Sanctions Don’t Weaken US Adversaries — But They Do Enrich Oligarchs

In a rare moment of candor, former Trump administration officials are now admitting that economic sanctions — one of their most aggressive foreign policy tools — don’t actually work. This admission, coming from the architects of the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaigns, is telling. It confirms what many in sanctioned countries, and those who study them, have known for years: sanctions fail at their stated goals, while inflicting enormous harm on civilian populations.

So if sanctions don’t lead to human rights improvements or regime change, why is Washington still addicted to them? In the 21^st century alone, U.S. sanctions have increased over 900 percent, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Because sanctions are not about strategy — they are about control.

My research across heavily sanctioned states like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea shows that sanctions entrench authoritarian rule, hollow out economies and punish ordinary people. But they persist because they serve deeper interests — economic, political and ideological — in the states that inflict them. Sanctions are tools of economic warfare disguised as diplomacy. And behind them lies a powerful force shaping U.S. policy: elite competition.

Take the case of Iran’s pistachio industry. For decades, Iran and California were the two global powerhouses in pistachio production. But under U.S. sanctions, Iranian farmers were locked out of international markets, and California’s Wonderful Company — owned by billionaire couple Stewart and Lynda Resnick — secured dominance. Through targeted lobbying efforts, the Resnicks have consistently advocated for stricter sanctions on Iran, arguing that such measures are necessary to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and regional influence. But the real prize was market control. This is how sanctions work in practice: under the cover of geopolitics, they enable corporate monopolies and enrich well-connected elites.

Nearly one-third of the world’s countries are under some form of U.S. sanctions.

This isn’t an isolated example. In today’s global sanctions regime, nearly one-third of the world’s countries are under some form of U.S. sanctions. Behind many of these policies are lobbying networks — agribusinesses, defense contractors, diaspora groups, even sanctioned individuals hiring Washington’s top firms — all seeking to reshape markets or settle political scores. These players don’t just advocate for sanctions. They weaponize them.

This has given rise to a lucrative industry in which former U.S. officials, including ex-lawmakers and agency heads, capitalize on their networks to represent clients entangled in sanctions. Take for example a law firm in Colorado run by Norm Coleman — former U.S. senator from Minnesota — which lobbied the State Department to tighten sanctions against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Coleman was working on behalf of Intrepid Potash, a domestic fertilizer company. The lobbying was targeted to cut Belarusian potash producers out of international markets. In less than one decade, sanctions-related lobbying expenditures have skyrocketed — from $6 million in 2014 to $31 million in 2022.

This turns sanctions into a form of elite competition. Far from effectively targeting rogue states, sanctions often serve to tip the scales among global oligarchs. They function as tools for economic exclusion, designed by those with access to power to sideline rivals. In a world shaped by neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, sanctions aren’t just foreign policy — they are market policy.

The Trump administration’s approach to Iran makes this painfully clear. After withdrawing from the nuclear deal in 2018, during Trump’s first tenure, officials in his administration reinstated crushing sanctions that devastated Iran’s economy and made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world. The result? Skyrocketing inflation, medicine shortages and increased poverty — while conservative factions in Iran tightened control and further securitized the political sphere. As I’ve argued elsewhere, sanctions can create a “siege economy” that benefits authoritarian elites. They consolidate power by controlling smuggling routes, redistributing access to scarce goods and scapegoating foreign enemies for domestic failures. In other words, sanctions strengthen the very regimes they claim to weaken. In every sanctioned country I’ve researched, prolonged sanctions have increased the wealth of the military and political elite by orders of magnitude.

Sanctions aren’t just foreign policy — they are market policy.

Sanctions also serve a domestic political function in the U.S. They allow politicians to appear “tough” without engaging in the hard, unpopular work of diplomacy. They generate headlines, bolster campaign narratives and maintain U.S. dominance over the global financial system — especially via control over dollar transactions and the SWIFT payment network that the vast majority of global banks use to send international payments.

This system is so entrenched that challenging it brings real consequences. As a scholar of media and politics in Iran and the U.S., I brought together over a dozen leading scholars at the Rethinking Iran Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 2019 to deepen research on the impacts of economic sanctions, especially as the first Trump administration escalated its “maximum pressure” sanctions policy against Iran. Almost immediately, I was targeted by online smear campaigns funded by the U.S. State Department’s Iran Disinformation Project. Videos of my lectures were doctored on social media, my university was contacted by anonymous sources, and I received daily threats. This wasn’t just online trolling. It was part of a broader effort to silence those who question the human costs of sanctions — which today is the U.S.’s most pervasive foreign policy tool.

And those costs are staggering. In Venezuela, sanctions contributed to a collapse in health care, with maternal mortality rates surging. In Iran, women disproportionately bear the burden of inflation and shortages. In North Korea, sanctions isolate the country further while leaving the ruling class untouched.

Even so-called “smart sanctions” – targeted ones directed at specific individuals, entities and sectors to allegedly spare civilian populations from their harmful effects – suffer from the same structural problems. They rely on complex compliance regimes that force global banks and companies to over-comply, effectively acting as de facto comprehensive sanctions. What looks targeted on paper becomes devastating in practice. Sanctions don’t operate like surgical tools — they are blunt instruments that exacerbate inequality and hardship.

So again: if sanctions don’t work, why do we keep using them?

Because they work for someone.

Sanctions don’t operate like surgical tools — they are blunt instruments that exacerbate inequality and hardship.

They work for the Resnicks and other corporate elites who benefit from the destruction of foreign competitors. They work for lobbyists who cash in on both sides of a sanctions regime — first pushing for restrictions, then getting paid to help clients navigate or lift them. They work for politicians who want a win without war. And they work for think tanks and ideological advocacy groups that silence dissent and narrow the bounds of policy debate.

This is the machinery behind sanctions — the hidden system that sustains their use despite their failure. It’s a system of power without accountability, profit without consequence.

With the return of many Trump-era officials to Washington, this is a crucial moment to expose the real logic of U.S. sanctions policy. As the new Trump administration has entered nuclear negotiations in earnest with Iran, it was no surprise that Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, wrote in The Washington Post that sanctions have “kept American enterprises away from the trillion-dollar opportunity that access to [Iran’s] economy represents.” Iran’s bitter experience with sanctions over the decades has taught it that the core issue is market control.

The point isn’t just that sanctions don’t work. It’s that they were never meant to work in the way we’ve been told. They are not strategies for peace or tools of diplomacy. They are economic weapons, wielded for political gain and private profit.

And until we confront that fact, we’ll keep repeating the same failed policies — at the cost of lives, livelihoods and any claim to moral high ground.