How can democracies deliver to the mass emotional appeal of the beleaguered public? Consider the following case in point: When the 9/11 attacks happened, the US democratic framework seemingly took steps which, on any given day, look like ones taken by hardened autocratic regimes - invading Afghanistan and Iraq back in the 2000s. Yes, in all its glory and passion, the US turned the tide in its favour - resulting in its win in the Cold War. 'Freedom and Democracy', which is worth dying for, according to Ronald Reagan, triumphed over the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' of the mighty Soviet Union. As Samuel Huntington noted in his 1991 paper, there was a 3rd spurt in democratic growth, a feat only witnessed rarely in history - once after the Enlightenment era and secondly after the rapid disintegration of European colonial states post World War 2, leading to new identities, borders and governments arising out of liberation from chronic subjugation by imperial powers.
Of late, autocratic hands have outplayed, displaced and back footed democracies significantly. That has partially to do with the botched approach of taking the lead when you are so uncritical and non-introspective of your stances - no one can forget the memorable gaffe of Colin Powell and the supposed Anthrax vial that Iraq allegedly hoarded on their territory. This unwelcome intervention and the demand that African countries reform their institutions to enhance accountability and transparency (for facilitating funds disbursement) were branded as 'blatant interference' and sacrilege of the sovereignty of nations' idea. Sanctions as a particularly potent weapon were extensively used post the conclusion of World War 2; now, serious doubts have been raised regarding its on-ground effectiveness. Besides, the situation does not present a satisfactory picture of sanctions, especially when, for example, Mr Zelensky of Ukraine asks Russia to be included in future peace talks. So, was victory and the 'end of history' declared too early by the winning side of the Cold War? Have the 'Regimes of the Authoritarians' made an enviable comeback, and if so, does this carrot-and-stick approach work to democratise them? I will unravel the hype of sanctions in this editorial piece and suggest alternative, attainable methods to deal with autocracies that shall make this world a finer place for the populace of all countries.
Sanctions as a concept need to be understood thoroughly to dissect their effectiveness. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of 'sanction' is that of a coercive action to make a country obey international norms and laws. From the beginning, the tone is set out negatively, detrimental to state-state and people-people relations. In my paper context, sanctions primarily pertain to economic measures to drive a foreign policy change towards the targeted state. Investopedia breaks down the intensity and scope of sanctions into several departments - from targeted individuals originating from certain countries to broad embargoes prohibiting substantive trade with earmarked countries, except for necessary humanitarian purposes. Just like toppings on a pizza, sanctions are highly customisable - they can relate to specific prohibitions of exports of 'dual-use' technology such as AI or satellite technology, for example, or they could be instituted in 'rounds' to target a particular country's infrastructure and economy, for example, the Russian economy after the war in Ukraine commenced. This approach is starkly different to the one pursued intensively by committed liberals like Angela Merkel, who sought to trade with Russia to compel it to democratise and be an illustrative part of the rules-based order.
Early on, these sanctions had effectively incapacitated your ideological foes. Immediately after the conclusion of the Korean War, the US instituted broad, comprehensive sanctions against North Korea, effectively rendering it an outlier, isolated state in the global network of states. Cuba has been treated in the same manner ever since 1959; had it not been for the erstwhile Soviet Union, these resource and population-scarce countries would not have withstood the mighty weight of the American economic juggernaut (as evident from the 1994 North Korean famine). Iran, 1979; Iraq, 1990 through UN Security Resolution 661; and Russia after 2014 and more encompassingly after 2022. China and Belarus, for instance, are prohibited from buying weapons manufactured in the US.
Before moving to the drawbacks, we need to lay down what sanctioning has achieved until now. Sanctions are of two types in the international arena - unilateral and UN Security Council-authorised. For the scope of the paper, I am limiting myself to the state factor; the UNSC is also authorised to take stringent action against non-state actors by barring them from accessing any external economic aid or participating in broadly all activities with other recognised states in the UN sphere (UNSC Resolution 1267, colloquially called as the Al-Qaeda Committee).
