From export and import controls to asset freezes and travel restrictions, there are various methods for imposing sanctions. But how effective are they?
In this episode, we will discuss sanctions, how they work, and pose the perhaps controversial question: do they truly work?
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about sanctions, and asking the perhaps controversial question: do they even work?
[00:00:31] OK then, Do Sanctions Work?
[00:00:36] A few weeks ago I had a fascinating conversation with a gentleman called Siavash.
[00:00:42] He told me a moving story about his wife, who had been accepted onto a PhD programme at a prestigious university in Australia.
[00:00:52] The couple were getting excited about the move, and Siavash’s wife was particularly hopeful about possible doors that this degree would open for her, opportunities that would not be available if she stayed in her home country.
[00:01:08] But shortly before she was to be admitted, she received an email from the university.
[00:01:16] It read:
[00:01:18] Dear Mrs X,
[00:01:20] I refer to your application for Higher Degree by Research candidature and scholarship at University Y.
[00:01:28] The University has taken an assessment of your application and determined that acceptance of the application may breach international sanctions and controls imposed by the Australian Government. It is therefore necessary for the University to reject your application, to ensure the University remains in conformity with Australian Law.
[00:01:53] Understandably, Siavash and his wife were devastated. They were good, upstanding citizens, and his wife had all of the qualifications necessary to start this PhD programme.
[00:02:07] The problem was…she was from Iran.
[00:02:11] And Iran, as you may know, has been under some form of sanctions on and off since November 1979 after the hostage crisis, when a bunch of Americans were held hostage by Iranian militants.
[00:02:26] The most recent batch of sanctions are intended to stop Iran from developing its nuclear weapons capability, and have essentially cut Iran off from the global economy.
[00:02:39] And in the case of Siavash and his wife, they have literally stopped the couple from being able to leave and complete a PhD programme in Australia.
[00:02:49] Now, the Australian sanctions against Iran appear to be only against services or products that are related to technology that could be used in ballistic or nuclear weapons, an area which Siavash told me his wife was not going to be involved in, and indeed Siavash’s wife responded to the university pointing out as much.
[00:03:11] But it was to no avail; the Australian university, perhaps understandably, did not even want to run the risk that it could be seen as breaking sanctions.
[00:03:23] And the PhD offer was rescinded, it was taken back.
[00:03:28] Now, you might hear this story and think “poor Siavash and his wife, it’s so unfair that honest citizens get caught up in these political disputes”, or you might hear it and think “good, that's exactly the way that sanctions should work”.
[00:03:45] Instead of trying to take a side, we are instead going to explore how effective sanctions are at achieving their stated aim. After all, every sanction has a goal, it has something it is aiming at, so we’ll explore how effective they are at doing this.
[00:04:05] It might surprise you that there is less agreement on the subject than you might think.
[00:04:12] But first, let’s start with a reminder of what sanctions actually are, and how they work.
[00:04:20] A sanction is a sort of catch-all term that refers to a wide variety of economic measures used by one country or a multilateral organisation to force another country to do something, from stopping it getting access to technology or military equipment to damaging its economy to trying to bring about a political change.
[00:04:44] They can be embargoes, where all trade with a country is banned, throttling economic growth and the prosperity of that country’s citizens, and stirring up discontent for the country’s political leaders.
[00:04:58] There can be export or import controls, where certain products cannot be exported or imported. These are typically used to stop important strategic products entering or leaving a country, typically related to technology or military objectives.
[00:05:17] There can be financial controls, where all dealings with banks from a country are banned. Like the first type of sanction, a trade embargo, the objective is to weaken a country’s economy.
[00:05:31] There can be asset freezes, where all of the assets belonging to or linked to a particular person are frozen. These are typically used to target powerful people close to the country’s political elite.
[00:05:45] And there can be travel restrictions, where individuals and their family members are banned from travelling to a particular country or region. Again, the objective of this is similar to asset freezes; to inconvenience those who wield the power in a particular country, disrupting their international mobility and influence.
[00:06:09] Sanctions can be very limited in scope, with only certain individuals within a country targeted, or an entire country can essentially be cut off from trading with another, as is the case with Iran and the US.
[00:06:25] Now, as to the history of sanctions, it is a lot longer than you might think.
[00:06:33] The first record of economic sanctions goes all the way back to Ancient Greece in the year 432 BC, just before the Peloponnesian War. This was something called the Megarian Decree, and was a form of economic blockade by the Athenian Empire against the city of Megara.
[00:06:55] The idea was to cut off the city of Megara from trading with its neighbours. It worked, at least from an economic point of view; the city of Megara was devastated.
[00:07:07] But Magara appealed to its neighbour and ally, Sparta, and this is believed by some to be a key factor in starting the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens, the sanctioning power, was defeated.
[00:07:23] So, as you can see, right from the very first sanction, they can have unintended consequences, and the extent to which they achieve their goal is…debated.
[00:07:36] Skipping forward a few thousand years, Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the first “modern” leaders to implement sanctions. In 1806 he implemented a trade embargo against the UK, in effect creating a blockade, forbidding the import of British goods into European countries allied with or dependent upon France.
[00:08:01] In Napoleon’s case, it did not achieve its goal. British goods continued to be smuggled into Europe, the fact that they were harder to come by hurt France’s European allies, many of whom had come to be dependent on British goods, and it caused a strain on France’s relations with its European allies.
[00:08:21] In short, it didn’t work, and was a not insignificant factor in Napoleon’s downfall.
