The Current - Do sanctions actually work?

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Sanctions have become the go-to tool in global politics — used to punish rogue states, and signal international condemnation. But are they effective? With sanctions piling up against Russia, Iran, and two Israeli cabinet ministers, we ask whether economic punishment actually shapes behavior — or just creates diplomatic noise.

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At the G7 summit last week, Canada imposed a new round of sanctions against Russia. Details from the Prime Minister Mark Carney as he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kananaskis, Alberta. Canada is announcing sanctions against a number of individuals in Russia against over 40 entities in Russia and beyond that are trying to contribute to the evasion of sanctions. The sanctioning of over 200 vessels in the shadow fleet that Russia is using again to try to evade these sanctions. Canada along with four of its allies, also imposed sanctions on two Israeli cabinet ministers for inciting settler violence in the West Bank earlier this month. And more sanctions were added against Iran as well.

In the last few years, the use of sanctions by Western countries has dramatically increased. But have they worked? Delaney Simon is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. Edward Fishman is a senior research scholar at Columbia University who has designed sanction policies within the US government. And Andrea Charon is a professor at the University of Manitoba and the director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies. Good morning to you all. Good morning.

Good morning. Great to you all. Good morning. Great to be here. I want to start with Iran because it's so in the news this week. It's been subject to years of sanctions by the US and other Western countries, including Canada, really in its aim to deter its nuclear program. Yet we saw what happened last weekend. The US has announced more sanctions targeting Iran. what happened last weekend. The US has announced more sanctions targeting Iran. That happened last Friday and then over the weekend of course bombed its nuclear sites. So

Edward, to you first, have sanctions worked when it comes to Iran? Edward C. Smith, Ph.D. No, they have not. And I think that's the tragedy of this whole situation. When I got into government, I joined in the early 2010s really because I was hoping that there would be a way to end Iran's nuclear program peacefully through the use of economic sanctions. That did work initially. We did get a diplomatic deal with Iran in 2013 to freeze their nuclear program, and then in 2015, Iran agreed to significantly roll back its program.

This was the JCPOA, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump didn't think that that deal was a good deal, and so he pulled out of it in 2018. Iran reconstituted its program. He thought that he could use sanctions to get an even better deal. And unfortunately, with Israel's strikes and then the US strikes over the last few days, that marks the decisive end of that period. We have not been able to get a better deal with Iran and as a result, we are now in a state of war.

Danielle Pletka Andrea, Russia has also been subject to long standing sanctions by the West with new ones announced by Canada at the G7. Will those have an impact and what should we take from that, that there have been so many sanctions on Russia and now more? Well, the problem with sanctions is that the underlying theory is that the more senders you have who are sanctioning in the same way, the fewer options there are for the targets to get around the sanctions. And because the UN Security Council is geopolitically blocked when it comes to sanctioning Russia, we have these coalitions of like-minded states who are trying to sanction.

But of course, every state has very different legislation. So we have limitations. And so because there are often gaps in the sanctioning, it means that there are always opportunities like the shadow fleets that Russia has to circumvent the sanctions. Delaney, I want to bring you in here. Data from the European Commission's sanctions tracker, it's called, shows that there's a major spike in the use of sanctions

over the past four years. Why is that? of sanctions over the past four years. Why is that? Absolutely. And the US has recorded a 1000% increase in sanctions use over the past 20 years. It's actually probably a little bit higher than that. Why? Sanctions are not very expensive to use. They're not as risky to use as military force, and they seem to be the go-to tool for policymakers in Washington, I suppose now in Ottawa and around the world. There's also an issue that sanctioning countries, they're not so able to understand what the costs are of sanctions.

It's very easy to deploy them, but the detailed considerations of their costs is not really done. Danielle Pletka Edward, there are many countries that have been subject to sanctions, and we're going to talk about some of them. One of the most recent is Canada with the UK, Australia, Norway, and New Zealand imposed sanctions against two Israeli cabinet ministers a couple of weeks ago for their incitement of violence, they said, against Palestinians in the West Bank. So what is usually the goal when imposing sanctions against individuals?

Yeah, so in that context, the goal is really to enforce a norm, to say that the behavior of these individuals is so unacceptable that they should not have access to our market in any way. This would be sort of in the category of symbolic sanctions or sanctions that really aim to stigmatize behavior. What I would say is that while there has been an increase in sanctions used for this purpose, there's also downsides because when you start using sanctions to stigmatize any behavior you don't like, you very quickly have a rapid proliferation of sanctions against people in all different countries around the world.

