From a ban on Russian oil imports to McDonald’s closure of restaurants, economic sanctions have been an important part of the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Benjamin Coates, associate professor of history, is currently conducting research for a book that will examine the U.S. and economic sanctions since WWI. Coates is a historian of U.S. foreign relations, whose first book examined the relationship between international law and empire. In the following Q&A, he explains how sanctions have been used in the past, how they are being used against Russia and the impact they are likely to have.
How has the U.S. used economic sanctions in the past?
The United States has relied on sanctions more than any other country in the world since World War II. These have ranged from cutoffs of foreign aid or arms sales (or threats thereof) to full-scale embargoes. In recent years the country has turned to sanctions even more frequently. Under the Obama administration about 500 people or organizations were added to sanctions lists every year; during the Trump presidency this number nearly doubled. Reliance on sanctions reflects in part the centrality of the dollar to global trade and finance, which allows the U.S. to block transactions around the world. But it also reflects a certain mindset that sanctions are easy to impose and relatively cost-free from the perspective of the United States. The rise of “targeted sanctions” in the 1990s also gave the impression that it was possible to use sanctions in a way that hurt only the “bad guys” while causing minimal collateral damage.
What is different now?
What’s dramatic about the current sanctions is just how far-reaching they are and how quickly they’ve been imposed. Never before—outside of the World Wars—has a country with an economy the size of Russia’s been subject to this level of economic coercion. And not only has the U.S. acted, but the EU, Japan, the UK, and even Switzerland have jumped…
