In a multi-part featured series called ‘The Money War,’ The Washington Post takes a long hard look at US sanctions policy dating back to the Bill Clinton era and concludes that the sanctions regime is out of control and losing effectiveness.
In another entry in the series, the incredible dependency of the Syrian Government on a drug known as Captogon is laid out, interspersed with references to the severity of the US and international sanctions regime on Syria and how illicit drugs are now the most important source of revenue propping the Assad regime up.
The team involves 4 reporters and writers, several editors, and is based on “30 years of historical data scraped from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control by Enigma Technologies, a data and entity resolution company that specializes in sanctions screening and business intelligence,” according to The Post.
If read in their entirety, something becomes immediately clear – sanctions are a powerful and effective tool in the US arsenal. Or at least that’s what The Post’s reporters seem to bend over backwards to conclude. They do this in part by constantly giving US officials the benefit of the doubt.
Early on in the first piece, entitled How Four US Presidents Unleashed Economic War Across the World, reporters Jeff Stein and Federica Cocco follow up an introduction on some of the most high-profile failures of the sanctions regime, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, by stating that they are, in fact, effective.
“Sanctions – or even just the threat of them – can be an effective policy tool, a way to punish bad behavior or pressure an adversary without resorting to military force. Sanctions have allowed U.S. governments to take moral, economically meaningful stands against perpetrators of war crimes,” they write.
There’s something perhaps admirable, yet undoubtedly strange to state this as fact, before teaming up to write another 2,000 words disproving it, while in a similar display of bipolarity, returning section after section to interview people who find the practice simply one that has been misguided or abused, and not one which has an almost perfect track record of failure.
“It is the only thing between diplomacy and war and as such has become the most important foreign policy tool in the U.S. arsenal,” adds Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official, who followed the revolving door of Washington into a major think thank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Sanctions are an important tool that can help promote our national security, but they should only be used as part of a broader foreign policy strategy,” the Biden Administration’s Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.
“The abuse of this system is ridiculous, but it’s not Treasury or OFAC’s fault: They are good professionals,” said Caleb McCarry, who served as a senior staffer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during Bush Jr.
“We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral damage of war,” said Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser for the Obama administration who worked on Syria policy.
As one of the largest papers in the country, one would think The Post would challenge such statements, but The Money War doesn’t come anywhere near something like a conclusion.
What exactly is a sanction?
In the pre-modern era, what we call sanctions was often called a blockade or siege – the prevention of critical resources from arriving in a country by use of political or military force. But after the signing of the Breton-Woods Agreement and the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States discovered it had near-unilateral control over the world’s banking system, and following a “blunt embargo” on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990, which caused between 300,000 and 500,000 children to die from lack of food and medicine, the United States Treasury Department began to be inundated with requests for targeted sanctions on countries all over the world.
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) could block transactions and issue fines to firms all across the financial world if they attempted to work with sanctioned entities, allowing the US to break the backs of regimes that disobeyed Washington without a shot being fired.
But Stein and Cocco correctly identify the problem with sanctions – they don’t pressure adversaries into changing behavior, they never have – even if they spend an awful lot of ink batting around the issue.
North Korea has been sanctioned for over 5 decades, and was still sanctioned 18 years after obtaining a nuclear warhead. The UN sanctions were passed under Resolution 1718, and the follow-on resolution 1874 in 2009, which established a so-defined “Panel of Experts” to conduct credible, fact-based, independent investigations of Pyongyang’s weapons programs and sanctions evasion efforts, all in the name of preventing North Korea from becoming a nuclear power. They have been one for 18 years now, but if not for a Russian veto, this strange, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ situation would have continued into a nineteenth.
Iran has been sanctioned for 40 years, and it’s still ruled by a theocratic autocracy. As WaL reported in 2023, the “economic nuclear weapon” carefully put together to drop on Russia in the wake of her invasion of Ukraine, was more like a firecracker, and the Russian economy is stronger now in some ways than it was before the sanctions.
In Venezuela, crippling sanctions placed by Trump and his administration exacerbated what The Post calls “one of the worst peacetime economic collapses in modern history”. WaL reported at the time that economic analysis found that the first 10 months of sanctions led to 40,000 excess deaths from lack of food, medicine, and fuel.
