Sanctions are penalties that the United States has been using for decades—ranging from economic to diplomatic to military—in the hopes of accomplishing its foreign policy goals. However, these penalties in their current and most common form raise several concerns, most notably hurting innocent citizens and being unproductive incentives for amending global issues.

Sanctions, as they are presently, typically target a country or government as a whole. For example, if the U.S. wants to pressure a country into ceasing human rights violations, it might ban certain exports from that country to harm that country’s economy. Although this may seem practical, it ultimately hurts the lower- and middle-class citizens; when the economy worsens, the people who suffer are those who have nothing to do with the issues, while the perpetrators of the human rights abuses have the financial means to escape punishment. Thus, the sanctions rarely disincentivize immoral actions, because the fatalities are the already powerless victims of their country’s regime. 

In the last decade, the United States attempted to create legislation that would not have this effect. The Magnitsky Act implemented sanctions on the financial assets of specific Russian elites that had committed human rights abuses. On the surface, this seems to solve the aforementioned issues because such sanctions only negatively affect those who were in the supposed “moral wrong.” However, with deeper analysis, it is evident that the act also has the same detrimental effects on ordinary Russian citizens—albeit more mild. The Russian elites can no longer use their money, or they already transferred it out of the country before the Magnitsky Act took place. In either case, their wealth is no longer contributing to the Russian economy and everyone in the country is worse off. Although the Magnitsky Act attempted to solve some issues with economic sanctions—and was at least partly successful—it still did not remedy the entire problem.

Additionally, decades of failed penalties clearly show a precedent that they are simply ineffective at achieving the desired goal. Even sanctions that gained substantial international support couldn’t force Iran to agree to a long-term nuclear deal, nor did they thwart Fidel Castro’s authoritarian regime in Cuba. More recently, the U.S. has implemented sanctions against military officials in Myanmar after a coup in 2019— these were meant to establish a stable democratic government with no future rebellions. Nevertheless, not even two years later, Myanmar underwent yet another coup in February 2021 involving many of the same military officials sanctioned for the original one. Inflicting even more sanctions on Myanmar, as the U.S. somehow contemplated doing, would have been completely pointless given how futile they were in 2019. 

Sanctions are often enforced with good intent. However, their current form should not be implemented. To achieve their foreign policy goals, the United States and the entire global community must look for new methods to find incentives for other nations. After all, what’s the point of implementing policies that merely perpetuate the same problems they were created to solve?