The United States has long relied on economic sanctions and trade embargoes as its primary instruments to rein in malign international actors. Yet, whenever policymakers grow dissatisfied with the incremental results of financial pressure, they routinely pivot to military action as the next logical step. Washington applied restrictive economic sanctions against Iraq for more than a decade before launching a full-scale invasion of the country in 2003. A similar pattern unfolded with Iran: Washington utilized sweeping economic pressure to force Tehran into nuclear negotiations during the 2010s, only to abandon the resulting international agreement in 2018 and ultimately slide into an open war by February 2026.
This cyclical pattern of behavior persists because standalone sanctions rarely—if ever—make a complex geopolitical problem vanish, such as by instantly toppling the adversarial government responsible. This reality routinely frustrates American leaders and the public alike, who often seek simple, swift, and permanent fixes to deep-seated foreign policy challenges. Many interpret the stubborn persistence of these foreign adversaries as definitive proof that sanctions are fundamentally futile. However, the true efficacy of sanctions is often best measured in crises that do not actually occur: the clandestine nuclear test that never takes place, or the critical shipping lane that remains open and undisturbed. These successes are inherently invisible, whereas an adversary’s ongoing provocations are loud and public. Consequently, American officials frequently conclude that a resort to war is unavoidable.
This logic reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how economic statecraft operates. While sanctions may fail to achieve sweeping, maximalist aims on their own, they can successfully manage intractable problems when deployed alongside other diplomatic tools. They accomplish this by reliably depressing a target nation’s economic growth over a sustained period. Although this approach inevitably inflicts hardship on innocent civilians—as authoritarian leaders routinely shift the financial burden from their core regime supporters to the politically disenfranchised—no government can ultimately escape the inexorable math of slowing economic growth.
Consider the mathematics: an economy starting with a three percent annual growth rate, roughly the global average, will double in size in approximately 23 years. But if international sanctions reduce that annual growth to a sluggish one percent, doubling in size will take 70 years—three times as long. One need only compare the divergent trajectories of North and South Korea, or examine nighttime satellite imagery of the Korean Peninsula, to witness the compounding generational effects of sanctions. While economic measures may not alter a targeted regime’s underlying geopolitical ambitions, they systematically erode its financial wherewithal and can powerfully deter other governments from emulating the sanctioned behavior.
Military campaigns can theoretically overthrow adversarial regimes, but they usually do so only after years of grinding conflict, and repairing the resulting devastation demands staggering amounts of time and financial resources. Too often, the United States misidentifies its foreign policy dilemmas as problems that can be solved cheaply and quickly. Following World War II, it required an Allied occupation force of more than 1.5 million soldiers to properly garrison Germany, a nation of 80 million people. Fast forward six decades, and Washington showed little appetite for deploying the massive troop levels necessary to securely subdue Iraq, a country of nearly 30 million. Today, Americans are similarly unwilling to make the profound sacrifices required to vanquish Iran, with its population of 90 million—let alone China, with its 1.4 billion citizens. The challenges these nations present are simply too vast to solve at an acceptable cost. In such scenarios, sanctions offer a sustainable strategy for managing troublesome situations over the long term.
The First Mistake
According to conventional wisdom, sanctions discourage unsavory state behavior by raising its economic costs while simultaneously weakening an adversary in advance of potential military hostilities. This foundational logic has endured since 1935, when the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy following its invasion of Ethiopia, hoping to induce Rome to halt its campaign or at least temper its imperial ambitions. Yet because the sanctioning nations were unwilling to restrict vital commodities such as oil and coal, the effort proved largely ineffective.
The mechanics of sanctions have evolved significantly since 1935. Unlike historical broad-based trade embargoes that inflicted massive collateral damage on entire populations, modern "smart sanctions" target specific institutions, entities, or individuals. They are enforced primarily through the global banking system by blocking financial transactions linked to illicit activities. The UN sanctions imposed on Iraq starting in 1990 represented, in many ways, the final gasp of the older comprehensive sanctions model. The lifting of those restrictions was strictly contingent upon Baghdad dismantling its weapons of mass destruction and respecting Kuwaiti sovereignty. Because verification of disarmament proved exceedingly difficult, many of the economic sanctions remained firmly in place long after the 1991 armistice, persisting right through to the 2003 invasion. After U.S.-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein, it became apparent that the isolation had successfully prevented Iraq from restoring its economy, rebuilding its shattered military, and resuming its unconventional weapons programs.