The Peterson Institute of International Economics, in their 1997 testimony, listed key patterns during sanction imposition that accounted for factors in their successful implementation. Some of them were as follows:
The targeted country is politically and economically weak (their finding from that time was that the sanctioned country's economy was 187 times larger than the sanctioned one).
The sanctions must be swift and decisive (its military counterpart would be the shock-and-awe strategy followed in Iraq).
The goals are limited, and, in the process, the sanctioning country should avert harm to itself.
However, circumstances have changed completely since 1997. With the inclusion of Russia, Venezuela and the burgeoning trade war with China, the first point no longer holds merit (this has been articulated by Vaibhav Tandon in Northern Trust). Another key paper detailing some aspects of successful sanctions dates from 1980 by Margaret Doxey. She states that sanctions are primarily symbolic declarations of principle integrity, which are meted out to ensure that erring states fall in line with the international system. This message is also sent to the allies of the said sanctioner, who take it as a move to reassure them of the sanctity of their politico-economic bond, often extended to military partnerships (NATO, US-Japan and US-RoK cooperation and security treaty).
Arriving at the successful cases of sanctions implementation, the Washington Post (2014) details 13 of them, ranging from the post-WW1 era to 2008. Very strikingly, three years later, the same author, in the same paper, refuted some of his arguments in a subsequent piece. Outside of the 2017 re-edit, I found the 2014 piece quite hurried in its narrative, ignoring more significant facets of history. For instance, the author's post on the cancellation of US Aid to India in 1965 (due to the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965) was the sole attribution to the success of the Green Revolution, but it was a hasty conclusion. He failed to consider that US sanctions on military aid were also extended to Pakistan in 1965. The historical link of India being a chronic sufferer of prolonged famines was also not considered. A 2022 article from The Print deep-dives into the historical context as well.
Another quite cited example of sanctions' effectiveness has been the global trade embargo on South Africa during the apartheid era. The argument has been so prevalent in popular discourse that even the heroes of the liberation movement, like Nelson Mandela, attributed the success of the sanctions to emancipation from apartheid. A 1999 paper by Philip L Levy from Yale University dissects this argument: the sanctions were too little, too late (they were not targeting rare earth minerals and diamonds, which formed the core part of South African exports), and the GDP growth accelerated (from 1986-1988) when the sanctions were levied. The cost to South African GNP was also 0.5% annually, which is not huge. Instead, the sanctions had more of an impact on the psychological domain than the economic one.
To other potential benefits of sanctions that come to my mind, I also assess the argument that sanctions are like pre-emptive strikes that prevent armed conflict and limit the negative spillover to economic considerations only. However, as with the general critique of the realist tradition in IR, the security consideration keeps on going ad-infinitum, i.e. with more weapons accumulation, the power balance gets upset, and the lagging party would try its best to get more power to achieve parity and avoid the hegemony of a single nation-state. This cycle, in turn, only worsens the status quo and increases the risk of more warfare. The North Korean cycle of testing missiles is proof of the same: with more sanctions and less cross-border cooperation, conflict becomes ever-likely on the Korean Peninsula. This situation could not have been more tenuous since 1953 (except for the 2010 Yeonpyeong Island incident). This exercise showed us the hollowness of the articulated arguments favouring economic sanctions.
In recent years, we have witnessed strong opposition to the use of sanctions. However, it is essential to know that resistance to sanctions is not contemporary. At the end of the Enlightenment phase in Europe, Adam Smith, the famed economist, launched 'an Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations', which critiqued mercantilism as impeding the natural fulfilment of the 'self-interest' of the individual and extendedly the society and advocated for the existence of an 'invisible hand' that lead to organic flourishment. Sanctions as an enforcement mechanism betray the basic liberal theoretical idea that proposes a free politico-economic interaction regime between different countries and populations across the globe: globalisation and specialisation of the workforce. With the development of complementary theories such as 'Comparative Advantage' by David Ricardo and utilitarianism by JS Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the opposition to trade restrictions got a new boost in mercantile-dominated imperial Europe. The brief period of Utopian Liberalism post the end of World War 1, the institution of global organisations like the UN, IMF and the World Bank (the Bretton Woods system), and the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1970s with scholars like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye also highlight the occasional spurts in opposition to isolationist trade policies.