[00:08:28] But ever since this so-called “Continental Blockade”, sanctions have been increasingly used as a political tool to weaken a country's economy and bring about a regime or policy change.
[00:08:44] The Allies sanctioned Germany in 1914, North Korea has been under UN sanctions since 2006, Russia has been sanctioned in a myriad of different ways since 2014, and then more seriously since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and perhaps most famously, Cuba has been under severe economic sanctions by the United States since 1962.
[00:09:12] If you go on holiday to Cuba and you fly back to Miami with a Cuban cigar or a bottle of Cuban rum in your pocket, or even a packet of chewing gum bought in Cuba, you are breaking American sanctions and you could theoretically end up in jail.
[00:09:30] So, given that they are increasingly used as a political and diplomatic tool, have sanctions become more effective, or are they still just as ineffective, but they are chosen for other reasons?
[00:09:46] According to the French author, Agathe Demarais, sanctions have not got any more effective.
[00:09:54] Demarais is the author of a book on the efficacy of economic sanctions, and in it she looks at all U.S. sanctions since 1970 and shows that the countries targeted by sanctions only changed their behaviour 13% of the time.
[00:10:12] Put another way, 87% of the time sanctions did not have their intended effect.
[00:10:19] Sanctions are chosen by politicians, according to Demarais, because they are a relatively easy, cheap and painless way to take action against a rogue state.
[00:10:32] Firstly, they are easy. A government can draft a piece of legislation and announce it the next morning. A government doesn’t need to actually do much to administer the sanctions; the private sector does this for it by simply cutting off trade or financial links with a country.
[00:10:52] Secondly, sanctions are cheap. Sure, they might have unintended economic costs down the road, but their immediate cost is typically only the lost revenue of not doing business with that country, and that is significantly cheaper than any kind of military intervention.
[00:11:13] Thirdly, and on a related note, sanctions are seen as a sensible halfway house, a midway between doing nothing and a full-scale military invasion of a country. If one country, country A, is seen to be taking an action that is not in the best interests of another country, country B. Let’s say that country A is developing nuclear weapons, violating human rights laws or invading a sovereign nation, what options does country B have to try to force it to change its behaviour?
[00:11:48] Doing nothing shows weakness, both domestically and internationally, and military action is politically dangerous, expensive, and will necessarily result in a direct loss of countless lives. Sanctions are a quick and easy way of showing that you are doing something. Country B can quickly and easily say “we are imposing sanctions on Country A” and it shows that an effort is being made, even if the impact of that effort is unknown.
[00:12:23] Sometimes they work exactly as expected. But according to Agathe Demarais, “sometimes” means 13% of the time, although I should add that other scholars have suggested that the success rate is as high as 34% and others as low as 4%.
[00:12:42] We’ll get into why there is so much disagreement on the topic in a minute, but first let’s take a look at a few examples, to see how this bears out in real life.
[00:12:55] With the example of US sanctions against Cuba, it's hard to make the argument that sanctions have been a success.
[00:13:02] The original objective was for regime change, which didn’t happen, and then in 1992 the objective was updated to “force Cuba towards democratisation and greater respect for human rights."
[00:13:15] Now, some form of sanctions have been in place for over 60 years.
[00:13:21] There has been no great political change, the sanctions have brought Cuba closer to countries like the USSR and Venezuela, and they have made the US a scapegoat for the poor economic outlook for Cuba.
[00:13:35] Now, in the interest of balance, there are several prominent cases where economic sanctions have had their stated effect, or at least sanctions have been put in place, and the objective of the sanctions has been reached.
[00:13:50] One clear case is South Africa.
[00:13:53] South Africans had lived under an apartheid regime since 1948, a system of institutionalised racism in which the minority white population was given more rights and privileges than the majority black population.
[00:14:09] Ever since the 1960s, various countries, from Brazil to Britain, imposed some specific trade sanctions on South Africa, and this intensified moving into the 1970s, ending with a full United Nations embargo on weapons sales to South Africa in 1977, an oil embargo 10 years later, and then multiple countries proposing full divestment from the country in the 1980s, essentially withdrawing all investments and money from the racist regime.
[00:14:42] The idea was to cripple the South African economy, and bring about regime change. But even as this was happening, not all voices outside South Africa agreed with the approach.
[00:14:55] Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, famously described sanctions as "the way of poverty, starvation and destroying the hopes of the very people you wish to help."
[00:15:07] And John Major, who would go on to be Prime Minister but was Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary at the time, criticised sanctions saying that they would "feed white consciences outside South Africa, not black bellies within it".
[00:15:22] In other words, sanctions might make people outside South Africa feel like they were doing a good thing by refusing to trade with a racist regime, but the people who were really being punished were black South Africans, who were suffering in poverty under a weak economy.
[00:15:41] In any case, sanctions worked, or at least in 1994, 5 years after the UN oil embargo, the South African apartheid regime finally ended, and Nelson Mandela was elected in the country’s first multi-racial election.
[00:15:58] Mandela certainly thought that sanctions helped end apartheid, replying “Oh, there is no doubt” when he was asked about their efficacy.
[00:16:07] But here we move into some interesting discussion about how effective they actually are. Yes, apartheid ended, but would it have ended without economic sanctions?
[00:16:21] Black South Africans had to live through the serious economic hardship and suffering caused by the sanctions for decades. Was it worth it, as in, was this suffering a necessary step to force regime change and end apartheid, or was it all for nothing?