And there are so many different people who are committing various crimes and human rights abuses that there's a question of when do you stop? My own view is that the best use of sanctions are when they're vital national security interests at stake and we're actually willing to go after serious economic targets. So when you look at the sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine, it wasn't the sanctions against Putin himself or against Russian oligarchs that were impactful. It was sanctions against the central bank of Russia and big banks on Russia. You know, the price cap on Russian oil.

Those are the sanctions that are more meaningful than the ones on individuals. What do those sanctions I just mentioned, Edward, mean for the individuals, the ministers, just so our listeners can understand what they are corralling? Yeah, so individual sanctions usually include two things. One would be some level of asset freeze. So if the individual has any assets in Canada or the UK or the EU, those assets would be frozen. And then oftentimes they're accompanied by travel bans, which that they you know cannot get a visa to visit those countries and so the reason I say that they're symbolic is

you know most of the time these individuals don't have significant financial interests in the countries that are sanctioning them. The travel bans of course can be frustrating and that you know a lot of people who are sanctioned are annoyed by them, but they're not so catastrophic as to change their behavior. Andrea, how unique is it for these types of sanctions for a country like Canada to sanction political leaders in government of an ally like Israel? Traditionally, you didn't sanction those who were the head of a state or high up in government because often they're the ones with whom you want to have diplomatic conversations and it's difficult to negotiate with somebody whom you've sanctioned.

But I just wanted to add in the case of Canada, because we don't have sort of the extra territorial bite that the US has, Canada is loath to sanction alone. And so this is why you see Canada will often find like minded partners to sanction with the EU, the UK, the U. S. Although that's happening less and less to try and show that Canada is not only a good ally. We are like-minded, but also to send a communication tool about the unacceptability of the action that's happening, but also that we are with a coalition in this thinking. Delaney, is there any risk of sanctions being used as a badge of honor? People boasting about, well, such and such country sanctioned me and that means I'm virtuous or I'm in the right or I'm on

the right side of history, and really to make more of the sanction in a positive way. Is that some of the problem? Yeah, absolutely. There's a sanctions expert who refers to this as the Joseph Kony problem. This is the famous Central African warlord who famously was delighted when the, he said he was delighted when he was sanctioned because it showed, you know, I am strong and powerful enough for the great powerful United States to put me on a list. This happens all the time, especially with enemies of sanctioning countries where they say, okay, I'm important because I'm on the list.

But there's also a risk of backfiring. In the Israeli cases, there's been a lot of concern. It will give them license to tighten the screws on their control of Palestinians in the West Bank. And indeed, immediately after being listed, Minister Smotrich made moves to paralyze the West Bank economy. Edward, the US hasn't joined Canada and the other countries in imposing more sanctions against Russia. I believe Trump has not imposed any more since his inauguration or Israel.

So how much impact can sanctions have if the US isn't part of that multinational group? Unfortunately very little and it's not because Canada and the EU and Japan don't have economic weight. They do. Their economies combined are actually larger than the US economy. The problem is that the track record of enforcement in any country outside of the US is effectively zero. You know in the past few decades, the reason that U.S. sanctions have become so impactful is because banks who have violated sanctions have been fined multiple billions of dollars for those violations. And so, over the course of the 2010s, and this is a story I tell in my book, Choke Points, that came out

recently, banks started viewing sanctions violations as existential to their operations. And so they built massive compliance divisions to monitor US sanctions lists and to make sure they're complying with them. And so I think in the sanctions world, the US has kind of served as almost like the world sanctions police. I think if Canada and the EU were to start doing their own sanctions enforcement in an aggressive manner, I think they could be significant powers when it comes to economic statecraft, but that's going to

take time in a track record of enforcement that they simply don't have. Can I just roll back something you just said to make sure I heard it properly? Are you suggesting that sanctions without the US in all cases have been unsuccessful? Yes. I mean there's not really a great example in modern history where there's really successful sanctions that the US isn't backstopping. Is drinking raw milk safe like RFK Jr. suggests? Can you reduce a glucose spike if you eat your food in quote unquote the right order? I'm registered dietitian, Abbey Sharp. I

host a nutrition myth busting podcast called Bite Back with Abby Sharp and those are just some of the questions I tackle with qualified experts on my show. On Bite Back, my goal is to help listeners create a pleasurable relationship with food, their body and themselves, which in my opinion is the fundamental secret to good health. Listen to Bite Back wherever you get your podcasts. So just to follow that along for a moment, then what is the impact or the message from the Donald Trump administration when there have been no more sanctions on Russia since his inauguration? Well the pressure on Russia has gone down substantially in the last several