Many scholars from Brookings and Hoover Institution and journalists from several newspapers have advocated for the end of the sanctioning regime. In several papers and articles (which I have cited below), sanctions have an effective rate of just one-third of all instances. Brookings further adds that sanctions complicate relations between two nation-states and that the error of margin for enforcing sanctions is less; in other words, sanctions of the 21st century have to be SMART in a sense (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reliable and Time-bound).
Another article from the New Yorker particularly highlighted two unique circumstances where sanctions fail. The very fact that they tend to exempt certain goods that are live savers of the sanctioned country - such as humanitarian food and aid is a doom-speller for the sanctions regime because many such autocratic states (such as Russia, Iraq and North Korea) tend to look out for self-sufficiency in this case. Hoover Institution substantiates this argument and takes it a step further: it is usually the ordinary people who bear the brunt of the sanctions, and it rarely, if ever, changes the behavioural complex of the tall leaders governing the country.
Finally, could sanctions be implemented effectively, if ever? A piece from the NPR lists three circumstances where sanctions have a greater effectiveness rate. To me, those recommendations still don't look that adequate - while the points (speed, limitedness, and multilateral support) are geared towards the on-ground, practical implementation procedure for sanctions, the philosophical part - the very reasons to use sanctions - is a feeble affair that defeats it's very purpose, that is to reduce the imprint of the sanctioned country and to limit its manoeuvrable ability. If anything, the inner elite is insulated from the sufferings of the ordinary people, or else elite division is sowed by the leadership to control their opposition effectively (case in point: Russia and Iran). Besides, as we are transitioning from a unipolar sphere to a multipolar world, there is a fragmentation of coordination and agreement (thereby, the term anarchy is more fitting for the international arena), and sanctions sow discord and lessening of trust, which turns off cooperation in the long run. With more global issues coming to the fore (AI, climate change, macroeconomic changes), conflict should be made a thing of the past.
Do we need to go on a global mission to 'save' democracy, as is the case with mainstream Western media? According to the Pew Research Centre (2024), relatively poorer and newly-minted democracies still look positively towards autocratic modes of governance despite its disastrous consequences - clearly, the appeal has not died despite 30+ years of liberal democratic dominance. WFD, in association with the UK Foreign, Development and Commonwealth Office, wrote a paper on 'how (not) to engage with autocratic states'. But, out of seven total recommendations, only one (that too a generic advice) was inward-looking. Sanctions are an outward-based approach, and to inspire real change, we must look at the anti-democratic elements of our system. Besides, the authoritative tone relies greatly on confrontation (especially recommendation one). Still, it is pertinent to be asked if democratic states, built on the premise of free exchange of knowledge, goods and services, can handle divestment and decoupling from authoritarian states (the US-China problem comes to the forefront in my mind). Also, authoritarian states were grouped into one monolithic body, while there are degrees of authoritarianism and different sorts of authoritarianism. There was hardly any mention of opposition groups in these countries, too; they exist and are crucial in bringing real, tangible changes in autocratic bodies. Democracies should back and foster these groups covertly and let authoritarian states know about their backing instead of going on the defensive overtly. Actions in the Machiavellian language should be secretive and decisive, for it is such language that authoritarian states understand and preach about (notably the ‘spheres of influence’ strand of thought).
If democracy is to win, it should be confident and resilient on its own outside the backing of the authoritarian states (to as much of an extent as possible, but still, cooperation should be an open option, for it is this one blue dot that we share).
Liberty must live on. Truth must be upheld.
About the Author: Partha SamalA graduate from IIT Madras, Partha is former co-head of IFPP's Democracy CPR Research Desk.