During the interwar decade, however, many observers argued that international sanctions were failing to deter Iraqi aggression or fully neutralize its secret programs. Anxious that Saddam’s regime still posed a mortal threat to Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, the United States, the United Kingdom, and briefly France established two unauthorized no-fly zones. In 1998, after Baghdad expelled UN weapons inspectors, U.S. and British warplanes launched airstrikes against the country. That same year, a cadre of hawkish scholars and former officials sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton branding the sanctions-based policy "dangerously inadequate." Many of these signatories later joined the George W. Bush administration to put their recommendations into practice.
To a certain extent, these critics highlighted genuine flaws. Deep political divisions within the United States and between Washington and its European and regional partners severely constrained international efforts to contain Saddam. While Arab governments remained wary of rupturing security ties with Washington, local publics grew increasingly resentful of Western intervention. Furthermore, a growing U.S. military presence in the Middle East antagonized both the anti-imperialist left and radical Islamists, while many European capitals chafed at American unilateralism.
Saddam skillfully exploited these fractures by manufacturing stories of civilian hardship caused by sanctions, narratives that Western media outlets frequently amplified. Real suffering certainly existed inside Iraq, but it stemmed primarily from Saddam’s own domestic policies, which systematically channeled national resources toward regime survival rather than the civilian population. Although the UN’s oil-for-food program, launched in 1995, allowed Iraq to sell petroleum for essential humanitarian goods, Saddam subverted the system by demanding financial kickbacks and signing lucrative oil contracts with permanent UN Security Council members like China, France, and Russia to dilute their commitment to the sanctions regime. This period of frustration catalyzed the international push for targeted smart sanctions, though it took Washington years to refine the approach.
As enforcement dragged on, the maintenance of no-fly zones and economic restrictions grew increasingly costly and politically unpopular. Because the core objective was preventing the resurgence of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism funding, the policy demanded endless, unglamorous vigilance. Then came the September 11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led coalition swiftly toppled the Taliban in a matter of months. This rapid victory suggested to many policymakers that military force—when executed by a technologically advanced military—could neatly solve geopolitical problems in a way that stagnant sanctions could not.
When President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, he framed the intervention around disarming the nation, liberating its people, and defending the world against grave dangers, specifically alleging hidden stockpiles of unconventional weapons and ties to al-Qaeda. Although Washington initially planned to hand reconstruction over to the United Nations, a devastating truck bombing at the UN’s Baghdad headquarters five months after the invasion killed the head of the mission and 22 others, forcing the organization to withdraw most of its 600 staffers and leaving the United States entirely in charge.
Rather than ending regional instability, the occupation unleashed catastrophic new conflicts. The war validated al-Qaeda’s propaganda regarding Western oppression of Muslims, drawing international jihadists to the fight. In 2006, an al-Qaeda bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra—a deeply revered Shiite shrine—ignited a brutal sectarian civil war. More than 4,000 American service members and upwards of 200,000 Iraqis lost their lives. Following the final U.S. military withdrawal in 2011, instability rippled outward across the Middle East and North Africa. Remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party joined with foreign extremists to form the Islamic State, or ISIS, overrunning large swathes of Iraq and Syria by 2014. Although international coalitions eventually pushed the group out at immense human and financial cost, surviving fighters dispersed to other conflict zones, including the African Sahel and the civil war in Syria, while a massive refugee crisis reshaped European politics.
By contrast, international sanctions had proven far more effective than Washington appreciated. While the restrictions were active, Iraq remained incapable of developing new weapons of mass destruction and dismantled existing infrastructure to seek relief. The 2003 war, on the other hand, delivered a fraction of its promised success at an astronomical human and financial price, falling drastically short of Washington’s vision for a stable, pro-Western democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East.
History Repeats
Another unforeseen consequence of the Iraq war was the inadvertent empowerment of Iran, whose regional ambitions had long been checked by Saddam’s regime. Washington and Tehran have remained locked in geopolitical hostility since the 1978–79 Iranian revolution. In November 1979, the United States imposed sanctions following the seizure of its embassy staff, lifting them only upon the hostages’ release in 1981. The Reagan administration reimposed economic penalties in 1984 to punish Iranian backing for Hezbollah in Lebanon, though this policy was undermined by the illicit arms-for-hostages deals of the Iran-Contra affair.
Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration added further sanctions to curb Iran’s nascent nuclear program. Following the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 2005 finding that Iran was noncompliant with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Bush administration introduced targeted financial measures against specific entities like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to minimize civilian suffering. By 2007, the UN Security Council passed resolutions demanding a halt to uranium enrichment. Finally, in 2010 and 2011, the Obama administration successfully rallied international backing to choke off Iran’s oil and gas exports, effectively grinding the Iranian economy to a halt.
This compounding economic pressure eventually catalyzed a political shift inside Iran, contributing to the 2013 election of moderate President Hassan Rouhani and empowering domestic factions favoring a diplomatic resolution. In 2015, Tehran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The accord strictly capped enrichment levels, reduced operational centrifuges, repurposed nuclear research facilities, and established rigorous international inspections.
While critics rightly noted that the 2015 agreement failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile programs or regional proxy networks, the deal provided a sustainable mechanism to freeze Tehran’s path toward a nuclear weapon and manage the most acute security threat posed by the regime. A comprehensive diplomatic solution was simply unattainable at the time.
The United States has since discovered that military intervention delivers outcomes far worse than economic isolation. Following the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear accord in 2018, Iran resumed its advanced enrichment activities. Subsequent military escalations by Washington and Israel aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure failed to eliminate all underground sites. Even after targeted strikes eliminated much of the country’s senior leadership, the regime remains firmly entrenched.
Tehran responded to military attacks by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and launching retaliatory strikes against oil, gas, and military infrastructure across the region. The resulting contraction of petroleum, fertilizer, and industrial gas exports has fueled international inflation and threatened global supply chains. Furthermore, strikes against regional installations severely damaged air defense systems and satellite communications terminals in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, while destroying dozens of high-value U.S. military aircraft and disabling major naval hubs.
Far from neutralizing the Iranian regime, the recent conflict demonstrated its capacity to disrupt the global economy. By comparison, the prewar sanctions that hobbled Tehran’s military development and kept its nuclear ambitions in check represented a highly efficient strategic bargain.
The Best You Can Do
Sanctions maintain a vastly superior historical track record compared to outright war when it comes to managing unresolvable geopolitical disputes at an acceptable cost over prolonged periods. Under a sanctions regime, the target nation and its population shoulder the direct economic burden. In military conflicts, by contrast, the costs are violently shared by both sides, often generating catastrophic global collateral damage that alienates neutral states.
During the Cold War, Western leaders recognized that any direct military assault on the Soviet Union risked triggering mutual nuclear annihilation. Instead, Washington and its allies managed the Soviet threat for generations through containment, utilizing strict export controls to starve the communist bloc of hard currency and advanced Western technology. Through multilateral committees and enforcement legislation, trade plummeted, exacerbating deep structural flaws within the Soviet command economy, such as chronic consumer goods shortages and inefficient central planning. By the 1980s, new Soviet leadership recognized that their system could never bridge the widening economic and technological chasm with the West, leading to a peaceful winding down of the Cold War.
Economic pressure does not guarantee total victory, but the alternative—war—rarely achieves its stated objectives. Modern military campaigns demonstrate that while advanced navies and air forces can easily close strategic waterways, they cannot easily reopen them. Wars persist until both combatants agree to stop fighting, meaning adversaries can prolong conflicts long after Washington seeks an exit.
Ultimately, conflicts end through two mechanisms: removing an adversary’s physical capacity to resist or breaking their political will. While both sanctions and military strikes diminish the capacity to resist, the bloodshed and destruction of war frequently harden national resolve, rendering the underlying geopolitical problem even more intractable. The historical precedents of Iraq and Iran illustrate that economic statecraft offers a better path. Sanctions alone may not eliminate every security threat, but they provide an invaluable mechanism for managing dangerous situations at a fraction of the cost. Rather than a silver bullet, economic sanctions are best viewed as diplomatic chemotherapy—a tool designed to shrink a tumor and contain a threat when no other viable option remains.