months. I think one thing that's important to understand is that sanctions are a two-player game, right? There's a coalition that imposes sanctions or a country that imposes sanctions, and then there's a country who receives the sanctions. The receiving country, in this case Russia, is adapting every single day. They're finding workarounds

to the measures that are in place. And so if the sanctions are just plateauing, if they haven't been technically removed and they haven't been increased, the impact of the sanctions is still decreasing over time because Russia is adapting while the US is not imposing any new sanctions. And so the consequence of Trump not doing anything new on sanctions since January, and I'll remark that that is highly unusual, right? During the three years since the invasion started up until Trump's inauguration, the US did new sanctions almost every single week. But the consequence of Trump's inaction is

that the pressure on Russia has gone down quite a bit in the last several months. Andrea, countries like Iran, Syria and Cuba are examples of nations that have had to contend with widespread and long-term sanctions. What kind of negative consequences have those had on the general population of those countries? Well, you raise a really good point, and this is something that Canada certainly championed when it was on the UN Security Council in the 2000s, and that's the

unintended consequences of sanctions against civilians, innocent civilians, and especially women and girls. Canada has been extremely concerned about making sure that we have smart sanctions that we have the right to protect our citizens and our citizens, and that's what we and especially women and girls, Canada has been extremely concerned

about making sure that we have smart sanctions, that they target the elites who are making the decisions and don't have spillover effects on citizens. And so Canada is often issuing permits to allow certain activities to happen and exceptions. So for example humanitarian aid isn't caught up in the sanctions regimes. Delaney, the EU, the UK and US have taken steps to lift sanctions against Syria in

recent months. Canada has also eased sanctions. It's not simple, it's a complicated business. How challenging is it to remove them after they've been in place for a long time? It's really difficult and further to Andrea's point, I mean, it's true that most sanctions are targeted in this way and there's this good practice now that most policymakers consider to make sure that sanctions are as humane as possible. Syria has been an outlier. Syria's sanctions tightened and tightened from 1979 when they were first imposed by the US and then over the decades and much more after the 2011 atrocities began during the time of Bashar al-Assad. And up until December, when Assad was deposed, sanctions had become de facto a chokehold on the entire Syrian economy.

It became this detailed, complicated, very confusing web of sanctions on the country that made it very difficult for humanitarian actors to get aid to people who were suffering, made it very difficult for the economy to move ahead, made it almost impossible for Syriac to connect with the rest of the world. Now the countries, the United States, Europe, Canada, and others are in the process of unwinding their sanctions now that Assad has been deposed. But it's so difficult. In the United States, the effort to do that requires dozens of different steps in the legislative branch, in the executive branch,

White House, Treasury, State Department. So just deconstructing this vastly complicated web is enormously difficult. Edward, are there other foreign policy tools besides sanctions that nations can use to hopefully get the same or better results? Edward P. Reilly Military force, perhaps. I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, tongue in cheek. I think that sanctions are a coercive tool of statecraft, right? You're using them to try to force another country to do something that they wouldn't otherwise want to do of their own volition, right? And so they're not a friendly tool. They're not something that you're

doing because, you know, you want to be nice to someone. You're doing it because you're ostensibly, there's a vital national security interest at stake and you're trying to get something you want without going to war. That's what our policy was with respect to Iran for two decades. It was using economic pressure to try to support the ending of Iran's nuclear program through diplomacy. I do think that for all the criticism sanctions take, so long as we have geopolitical conflicts, so long as there are problems in the world, there are going to be states who are trying to use coercive tools of statecraft. And if economic warfare doesn't work, if sanctions don't work,

oftentimes the alternative is a military force. And so I think it's incumbent on our governments in Canada and the US and Europe to make sanctions as impactful as possible, because if they don't work, we may find ourselves fighting more wars with guns instead of with our pocketbooks. Edward I just want to ask you about that because one of the questions I had about Russia is you know it they've been eased out over time there were a flurry of course after Russia invaded Ukraine but then there were others that could have been done, they weren't. So is it better to go in big at the beginning? Is that more effective than incrementally adding? Yes, we should have gone much bigger on Russia much sooner. So I think there are two problems

we had with the Russia sanctions. One was in the lead up to Putin's decision in February 2022 for the large scale invasion, we tried to use the threat of sanctions to deter Putin, to change his mind about the wisdom of invading. The problem was, we weren't clear enough about how far we were willing to go and Putin actually underestimated the threat of sanctions. And that's why you see Russia now has $300 billion worth of their central bank reserves frozen in Western bank accounts. If Putin had thought we were going to go that far, he would have diversified sooner.

