequently consolidate domestic support against external pressure. Measured against their stated objective, sanctions regimes mostly fail.

The difficulty is that the stated objective is rarely the operative one.

Four jobs, one instrument

Sanctions are asked to do at least four different things, and they perform very differently at each.

Coercion — forcing a change of policy — is the advertised purpose and the least frequently achieved. It requires the target to value the sanctioned goods more than the sanctioned behaviour, and requires the sanctioning coalition to hold together longer than the target can endure. Both conditions are demanding; the second is usually the one that fails.

Constraint — degrading capability rather than changing intent — is a much lower bar and considerably more attainable. Export controls on specific components, restrictions on financing, and shipping designations do not require the target to agree to anything. They simply make certain activities slower and more expensive. Success here is measured in procurement delays and cost premiums, not in policy reversals.

Signalling — establishing a position, domestically and internationally — is achieved at the moment of announcement. This is the function critics most often dismiss as cynical, and it is genuinely the least defensible when it is the only function. But signalling also does real work: it creates the documented record that a line was drawn, which matters for coalition-building and for what a government can legitimately do next.

Deterrence by demonstration — showing third parties what non-compliance costs — is the hardest to measure, because its successes are invisible. A bank that quietly declines a transaction, a shipper that refuses a cargo, a supplier that walks away from a contract: none of these appear in any dataset.

Judging an instrument designed for the second and fourth jobs by its performance at the first produces a reliable verdict of failure.

Where enforcement actually happens

The consequential shift of the last decade is not in what gets designated but in who does the enforcing. Sanctions today are implemented overwhelmingly by private institutions — correspondent banks, insurers, classification societies, shipping registries, freight forwarders, cloud providers — acting on their own risk assessments.

This produces over-compliance, and over-compliance is the mechanism that gives sanctions much of their bite. A compliance department facing an ambiguous counterparty and a potentially enormous penalty does not seek a legal opinion; it declines the business. The chilling effect extends well beyond the designated entity to anything adjacent to it.

It also produces the most serious collateral problem in the field. The same risk-aversion that strangles a targeted procurement network also strangles humanitarian transfers, remittance corridors and medical imports that are formally exempt. Carve-outs written into a regulation do not reassure a compliance officer who will be judged on false negatives rather than false positives. This is a design failure that sanctioning governments have repeatedly acknowledged and only partially addressed.

The coalition is the variable

Almost everything that determines whether a sanctions regime constrains anything reduces to one question: how many significant economies are participating, and for how long.

A regime backed by a large share of global finance and advanced technology forces genuinely costly adaptation. A regime backed by a minority produces trade diversion — the same goods arriving through different intermediaries at a markup. The markup is a real cost, and it is not a trivial one, but it is a tax rather than a barrier.

This is why enforcement against third-country intermediaries has become the central operational fight, and why secondary sanctions — penalties on non-nationals for dealing with a target — are simultaneously the most effective and most resented tool available. They work by conscripting other states’ companies into another state’s foreign policy, which is precisely why they generate durable diplomatic backlash even among allies.

What to watch

For assessing any sanctions regime, four indicators carry more information than the designation count:

1. Price premiums paid by the target for restricted goods, which measure real friction rather than formal prohibition.
2. Intermediary geography — where the re-export hubs are, and whether they are under diplomatic pressure or being quietly tolerated.
3. Coalition cohesion, especially whether any large participant is seeking exemptions or carve-outs.
4. Humanitarian throughput, which indicates whether over-compliance has exceeded its intended scope.

The honest summary is that sanctions are a slow instrument of attrition that works at the margin, imposes real costs on populations that chose nothing, and almost never delivers the capitulation announced at the podium. Whether that trade is worth making is a political judgement. It should at least be made against the right scoreboard.

This is a sample analysis piece supplied with the site template. Replace or delete it before launch.