[00:16:39] And bringing us closer to the present day, Russia has overtaken Iran as the most sanctioned country in the world.
[00:16:48] If you are in Russia, as you will know, you cannot use your Russian bank card to buy many international products. VISA and Mastercard have blocked Russian banks, Russia is cut off from the SWIFT network, and household names from McDonald’s to Starbucks have exited the country.
[00:17:08] Multiple oligarchs have had personal sanctions placed against them, their yachts impounded and mansions from London to New York seized, or at least frozen.
[00:17:20] This all started in late February and March of 2022, so…has it worked?
[00:17:27] Now, there are as many articles saying “Russian sanctions are working” as there are “Russian sanctions aren’t working”, so commentators are divided on the issue.
[00:17:39] And the major problem with assessing the efficacy of the sanctions against Russia is that there was no clear and easily measurable goal to them, they had no clear objective, other than “show Russia that its invasion was not acceptable to the international community and disrupt its ability to continue to wage war”.
[00:18:01] Certainly, those who predicted that Russia would fall into an immediate financial collapse and there would be domestic pressure for regime change have been proved incorrect.
[00:18:13] This was almost two years ago, the war is ongoing, and as of the time of recording at least, Putin is still in charge with no sign of that changing in the near future.
[00:18:25] Western goods are still getting into Russia, typically being “imported” to neighbouring countries and then taken across the border.
[00:18:34] What’s more, sanctions against Russia are not global by any means; Russia might be sanctioned by much of the West, including the EU and the US, but this has strengthened its relationship with China and India.
[00:18:49] And sanctions have given Putin yet another opportunity to blame the West, telling Russian citizens that Europe and the US wants to cripple Russia, and he is the only person capable of leading his country.
[00:19:05] But there are signs that the Russian economy is creaking. Russian GDP decreased by 2.1% in 2022. The production of motor vehicles was down almost 50% year on year, the Russian rouble continues to lose value against the dollar, and proponents of sanctions say that it is a waiting game.
[00:19:28] Sanctions are strangling Russia, so they say, and much like it took decades to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa, sanctions are a chokehold on the Russian economy, and it is simply a question of waiting for the hold to grow so tight that there is a reaction.
[00:19:49] The problem is, as the history of economic sanctions tells us, that there is often no way to know what their impact, what this reaction, will be.
[00:19:59] In some cases, the political objective might be reached swiftly and relatively painlessly, with sanctions playing an important role or a minor one.
[00:20:09] In others, it will be a multi-decade process, where innocent citizens of a country are forced to suffer because of policy decisions that might have been taken even before they were born.
[00:20:22] And to bring it back to Siavash and his wife, the PhD candidate from Iran I told you about at the start of the episode, what can we take away from this personal story?
[00:20:34] It seems to epitomise the paradox of sanctions: they are a tool designed to exert pressure on a regime, but in practice they are a collection of punishments on individuals, promising people like Siavash’s wife.
[00:20:51] Sanctions are easy to implement, and they are a useful tool for politicians who don’t want to get their hands dirty. To quote the British Labour Party politician William Arnold-Forster, “Pens seem so much cleaner instruments than bayonets”.
[00:21:08] But sanctions are difficult to measure, and their impact is almost impossible to predict.
[00:21:16] What Siavash’s wife’s story is an important reminder of, is that in this grand chess game of international relations, the pawns often have faces, stories, hopes and dreams.
[00:21:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on economic sanctions. I know it probably sounded like a bit of a dry topic, but I hope that we’ve managed to bring some humanity to it. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:47] We've got loads of listeners from Iran and Russia, so if that is you, shoot me an email at hi@leonardoenglish.com and let me know your thoughts on sanctions.
[00:21:58] Are they a necessary evil? Who do you blame for sanctions?
[00:22:02] And for the members among you, You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:17] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about sanctions, and asking the perhaps controversial question: do they even work?
[00:00:31] OK then, Do Sanctions Work?
[00:00:36] A few weeks ago I had a fascinating conversation with a gentleman called Siavash.
[00:00:42] He told me a moving story about his wife, who had been accepted onto a PhD programme at a prestigious university in Australia.
[00:00:52] The couple were getting excited about the move, and Siavash’s wife was particularly hopeful about possible doors that this degree would open for her, opportunities that would not be available if she stayed in her home country.
[00:01:08] But shortly before she was to be admitted, she received an email from the university.
[00:01:16] It read:
[00:01:18] Dear Mrs X,
[00:01:20] I refer to your application for Higher Degree by Research candidature and scholarship at University Y.
[00:01:28] The University has taken an assessment of your application and determined that acceptance of the application may breach international sanctions and controls imposed by the Australian Government. It is therefore necessary for the University to reject your application, to ensure the University remains in conformity with Australian Law.
[00:01:53] Understandably, Siavash and his wife were devastated. They were good, upstanding citizens, and his wife had all of the qualifications necessary to start this PhD programme.
[00:02:07] The problem was…she was from Iran.
[00:02:11] And Iran, as you may know, has been under some form of sanctions on and off since November 1979 after the hostage crisis, when a bunch of Americans were held hostage by Iranian militants.
[00:02:26] The most recent batch of sanctions are intended to stop Iran from developing its nuclear weapons capability, and have essentially cut Iran off from the global economy.
[00:02:39] And in the case of Siavash and his wife, they have literally stopped the couple from being able to leave and complete a PhD programme in Australia.
