There are no swords, just sanctions. To understand this question properly one needs to understand the historical context of colonialism and trade. From the 15th century onward, colonial powers seized new lands and built economies rooted in exploitation and the slave trade. By the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution intensified this process by culminating in the near-total colonization of Africa by 1900; while major non-Western powers like India and China were blocked from independent development by Western control over capital and technology. Further, we observe a phase of de-colonisation post World War II which, unlike what the mainstream narrative says, does not change the essence of imperialism, but changes its manifestations. What we now see is sneaky warfare as opposed to a more brute and direct warfare by the imperialist powers.
Economic sanctions have evolved from limited measures targeting foreign leaders into a central “weapon of economic warfare” used to address a wide range of global conflicts. They have become the West’s preferred alternative to military force, with U.S. usage alone surging roughly 900% over the past two decades. Applied most prominently against Russia, Iran, and China, they have shown a decidedly mixed record, capable of weakening economies and compelling negotiations, but rarely resolving the underlying conflicts they claim to target.
TYPES OF SANCTIONS
- Trade sanctions restrict the flow of goods through three mechanisms: export controls (cutting supply to a target), import restrictions (blocking purchases from a target), and bilateral sanctions (suppressing both simultaneously). Stringency is decisive: complete bilateral sanctions reduce trade by approximately 77%, compared to a far more modest impact from partial measures.
- Because most global trade is dollar-denominated and cleared through US-linked institutions, Washington can effectively destroy a bank’s viability by cutting off its access to the American financial system which is a capability deployed against North Korean and Iranian institutions to disrupt nuclear programmes. The primary instrument is the SDN list, which freezes assets and prohibits any counterparty from transacting with designated individuals or entities. Secondary sanctions extend this pressure further, forcing foreign banks worldwide to choose between continued US financial access and engagement with sanctioned economies.
- While country-specific programmes remain prominent, wherein Russia leads as the world’s most sanctioned state, followed by Iran, Belarus, and North Korea; sanctions architecture has expanded into thematic regimes targeting transnational threats including terrorism, human rights abuses, non-proliferation, and cybercrime. Drug-related sanctions are the most striking recent development, surging 317% between 2022 and 2023 as policy pivoted toward disrupting the chemical precursor supply chains behind synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
- As targets have grown more sophisticated in evading traditional measures, novel instruments have emerged to maintain pressure without destabilising global markets. The G7 oil price cap leverages Western dominance in maritime shipping insurance to cap Russian energy revenue while keeping supply flowing globally. In the digital sphere, the sanctioning of crypto mixers like Tornado Cash targets the anonymising infrastructure adversaries use to evade dollar-based chokepoints. Across all these approaches, the broader strategic preference has shifted toward “smart” list-based sanctions designed to concentrate pressure on decision-makers rather than civilian populations.
SANCTIONS IN PRAXIS: EVIDENCE AND OUTCOMES
From just 52 cases in the 1950s, the number of new sanctions imposed per decade has grown nearly eightfold, reaching 309 in the 2010s and 387 in the partial 2020s, making the current decade on pace to dwarf every previous period in recorded history. The annual case chart makes the inflection point impossible to ignore: for roughly seven decades, new sanctions hovered in a volatile but relatively contained band of 0–50 cases per year. Then, after 2020, the line goes nearly vertical — 103 cases in 2021, 119 in 2022, and 121 in 2023, levels with no historical precedent.
Two structural forces explain the long-run trend. As WTO membership expanded, governments lost conventional trade policy tools and turned to sanctions to pursue foreign objectives. Simultaneously, costly military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan made economic coercion appear a less expensive alternative to force, a dynamic identified as a primary driver of sanctions’ growing popularity as an instrument of foreign policy. The result is a tool that was once reserved for exceptional circumstances becoming the default response to geopolitical friction.
What the 2020s spike captures specifically is the Russia-Ukraine war effect. This conflict triggered the most intensive coordinated sanction campaign in history and effectively reset the baseline for what large-scale economic warfare looks like. The danger embedded in both charts is the same: sanctions are being deployed at historically unprecedented rates at precisely the moment when the empirical evidence on their effectiveness is most pessimistic with success rates falling from approximately 44–51% in the 1980s and 1990s to just 23% in the 2010s, and barely 1% in the 2020s.
The structural reasons for this poor performance are not difficult to identify. Sanctions work best against small, economically vulnerable, politically unstable targets with modest, well-defined objectives and they work best in coalitions. The major-power conflicts so far satisfy almost none of these conditions.
Two longer-run risks compound this immediate effectiveness problem. The first is humanitarian. Despite the shift toward “smart” targeted measures, the civilian populations of sanctioned states continue to bear a disproportionate burden, a pattern documented in Venezuela, Iran, and beyond; the political elites whose behaviour sanctions are designed to change retain their assets and authority. The second is structural. The aggressive weaponization of dollar-based financial architecture is generating a rational and measurable incentive among a growing number of states to build alternative financial systems that reduce their exposure to US coercive leverage. Every secondary sanction imposed, every bank cut off from SWIFT, every asset freeze broadened to include third-country actors adds another argument for de-dollarisation. The chokepoints that make American sanctions so powerful today are being eroded, slowly but systematically, by the very frequency with which they are used.
