The writer is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
When a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands in Turkey and Syria in February, activists around the world rushed to raise money for relief efforts through platforms like GoFundMe. They immediately hit a roadblock: US sanctions. To comply with the regulations, GoFundMe told users, it will not only block fundraising efforts that mention Syria earthquake relief, but suspend accounts of who makes the requests.
In the face of public outcry, the Biden administration issued a special, limited time license exempting Syria earthquake relief transactions, after which GoFundMe allowed the campaigns to move forward. However, while this cut may have eased some difficulties in bringing aid to victims, no such exceptions exist for other US-sanctioned countries.
In recent years, sanctions have become the preferred foreign policy tool for Western countries to deal with hostile international actors. In a published study today from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, I show that 27 percent of all states – and 29 percent of the world economy – are subject to sanctions. This represents a large increase in recent decades: until the 1990s, they affected less than 10% of countries and about 5% of the world economy.
Evidence conclusively demonstrates that sanctions worsen living conditions in target countries. I reviewed 32 academic papers that estimated their effect. Of these, 30 found consistently negative effects on measures ranging from poverty, inequality and growth to health and human rights.
The extent of the damage is dramatic. One study estimated that sanctions would lead to a drop in a state’s gross domestic product by up to 26%, equivalent to that of the Great Depression. Another finding reduces female life expectancy by 1.4 years, similar to the estimated global mortality effect of the pandemic. In many cases, the damage is similar to that suffered during armed conflicts, making economic sanctions perhaps the deadliest weapon used by Western powers.
The main channel through which sanctions operate is to limit the public sector’s access to foreign currency. They are typically followed by a decline in spending on public health, education and food assistance. The resulting currency depreciation and inflation are also driving the decline in real wages.
Proponents of the sanctions argue that targeted regimes, often responsible for human rights abuses, are unlikely to channel foreign exchange earnings to their own citizens regardless of such measures. But the evidence shows that, if forced to cut spending, they will protect their cronies’ rents at the expense of the most vulnerable populations.
US authorities say their sanctions target only those responsible for corruption and undermine democracy and human rights, and do not prohibit humanitarian aid. But, as Syria has made clear, standard humanitarian exceptions are often ineffective, as financial institutions may refuse to process transactions for fear of inadvertently aiding the flow of funds to sanctioned entities.
In recent years, there has been an increasing use of so-called targeted sanctions by freezing the resources of central banks and state oil monopolies. This blocks access to foreign exchange earnings and international reserves critical to the functioning of any economy, blurring the distinction between targeted and global sanctions.
Woodrow Wilson once described sanctions as “something more terrible than war”. Unfortunately, governments that impose sanctions too often ignore concerns about their harms. Given the weight of the evidence, their attitude reflects a disregard for people’s lives in developing countries. No state that shows such indifference to the plight of the world’s most vulnerable groups can call itself a champion of freedom.
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