US Sanctions Becoming More Symbolic Than Useful, Former Official Says
A former top U.S. national security official argued for a more cautious approach to U.S. sanctions policy, saying the administration should seriously assess whether sanctions will work before making them a default foreign policy tool. Although “sanctions can work” when they impose consequential political or economic costs, many U.S. sanctions today don’t have as strong of a purpose, Gregory Treverton, chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, said in an Aug. 15 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. When the U.S. “targets individual Russians or Chinese or Iranians, it is almost always a symbolic gesture, like indicting foreigners who will never be extradited,” Treverton said. “Symbols matter but concrete results are better.”
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Treverton specifically said U.S. sanctions against Iran -- including President Donald Trump’s maximum pressure campaign -- have largely failed. Those measures “have produced neither regime change nor much visible restraint by Iran when it comes to its other offenses, including its missile program or interventions in the region,” said Treverton, an international relations professor at the University of Southern California. “The sanctions have given the regime a handy scapegoat for its economic failings.”
He compared the U.S. sanctions policy to “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” and urged the U.S. to employ a different tactic regarding Cuba. The Biden administration has already imposed a series of sanctions against Cuban government agencies and officials for its recent suppression of pro-democracy protests (see 2108130041 and 2107300063), and said it plans to issue more. “As the U.S. imposes new sanctions on Cuba,” Treverton said, “we need to move beyond what we hope they will accomplish and ask: What do we expect to gain from them?”