Politics & power
How economic sanctions really work, and why they often fail
12 min
Sanctions are a favorite tool of statecraft, but their track record is mixed. Explore the mechanics of financial and trade pressure, when they change behavior, and why targeted regimes so often endure them.
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Show notes
Unilateral United States sanctions succeed in changing behavior only thirteen percent of the time.
Target nations use shadow fleets of aging tankers and ship-to-ship transfers to bypass global price caps.
Sanctions cost the United States up to nineteen billion dollars in lost annual exports and two hundred thousand jobs.
Success requires a massive power imbalance where the sanctioning country is eighty-seven times larger than the target.
Black Knight nations neutralize isolation by capturing market share abandoned by Western companies during trade restrictions.
Aggressive economic warfare risks eroding the dollar's reserve status by forcing the creation of alternative payment networks.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Mechanics of Economic Pressure3 min
- 3The Success Rate Problem2 min
- 4The Black Knight and the Shadow Fleet3 min
- 5The Hidden Costs of Economic Warfare2 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- The Economics of Sanctions: From Theory into Practice
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- A brief history of US sanctions on Iran : Planet Money : NPR
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- The economics of sanctions: From theory into practice | Brookings
- Oil Sanctions Are the Wrong Tool When Dealing With Iran, Russia, China
- Sanctions Don’t Work — So Why Do We Keep Using Them? - Novarapress
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- Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd ed., Preview Chapter 6
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- WORKING
- CGPA_WP_Title
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- America’s New Way of Economic War | Foreign Affairs
- The Dynamics of Evasion: The Price Cap on Russian Oil Exports and the Amassing of the Shadow Fleet
- Charting the Uncharted: The (Un)Intended Consequences of Oil Sanctions and Dark Shipping
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