[00:02:49] Now, the Australian sanctions against Iran appear to be only against services or products that are related to technology that could be used in ballistic or nuclear weapons, an area which Siavash told me his wife was not going to be involved in, and indeed Siavash’s wife responded to the university pointing out as much.
[00:03:11] But it was to no avail; the Australian university, perhaps understandably, did not even want to run the risk that it could be seen as breaking sanctions.
[00:03:23] And the PhD offer was rescinded, it was taken back.
[00:03:28] Now, you might hear this story and think “poor Siavash and his wife, it’s so unfair that honest citizens get caught up in these political disputes”, or you might hear it and think “good, that's exactly the way that sanctions should work”.
[00:03:45] Instead of trying to take a side, we are instead going to explore how effective sanctions are at achieving their stated aim. After all, every sanction has a goal, it has something it is aiming at, so we’ll explore how effective they are at doing this.
[00:04:05] It might surprise you that there is less agreement on the subject than you might think.
[00:04:12] But first, let’s start with a reminder of what sanctions actually are, and how they work.
[00:04:20] A sanction is a sort of catch-all term that refers to a wide variety of economic measures used by one country or a multilateral organisation to force another country to do something, from stopping it getting access to technology or military equipment to damaging its economy to trying to bring about a political change.
[00:04:44] They can be embargoes, where all trade with a country is banned, throttling economic growth and the prosperity of that country’s citizens, and stirring up discontent for the country’s political leaders.
[00:04:58] There can be export or import controls, where certain products cannot be exported or imported. These are typically used to stop important strategic products entering or leaving a country, typically related to technology or military objectives.
[00:05:17] There can be financial controls, where all dealings with banks from a country are banned. Like the first type of sanction, a trade embargo, the objective is to weaken a country’s economy.
[00:05:31] There can be asset freezes, where all of the assets belonging to or linked to a particular person are frozen. These are typically used to target powerful people close to the country’s political elite.
[00:05:45] And there can be travel restrictions, where individuals and their family members are banned from travelling to a particular country or region. Again, the objective of this is similar to asset freezes; to inconvenience those who wield the power in a particular country, disrupting their international mobility and influence.
[00:06:09] Sanctions can be very limited in scope, with only certain individuals within a country targeted, or an entire country can essentially be cut off from trading with another, as is the case with Iran and the US.
[00:06:25] Now, as to the history of sanctions, it is a lot longer than you might think.
[00:06:33] The first record of economic sanctions goes all the way back to Ancient Greece in the year 432 BC, just before the Peloponnesian War. This was something called the Megarian Decree, and was a form of economic blockade by the Athenian Empire against the city of Megara.
[00:06:55] The idea was to cut off the city of Megara from trading with its neighbours. It worked, at least from an economic point of view; the city of Megara was devastated.
[00:07:07] But Magara appealed to its neighbour and ally, Sparta, and this is believed by some to be a key factor in starting the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens, the sanctioning power, was defeated.
[00:07:23] So, as you can see, right from the very first sanction, they can have unintended consequences, and the extent to which they achieve their goal is…debated.
[00:07:36] Skipping forward a few thousand years, Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the first “modern” leaders to implement sanctions. In 1806 he implemented a trade embargo against the UK, in effect creating a blockade, forbidding the import of British goods into European countries allied with or dependent upon France.
[00:08:01] In Napoleon’s case, it did not achieve its goal. British goods continued to be smuggled into Europe, the fact that they were harder to come by hurt France’s European allies, many of whom had come to be dependent on British goods, and it caused a strain on France’s relations with its European allies.
[00:08:21] In short, it didn’t work, and was a not insignificant factor in Napoleon’s downfall.
[00:08:28] But ever since this so-called “Continental Blockade”, sanctions have been increasingly used as a political tool to weaken a country's economy and bring about a regime or policy change.
[00:08:44] The Allies sanctioned Germany in 1914, North Korea has been under UN sanctions since 2006, Russia has been sanctioned in a myriad of different ways since 2014, and then more seriously since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and perhaps most famously, Cuba has been under severe economic sanctions by the United States since 1962.
[00:09:12] If you go on holiday to Cuba and you fly back to Miami with a Cuban cigar or a bottle of Cuban rum in your pocket, or even a packet of chewing gum bought in Cuba, you are breaking American sanctions and you could theoretically end up in jail.
[00:09:30] So, given that they are increasingly used as a political and diplomatic tool, have sanctions become more effective, or are they still just as ineffective, but they are chosen for other reasons?
[00:09:46] According to the French author, Agathe Demarais, sanctions have not got any more effective.
[00:09:54] Demarais is the author of a book on the efficacy of economic sanctions, and in it she looks at all U.S. sanctions since 1970 and shows that the countries targeted by sanctions only changed their behaviour 13% of the time.
[00:10:12] Put another way, 87% of the time sanctions did not have their intended effect.
[00:10:19] Sanctions are chosen by politicians, according to Demarais, because they are a relatively easy, cheap and painless way to take action against a rogue state.
[00:10:32] Firstly, they are easy. A government can draft a piece of legislation and announce it the next morning. A government doesn’t need to actually do much to administer the sanctions; the private sector does this for it by simply cutting off trade or financial links with a country.
[00:10:52] Secondly, sanctions are cheap. Sure, they might have unintended economic costs down the road, but their immediate cost is typically only the lost revenue of not doing business with that country, and that is significantly cheaper than any kind of military intervention.