I think the second problem was after the invasion started, we did trickle out the sanctions too incrementally. We didn't get to oil sanctions, the price cap, until December of 2022, about 10 months after the invasion started. And that allowed Putin to continue making money hand over fist selling oil around the world. I think in retrospect, we would have been much better off with more aggressive sanctions sooner against Russia, not because it necessarily would have ended the war, but because it would have weakened Russia much sooner in the conflict as Ukraine was getting stronger. And so perhaps Putin would have had a greater incentive to end the war.

Delaney, you talked about sanctions creep in a way. Are there examples where sanctions are brought in for one reason and then years later they stay in effect even if the purpose has changed? Yeah, I'm afraid it's too common of a problem and Cuba is a classic example. I mean, the Cuban embargo has been in place for more than 50 years and it remains in place. And there's been no regime change in Cuba that was the intention of sanctions. There are also some other smaller problems that we see throughout the world. Colombia is an interesting example where the US sanctioned the FARC, which is a rebel group operating in Colombia for many years, but then it took the United

States a very long time to withdraw sanctions on the FARC after the FARC signed a peace deal with the Colombian government. So you see a lot of cases where sanctions are still in place even though their purposes have been met or they're still in place even though it's abundantly clear that they'll never achieve their objectives. Andrea, I want to ask you, Edward talked a little bit about the way we could use sanctions in a more effective way. What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way?

What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? What are the best ways to use sanctions in a more effective way? the Office of Foreign Asset Control like the United States has. So we don't have any one department that's responsible for administering and enforcing the economic sanctions. And so Global Affairs and the Minister of Global Affairs or Foreign Affairs is responsible for sort of putting together a list and proposing the measures, but then it's up to the Customs Border Agency and the RCMP to do the

enforcing. And it's getting very, very complicated to sort of navigate all the different regulations. AMT – Really fascinating discussion, all three of you. I have one final question to all of you really. And I do wonder with the rapid rise, the escalation of the use of sanctions for many reasons, is there a gap in people's understanding? The general public is seeing, okay, this week more sanctions, next week more sanctions. Do you think that in the general voting public in our countries that people do value sanctions still as a way of punishing or trying to restrict countries. Edward, start with you.

I think there is a significant deficit in the public, not just in the United States and Canada, but really around the world about what sanctions are and how they work. Look, we are living in an age of economic warfare. Sanctions, tariffs, export controls are being used more and more and more over time, and that trend is going to continue. As Delaney said, there's been a 1000% increase in the use of sanctions by the U.S. in the last 25 years. And so it's incumbent upon us as citizens of democracies, of voting publics, whose leaders

are using these tools to try to advance the most vital national security interests that we have to understand how national security interests that we have to understand how we work so that we can weigh in effectively and if called upon to actually work in this area to serve in government to actually craft policies effectively. Delaney, what's your response? It's an important question and it's not the public's fault

because sanctions are very complicated. They're rolled out in a very complicated way. And I can't tell you the amount of time I spend with experts, you know, at the top of their careers who are working on foreign policy. And they say to me, I just do not understand the sanctions on Syria, on Russia, on you name it. And so absolutely, it's important for all of us as citizens to understand what sanctions are and how economic warfare is shaping our world. But it's important for all of us as citizens to understand what sanctions are and how economic warfare is shaping our world. But it's incumbent upon policymakers to be very clear about what is the goal that sanctions

are trying to achieve? What can be done for the sanctions to be lifted? And how can the sanctions be adjusted if they're not achieving their impact? And Andrea, last word to you. The gap, sure, there are sanctions, but it's also do the sanctions work and do the public in Canada, for example, think they work when they just get increased month over month, year over year?

Yeah. Well, I think Canada has four issues that it needs to address. One is that we don't have a culture of sanctions training. If you take any of the international sanctions certification courses, Canada barely features. The next is communication. If you Google current sanctions imposed by Canada on the Global Affairs website, it was last modified in 2024. So the government of Canada struggles to keep its own communications up with the speed and scope of the sanctions. But finally, Canada doesn't track its sanctions.

There's no requirement for the government of Canada to yearly say these are the number of people and entities we've sanctioned, this is how much money we've seized, here are some of the gaps and challenges. If we don't have metrics for whom we're sanctioning, are they effective, how many permits are issued, how many certificates for UN sanctions, it is very difficult to make any changes when we just don't have the baseline information. Or to convince the public they're working. Exactly.

All right. Thank you very much. Really interesting discussion. Thanks again for your input. Thank you so much. Delaney Simon is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. Andrea Charon is the director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba. And Edward Fishman is a senior research scholar at Columbia University, also the author of Choke Points, American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.