The Shrine

While Trump has put a whole mess of entities on sanctions, he's hardly the first US president that does it. In fact, I think in the last couple of decades the US's understanding of sanctions is like something out of a video game. It's literally like they're playing a badly designed strategy game where if you have more money than your opponent you will never lose so they figure that since US wields unrivaled economic power due to being the reserve currency of the world, that means it's auto-win with no cost incurred.

Of course, North Korea's been under sanctions forever through multiple administrations and sure haven't capitulated. The fact is that real life is not a strategy game where you just have more research beakers or gold coins and win. At some point you've to be willing to fight and how much tolerance the population have for war and hardship has a huge factor. If economy is everything, Russia has less GDP than Germany or France so it should be cake for EU to handle the Russian threat, except that isn't how reality works. For all this bashing about Trump erodes US credibility, I think it's actually pretty dumb because that assumes the rest of the leaders of the world somehow couldn't tell that Trump is an outlier, as if anyone but Trump gets elected and then makes some generic statement people will be like 'but what if this guy is another Trump?' What may actually erode US's credibility is all the administration's willingness to use sanctions as some kind of game that is actually not very effective (nobody ever capitulated without military defeat unless you're willing to starve everyone to death, which probably isn't happening in the modern era) and maybe at some point people got tired of US forcing everyone to go along with anybody they happened to sanction. Yes EU and China all have their problems as a replacement world economic power but there's a limit to how long people can put up with this, especially given US is likely no longer going to be the sole superpower and certainly not the sole economic superpower.

Sanctions have their uses.

Right now, it's the most overused tool in the U.S.' arsenal, and amounts to bullying on our part a lot of the time.

Sanctions weaken but usually do not destroy a nation. They are generally used to isolate a country from a working international community and punish it by enticing it to act better with the promise of economic gain from their removal.

Our two favorite targets, however - Iran and North Korea - remain problematic precisely because they are already too isolated and ruled by fundamentalists - and sanctions generally strengthen a fundamentalist's rule by giving it a 'Great Enemy' to blame for the national poverty, which is usually already caused by authoritarianism.

Banning sales of military technology to either needs to remain in effect. These countries hate us, don't make any mistake. But they hate us because we fucked around militarily in their countries and committed atrocities - NK in the Korean war, Iran via our coup against Mossadegh - and it's past time for the U.S. to actually start having the discussions about why the bad blood exists instead of attempting to dictate power like an eagle on high.

Sanctions are likely best for things that don't actually require military power to change, like say convincing a nation to release some hostages or stop spying on you or stealing your technology though even there their success rate isn't anything great as can be observed by the fact that American literally sanctions anybody for anything but sure isn't always auto-winning every dispute they get into. However, expecting a country to basically surrender as if you actually invaded them just because you choke off their economic lifeline doesn't work, as clearly shown by the case of North Korea. Even in World War 2, where Japan was literally blockaded to the point where people would've eventually all starved to death, they still ended up dropping the atomic bomb because it likely wouldn't have been fast enough. Without debating on whether the bomb was necessary, suffice to say that even in a war with complete blockade you certainly can't be conclusively sure that Japan would've surrendered in a relatively short time frame, and of course you simply can't do that without already being at war today.

Sanctions obviously hurt the receiving nation a lot but the people who are hurting are the common folks, because military power is not directly proportional to total economic power. Again, if that was the case, the Russians would be of no threat to EU, instead of the current situation where the conventional army of EU likely stands no chance against Russians if US do not intervene (and still need significant intervention). While historically having the population starve to death indeed does bring regime change, this usually happens in the context of natural disaster or some kind of government incompetence. When the source is external all that does is rally people against the outsiders. I guess people in US government have this fantasy that a bunch of peasants will overthrow the country's leadership and then surrender to US, but that really only works if the peasants are secretly supported by a major power and given the large ideological difference between NK/Iran and US it'd be pretty hard to even have a plausible denial here. It really doesn't take much to keep the military guys fed and in a fighting state while letting the population starve, so it's not like you're even really doing anything to soften up the defenses. Yes given long enough of a time frame maybe you can eventually do an equivalent of a slow genocide but that's hardly something to be proud of, and if North Korea is of any indication, trying to slowly starve everyone to death doesn't even work that well in terms of weakening the nation's power. All you really do is pile up a lot of body counts for the guys who wouldn't have mattered in the actual war.

Like I said - sanctions weaken, but they do not destroy.

The U.S. sanctioned Cuba for decades; it did little but give Castro a lot of power by giving the Cubans a great imperialist enemy to point fingers at.

I believe in military sanctions against Iran and NK - no matter how these "historic" conferences go, the selling of military or arms-related technology to countries that have stated in the past a desire to destroy the States is still a pretty bad idea.

I'm not in favor of commercial sanctions, though, as non-military sanctions are likely to just further impoverish the people - not the ayatollahs or the Kim cult - and perpetuate the isolation and military standoffs.