[00:11:13] Thirdly, and on a related note, sanctions are seen as a sensible halfway house, a midway between doing nothing and a full-scale military invasion of a country. If one country, country A, is seen to be taking an action that is not in the best interests of another country, country B. Let’s say that country A is developing nuclear weapons, violating human rights laws or invading a sovereign nation, what options does country B have to try to force it to change its behaviour?
[00:11:48] Doing nothing shows weakness, both domestically and internationally, and military action is politically dangerous, expensive, and will necessarily result in a direct loss of countless lives. Sanctions are a quick and easy way of showing that you are doing something. Country B can quickly and easily say “we are imposing sanctions on Country A” and it shows that an effort is being made, even if the impact of that effort is unknown.
[00:12:23] Sometimes they work exactly as expected. But according to Agathe Demarais, “sometimes” means 13% of the time, although I should add that other scholars have suggested that the success rate is as high as 34% and others as low as 4%.
[00:12:42] We’ll get into why there is so much disagreement on the topic in a minute, but first let’s take a look at a few examples, to see how this bears out in real life.
[00:12:55] With the example of US sanctions against Cuba, it's hard to make the argument that sanctions have been a success.
[00:13:02] The original objective was for regime change, which didn’t happen, and then in 1992 the objective was updated to “force Cuba towards democratisation and greater respect for human rights."
[00:13:15] Now, some form of sanctions have been in place for over 60 years.
[00:13:21] There has been no great political change, the sanctions have brought Cuba closer to countries like the USSR and Venezuela, and they have made the US a scapegoat for the poor economic outlook for Cuba.
[00:13:35] Now, in the interest of balance, there are several prominent cases where economic sanctions have had their stated effect, or at least sanctions have been put in place, and the objective of the sanctions has been reached.
[00:13:50] One clear case is South Africa.
[00:13:53] South Africans had lived under an apartheid regime since 1948, a system of institutionalised racism in which the minority white population was given more rights and privileges than the majority black population.
[00:14:09] Ever since the 1960s, various countries, from Brazil to Britain, imposed some specific trade sanctions on South Africa, and this intensified moving into the 1970s, ending with a full United Nations embargo on weapons sales to South Africa in 1977, an oil embargo 10 years later, and then multiple countries proposing full divestment from the country in the 1980s, essentially withdrawing all investments and money from the racist regime.
[00:14:42] The idea was to cripple the South African economy, and bring about regime change. But even as this was happening, not all voices outside South Africa agreed with the approach.
[00:14:55] Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, famously described sanctions as "the way of poverty, starvation and destroying the hopes of the very people you wish to help."
[00:15:07] And John Major, who would go on to be Prime Minister but was Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary at the time, criticised sanctions saying that they would "feed white consciences outside South Africa, not black bellies within it".
[00:15:22] In other words, sanctions might make people outside South Africa feel like they were doing a good thing by refusing to trade with a racist regime, but the people who were really being punished were black South Africans, who were suffering in poverty under a weak economy.
[00:15:41] In any case, sanctions worked, or at least in 1994, 5 years after the UN oil embargo, the South African apartheid regime finally ended, and Nelson Mandela was elected in the country’s first multi-racial election.
[00:15:58] Mandela certainly thought that sanctions helped end apartheid, replying “Oh, there is no doubt” when he was asked about their efficacy.
[00:16:07] But here we move into some interesting discussion about how effective they actually are. Yes, apartheid ended, but would it have ended without economic sanctions?
[00:16:21] Black South Africans had to live through the serious economic hardship and suffering caused by the sanctions for decades. Was it worth it, as in, was this suffering a necessary step to force regime change and end apartheid, or was it all for nothing?
[00:16:39] And bringing us closer to the present day, Russia has overtaken Iran as the most sanctioned country in the world.
[00:16:48] If you are in Russia, as you will know, you cannot use your Russian bank card to buy many international products. VISA and Mastercard have blocked Russian banks, Russia is cut off from the SWIFT network, and household names from McDonald’s to Starbucks have exited the country.
[00:17:08] Multiple oligarchs have had personal sanctions placed against them, their yachts impounded and mansions from London to New York seized, or at least frozen.
[00:17:20] This all started in late February and March of 2022, so…has it worked?
[00:17:27] Now, there are as many articles saying “Russian sanctions are working” as there are “Russian sanctions aren’t working”, so commentators are divided on the issue.
[00:17:39] And the major problem with assessing the efficacy of the sanctions against Russia is that there was no clear and easily measurable goal to them, they had no clear objective, other than “show Russia that its invasion was not acceptable to the international community and disrupt its ability to continue to wage war”.
[00:18:01] Certainly, those who predicted that Russia would fall into an immediate financial collapse and there would be domestic pressure for regime change have been proved incorrect.
[00:18:13] This was almost two years ago, the war is ongoing, and as of the time of recording at least, Putin is still in charge with no sign of that changing in the near future.
[00:18:25] Western goods are still getting into Russia, typically being “imported” to neighbouring countries and then taken across the border.
[00:18:34] What’s more, sanctions against Russia are not global by any means; Russia might be sanctioned by much of the West, including the EU and the US, but this has strengthened its relationship with China and India.
[00:18:49] And sanctions have given Putin yet another opportunity to blame the West, telling Russian citizens that Europe and the US wants to cripple Russia, and he is the only person capable of leading his country.
[00:19:05] But there are signs that the Russian economy is creaking. Russian GDP decreased by 2.1% in 2022. The production of motor vehicles was down almost 50% year on year, the Russian rouble continues to lose value against the dollar, and proponents of sanctions say that it is a waiting game.
