Grandstand. American and European leaders and their allies have placed economic sanctions at the heart of their geopolitical strategy, in a way that has hardly any equivalent. Not that their use is rare. On the contrary, they are an integral part of the common foreign and security policy, to such an extent that the European Union (EU) today applies more than forty economic sanctions regimes.
The United States, for its part, is making increasing and increasingly active use of it, including against China and Russia. In no case, however, is it a question of such harsh sanctions against a leading power: strategic ambiguity is de rigueur, but there is mention, in addition to the blocking of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, of the cutting off of access to the financial telecommunications system Swift, the prohibition of financial transactions with certain large Russian banks and the drastic limitation of high-tech exports.
While the economic impact of sanctions is often obvious, their political effectiveness is much less so. The fight against apartheid remains a marked success in this area, but the same cannot be said of a number of sometimes severe and lasting measures, such as those against Cuba or North Korea, among others.
In fact, the importance given to the economy as a criterion for decision-making and political stability is very variable, especially in authoritarian regimes. The latter can even often use the sanctions to strengthen their support, by orienting in their favor the economic interventionism that the sanctions generally call for in response.
And while the macroeconomic consequences can provoke popular protest against the regime in place, they also risk fueling resentment towards the countries behind the sanctions. This is, moreover, what motivated the European move towards targeted sanctions, targeting individuals and, sometimes, institutions, rather than the entire population, through asset freezes and restrictions on traffic; by their nature, however, such measures are necessarily limited in scope at the country level.
Variable geometry
Sanctions impose a cost on all stakeholders, whether they are targets or issuers. Their relevance is therefore conditional on a sufficient degree of asymmetry for the costs inflicted to significantly exceed those suffered (including possibly through reprisals), which explains why they are more willingly used against small countries. Extensive international coordination is a major asset from this point of view, especially since it limits the risk of circumvention.
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