Sanctions don’t work because all governments, as political philosophers define it, have a monopoly on the use of force and violence. If the power of the gun is consolidated, it becomes very unlikely for economic hardship to impact sanctioned individuals in governments. Furthermore, a “rally around the flag effect” occurs whereby sanctioned governments often receive greater support from civilian populations than before they were sanctioned because they view it as the hostile act of an enemy foreign power, especially if the sanctions are as a response to something the domestic government did – i.e. annex Crimea, in the case of this research piece from Columbia University.
WaL has also reported, and The Post’s series came to the same conclusion, that sanctions drive countries into interdependency – isolating them from Washington’s allies, but connecting them out of necessity to its enemies.
Despite this, one of The Post’s most shocking revelations is that the United States has sanctioned a third of the world’s nations, that 60% of all states classified by the World Bank as low-income countries are under some form of sanction, and that the US maintains more sanctions than the UN, EU, UK, and Switzerland combined.
Calling a spade a spade
In ‘The Money War,’ the reporters omit many key details that might help readers have context as to why sanctions, outside of one single case, always fail to bring about positive change. The one proof of concept, South Africa, in which sanctions were (albeit reluctantly) applied to force the country to end its apartheid regime, was a unique case.
South Africa was a state with which the US enjoyed good relations. The Reagen Administration evaded UN sanctions and increased trade with the apartheid regime, and there were no destabilizing military actions undertaken against South Africa. Eventually, the Senate and House passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, in which the country could actually use its often-flaunted position as leader of the free world to advocate to a friendly regime on behalf of freedom.
Ironically, Reagen opposed the CAAA of 1986, arguing that it constituted “economic warfare” against South Africa’s black majority. In other words, he was saying that economic sanctions impact the citizenry, not the government, the same argument used to counter today’s politicians in The Money War.
In the Syrian piece, entitled Sanctions Crushed the Syrian Elite so They Built A Zombie Economy Fueled by Drugs, Washington Post authors Souad Mekhennet and Joby Warrick write paradoxically that “while sanctions remain a vital tool for punishing criminal behavior by governments, the targets of sanctions inevitably find ways to blunt their impact, often with painful consequences for ordinary citizens”.
Again, this comes alongside several paragraphs explaining why they don’t work, and before several more that only hint at the unimaginable devastation and suffering the people of Syria have endured under the sanctions regime.
Additionally, The Post does not mention even once the very real involvement of the US in starting and sustaining the civil war, a fact so widely reported that it can be found on Wikipedia. Instead, all of the blame and the war crimes are laid at the feat of President Bashar al-Assad, who was defending his regime from dozens of Jihadist groups armed by the United States. Recently the Biden Administration continued Obama’s sanctions policy, announcing that they “opposed Syrian reconstruction”.
“The most profound point is that sanctions strengthen the bad actor relative to the rest of the population,” Ben Rhodes told The Post again for the Syrian piece. “The people who are most able to withstand this are the people with guns and power”.
Yet despite Rhodes’ profound point, and despite the findings of their colleagues, Mekhennet and Warrick, state towards the end of their piece that the CAESAR Syrian Civilian Protection Act, a raft of additional sanctions passed in 2020 after it became clear Assad was using drugs to finance his government, constituted a means of inflicting “well-deserved punishment on Syria’s leader,” before commenting that “the sanctions are widely regarded as a triumph”.
“The sanctions targeted the country’s largest remaining industrial sectors, including energy production and construction, and are explicitly intended to discourage international business agreements that could help Assad repair the country’s battered infrastructure,” they write.
How could such measures – targeting energy production and infrastructure – avoid affecting the civilian population? The two writers hear from a sanctions advocate, ironically on humanitarian grounds, and from a skeptic who reinforces Rhodes’ point of “the inevitable certainty that the elites of society will find ways to survive and even profit”.
The four reporters seem to have all the information in their hands to conclude what anyone would conclude – as the comment section bears witness – that sanctions never work and devastate civilian populations. While they seem determined to walk a suspiciously abstentive line, clues like their description of Assad’s “punishment” as “well-deserved” even while hearing from two experts who assure them he and his regime will not be the ones suffering, offers a clue as to the motivations of The Money War series.
Andrew Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show. Reprinted with permission from World at Large.