[00:19:28] Sanctions are strangling Russia, so they say, and much like it took decades to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa, sanctions are a chokehold on the Russian economy, and it is simply a question of waiting for the hold to grow so tight that there is a reaction.
[00:19:49] The problem is, as the history of economic sanctions tells us, that there is often no way to know what their impact, what this reaction, will be.
[00:19:59] In some cases, the political objective might be reached swiftly and relatively painlessly, with sanctions playing an important role or a minor one.
[00:20:09] In others, it will be a multi-decade process, where innocent citizens of a country are forced to suffer because of policy decisions that might have been taken even before they were born.
[00:20:22] And to bring it back to Siavash and his wife, the PhD candidate from Iran I told you about at the start of the episode, what can we take away from this personal story?
[00:20:34] It seems to epitomise the paradox of sanctions: they are a tool designed to exert pressure on a regime, but in practice they are a collection of punishments on individuals, promising people like Siavash’s wife.
[00:20:51] Sanctions are easy to implement, and they are a useful tool for politicians who don’t want to get their hands dirty. To quote the British Labour Party politician William Arnold-Forster, “Pens seem so much cleaner instruments than bayonets”.
[00:21:08] But sanctions are difficult to measure, and their impact is almost impossible to predict.
[00:21:16] What Siavash’s wife’s story is an important reminder of, is that in this grand chess game of international relations, the pawns often have faces, stories, hopes and dreams.
[00:21:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on economic sanctions. I know it probably sounded like a bit of a dry topic, but I hope that we’ve managed to bring some humanity to it. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:47] We've got loads of listeners from Iran and Russia, so if that is you, shoot me an email at hi@leonardoenglish.com and let me know your thoughts on sanctions.
[00:21:58] Are they a necessary evil? Who do you blame for sanctions?
[00:22:02] And for the members among you, You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:17] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about sanctions, and asking the perhaps controversial question: do they even work?
[00:00:31] OK then, Do Sanctions Work?
[00:00:36] A few weeks ago I had a fascinating conversation with a gentleman called Siavash.
[00:00:42] He told me a moving story about his wife, who had been accepted onto a PhD programme at a prestigious university in Australia.
[00:00:52] The couple were getting excited about the move, and Siavash’s wife was particularly hopeful about possible doors that this degree would open for her, opportunities that would not be available if she stayed in her home country.
[00:01:08] But shortly before she was to be admitted, she received an email from the university.
[00:01:16] It read:
[00:01:18] Dear Mrs X,
[00:01:20] I refer to your application for Higher Degree by Research candidature and scholarship at University Y.
[00:01:28] The University has taken an assessment of your application and determined that acceptance of the application may breach international sanctions and controls imposed by the Australian Government. It is therefore necessary for the University to reject your application, to ensure the University remains in conformity with Australian Law.
[00:01:53] Understandably, Siavash and his wife were devastated. They were good, upstanding citizens, and his wife had all of the qualifications necessary to start this PhD programme.
[00:02:07] The problem was…she was from Iran.
[00:02:11] And Iran, as you may know, has been under some form of sanctions on and off since November 1979 after the hostage crisis, when a bunch of Americans were held hostage by Iranian militants.
[00:02:26] The most recent batch of sanctions are intended to stop Iran from developing its nuclear weapons capability, and have essentially cut Iran off from the global economy.
[00:02:39] And in the case of Siavash and his wife, they have literally stopped the couple from being able to leave and complete a PhD programme in Australia.
[00:02:49] Now, the Australian sanctions against Iran appear to be only against services or products that are related to technology that could be used in ballistic or nuclear weapons, an area which Siavash told me his wife was not going to be involved in, and indeed Siavash’s wife responded to the university pointing out as much.
[00:03:11] But it was to no avail; the Australian university, perhaps understandably, did not even want to run the risk that it could be seen as breaking sanctions.
[00:03:23] And the PhD offer was rescinded, it was taken back.
[00:03:28] Now, you might hear this story and think “poor Siavash and his wife, it’s so unfair that honest citizens get caught up in these political disputes”, or you might hear it and think “good, that's exactly the way that sanctions should work”.
[00:03:45] Instead of trying to take a side, we are instead going to explore how effective sanctions are at achieving their stated aim. After all, every sanction has a goal, it has something it is aiming at, so we’ll explore how effective they are at doing this.
[00:04:05] It might surprise you that there is less agreement on the subject than you might think.
[00:04:12] But first, let’s start with a reminder of what sanctions actually are, and how they work.
[00:04:20] A sanction is a sort of catch-all term that refers to a wide variety of economic measures used by one country or a multilateral organisation to force another country to do something, from stopping it getting access to technology or military equipment to damaging its economy to trying to bring about a political change.
[00:04:44] They can be embargoes, where all trade with a country is banned, throttling economic growth and the prosperity of that country’s citizens, and stirring up discontent for the country’s political leaders.
[00:04:58] There can be export or import controls, where certain products cannot be exported or imported. These are typically used to stop important strategic products entering or leaving a country, typically related to technology or military objectives.
[00:05:17] There can be financial controls, where all dealings with banks from a country are banned. Like the first type of sanction, a trade embargo, the objective is to weaken a country’s economy.
[00:05:31] There can be asset freezes, where all of the assets belonging to or linked to a particular person are frozen. These are typically used to target powerful people close to the country’s political elite.
[00:05:45] And there can be travel restrictions, where individuals and their family members are banned from travelling to a particular country or region. Again, the objective of this is similar to asset freezes; to inconvenience those who wield the power in a particular country, disrupting their international mobility and influence.
[00:06:09] Sanctions can be very limited in scope, with only certain individuals within a country targeted, or an entire country can essentially be cut off from trading with another, as is the case with Iran and the US.
[00:06:25] Now, as to the history of sanctions, it is a lot longer than you might think.
[00:06:33] The first record of economic sanctions goes all the way back to Ancient Greece in the year 432 BC, just before the Peloponnesian War. This was something called the Megarian Decree, and was a form of economic blockade by the Athenian Empire against the city of Megara.
[00:06:55] The idea was to cut off the city of Megara from trading with its neighbours. It worked, at least from an economic point of view; the city of Megara was devastated.
[00:07:07] But Magara appealed to its neighbour and ally, Sparta, and this is believed by some to be a key factor in starting the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens, the sanctioning power, was defeated.
[00:07:23] So, as you can see, right from the very first sanction, they can have unintended consequences, and the extent to which they achieve their goal is…debated.
[00:07:36] Skipping forward a few thousand years, Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the first “modern” leaders to implement sanctions. In 1806 he implemented a trade embargo against the UK, in effect creating a blockade, forbidding the import of British goods into European countries allied with or dependent upon France.
[00:08:01] In Napoleon’s case, it did not achieve its goal. British goods continued to be smuggled into Europe, the fact that they were harder to come by hurt France’s European allies, many of whom had come to be dependent on British goods, and it caused a strain on France’s relations with its European allies.
[00:08:21] In short, it didn’t work, and was a not insignificant factor in Napoleon’s downfall.
[00:08:28] But ever since this so-called “Continental Blockade”, sanctions have been increasingly used as a political tool to weaken a country's economy and bring about a regime or policy change.
[00:08:44] The Allies sanctioned Germany in 1914, North Korea has been under UN sanctions since 2006, Russia has been sanctioned in a myriad of different ways since 2014, and then more seriously since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and perhaps most famously, Cuba has been under severe economic sanctions by the United States since 1962.
[00:09:12] If you go on holiday to Cuba and you fly back to Miami with a Cuban cigar or a bottle of Cuban rum in your pocket, or even a packet of chewing gum bought in Cuba, you are breaking American sanctions and you could theoretically end up in jail.
[00:09:30] So, given that they are increasingly used as a political and diplomatic tool, have sanctions become more effective, or are they still just as ineffective, but they are chosen for other reasons?
[00:09:46] According to the French author, Agathe Demarais, sanctions have not got any more effective.
[00:09:54] Demarais is the author of a book on the efficacy of economic sanctions, and in it she looks at all U.S. sanctions since 1970 and shows that the countries targeted by sanctions only changed their behaviour 13% of the time.
[00:10:12] Put another way, 87% of the time sanctions did not have their intended effect.
[00:10:19] Sanctions are chosen by politicians, according to Demarais, because they are a relatively easy, cheap and painless way to take action against a rogue state.
[00:10:32] Firstly, they are easy. A government can draft a piece of legislation and announce it the next morning. A government doesn’t need to actually do much to administer the sanctions; the private sector does this for it by simply cutting off trade or financial links with a country.
[00:10:52] Secondly, sanctions are cheap. Sure, they might have unintended economic costs down the road, but their immediate cost is typically only the lost revenue of not doing business with that country, and that is significantly cheaper than any kind of military intervention.
[00:11:13] Thirdly, and on a related note, sanctions are seen as a sensible halfway house, a midway between doing nothing and a full-scale military invasion of a country. If one country, country A, is seen to be taking an action that is not in the best interests of another country, country B. Let’s say that country A is developing nuclear weapons, violating human rights laws or invading a sovereign nation, what options does country B have to try to force it to change its behaviour?
[00:11:48] Doing nothing shows weakness, both domestically and internationally, and military action is politically dangerous, expensive, and will necessarily result in a direct loss of countless lives. Sanctions are a quick and easy way of showing that you are doing something. Country B can quickly and easily say “we are imposing sanctions on Country A” and it shows that an effort is being made, even if the impact of that effort is unknown.
[00:12:23] Sometimes they work exactly as expected. But according to Agathe Demarais, “sometimes” means 13% of the time, although I should add that other scholars have suggested that the success rate is as high as 34% and others as low as 4%.
[00:12:42] We’ll get into why there is so much disagreement on the topic in a minute, but first let’s take a look at a few examples, to see how this bears out in real life.
[00:12:55] With the example of US sanctions against Cuba, it's hard to make the argument that sanctions have been a success.
[00:13:02] The original objective was for regime change, which didn’t happen, and then in 1992 the objective was updated to “force Cuba towards democratisation and greater respect for human rights."
[00:13:15] Now, some form of sanctions have been in place for over 60 years.
[00:13:21] There has been no great political change, the sanctions have brought Cuba closer to countries like the USSR and Venezuela, and they have made the US a scapegoat for the poor economic outlook for Cuba.
[00:13:35] Now, in the interest of balance, there are several prominent cases where economic sanctions have had their stated effect, or at least sanctions have been put in place, and the objective of the sanctions has been reached.
[00:13:50] One clear case is South Africa.
[00:13:53] South Africans had lived under an apartheid regime since 1948, a system of institutionalised racism in which the minority white population was given more rights and privileges than the majority black population.
[00:14:09] Ever since the 1960s, various countries, from Brazil to Britain, imposed some specific trade sanctions on South Africa, and this intensified moving into the 1970s, ending with a full United Nations embargo on weapons sales to South Africa in 1977, an oil embargo 10 years later, and then multiple countries proposing full divestment from the country in the 1980s, essentially withdrawing all investments and money from the racist regime.
[00:14:42] The idea was to cripple the South African economy, and bring about regime change. But even as this was happening, not all voices outside South Africa agreed with the approach.
[00:14:55] Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, famously described sanctions as "the way of poverty, starvation and destroying the hopes of the very people you wish to help."
[00:15:07] And John Major, who would go on to be Prime Minister but was Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary at the time, criticised sanctions saying that they would "feed white consciences outside South Africa, not black bellies within it".
[00:15:22] In other words, sanctions might make people outside South Africa feel like they were doing a good thing by refusing to trade with a racist regime, but the people who were really being punished were black South Africans, who were suffering in poverty under a weak economy.
[00:15:41] In any case, sanctions worked, or at least in 1994, 5 years after the UN oil embargo, the South African apartheid regime finally ended, and Nelson Mandela was elected in the country’s first multi-racial election.
[00:15:58] Mandela certainly thought that sanctions helped end apartheid, replying “Oh, there is no doubt” when he was asked about their efficacy.
[00:16:07] But here we move into some interesting discussion about how effective they actually are. Yes, apartheid ended, but would it have ended without economic sanctions?
[00:16:21] Black South Africans had to live through the serious economic hardship and suffering caused by the sanctions for decades. Was it worth it, as in, was this suffering a necessary step to force regime change and end apartheid, or was it all for nothing?
[00:16:39] And bringing us closer to the present day, Russia has overtaken Iran as the most sanctioned country in the world.
[00:16:48] If you are in Russia, as you will know, you cannot use your Russian bank card to buy many international products. VISA and Mastercard have blocked Russian banks, Russia is cut off from the SWIFT network, and household names from McDonald’s to Starbucks have exited the country.
[00:17:08] Multiple oligarchs have had personal sanctions placed against them, their yachts impounded and mansions from London to New York seized, or at least frozen.
[00:17:20] This all started in late February and March of 2022, so…has it worked?
[00:17:27] Now, there are as many articles saying “Russian sanctions are working” as there are “Russian sanctions aren’t working”, so commentators are divided on the issue.
[00:17:39] And the major problem with assessing the efficacy of the sanctions against Russia is that there was no clear and easily measurable goal to them, they had no clear objective, other than “show Russia that its invasion was not acceptable to the international community and disrupt its ability to continue to wage war”.
[00:18:01] Certainly, those who predicted that Russia would fall into an immediate financial collapse and there would be domestic pressure for regime change have been proved incorrect.
[00:18:13] This was almost two years ago, the war is ongoing, and as of the time of recording at least, Putin is still in charge with no sign of that changing in the near future.
[00:18:25] Western goods are still getting into Russia, typically being “imported” to neighbouring countries and then taken across the border.
[00:18:34] What’s more, sanctions against Russia are not global by any means; Russia might be sanctioned by much of the West, including the EU and the US, but this has strengthened its relationship with China and India.
[00:18:49] And sanctions have given Putin yet another opportunity to blame the West, telling Russian citizens that Europe and the US wants to cripple Russia, and he is the only person capable of leading his country.
[00:19:05] But there are signs that the Russian economy is creaking. Russian GDP decreased by 2.1% in 2022. The production of motor vehicles was down almost 50% year on year, the Russian rouble continues to lose value against the dollar, and proponents of sanctions say that it is a waiting game.
[00:19:28] Sanctions are strangling Russia, so they say, and much like it took decades to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa, sanctions are a chokehold on the Russian economy, and it is simply a question of waiting for the hold to grow so tight that there is a reaction.
[00:19:49] The problem is, as the history of economic sanctions tells us, that there is often no way to know what their impact, what this reaction, will be.
[00:19:59] In some cases, the political objective might be reached swiftly and relatively painlessly, with sanctions playing an important role or a minor one.
[00:20:09] In others, it will be a multi-decade process, where innocent citizens of a country are forced to suffer because of policy decisions that might have been taken even before they were born.
[00:20:22] And to bring it back to Siavash and his wife, the PhD candidate from Iran I told you about at the start of the episode, what can we take away from this personal story?
[00:20:34] It seems to epitomise the paradox of sanctions: they are a tool designed to exert pressure on a regime, but in practice they are a collection of punishments on individuals, promising people like Siavash’s wife.
[00:20:51] Sanctions are easy to implement, and they are a useful tool for politicians who don’t want to get their hands dirty. To quote the British Labour Party politician William Arnold-Forster, “Pens seem so much cleaner instruments than bayonets”.
[00:21:08] But sanctions are difficult to measure, and their impact is almost impossible to predict.
[00:21:16] What Siavash’s wife’s story is an important reminder of, is that in this grand chess game of international relations, the pawns often have faces, stories, hopes and dreams.
[00:21:32] OK then, that is it for today's episode on economic sanctions. I know it probably sounded like a bit of a dry topic, but I hope that we’ve managed to bring some humanity to it. As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:47] We've got loads of listeners from Iran and Russia, so if that is you, shoot me an email at hi@leonardoenglish.com and let me know your thoughts on sanctions.
[00:21:58] Are they a necessary evil? Who do you blame for sanctions?
[00:22:02] And for the members among you, You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:12] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:17] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
