Why sanctions almost never do what they are announced to do

27 July 2026 · The Law of Strangulation

A sanctions package is announced with a stated objective: change the behaviour of a government. It is imposed on an economy. Between those two sentences sits the entire problem, and it is a structural one rather than a moral one.

Who is actually playing

The official diagram has two players — the sanctioning coalition and the target government. The real board has at least five.

There is the target government, which controls what remains of the licit economy. There is the population, which absorbs the cost and cannot vote on it in most of the states where this is tried. There is the domestic elite around the government, which is the only group with the means to route around the restrictions and therefore the only group whose relative position improves. There are third-party states that continue trading, whose participation determines whether the measure bites at all. And there are the firms inside the sanctioning coalition, which lose revenue and lobby continuously against the measure they are said to support.

Note who cannot make a choice that changes the outcome: the population. They are not a player. They are the terrain.

What each player is rewarded for

The sanctioning government is rewarded on a domestic clock, and it is rewarded at announcement. The measure is the deliverable. Whether it produces the stated change three years later is somebody else's problem, usually somebody else's job.

The target government is rewarded for survival, and scarcity is useful to it. When goods become scarce, whoever allocates them becomes more powerful, not less. A government that controls import licences in a rationed economy has more leverage over its own business class than it had in an open one.

The domestic elite is rewarded for proximity to that allocation. Sanctions raise the value of being connected. Anyone who can move goods across a closed border earns a margin that did not exist before, and the people who can do that are precisely the people the measure was supposed to punish.

Third-party states are rewarded for buying at a discount. A sanctioned commodity does not stop being wanted; it stops being competitively priced.

The equilibrium

Run those incentives forward and the resting point is legible. The government consolidates. The elite around it enriches itself on the spread. The population becomes poorer and more dependent on the state, which is the only remaining source of allocation. Third parties absorb the redirected trade at a discount. The sanctioning coalition's firms lose the business and their competitors gain it.

Every participant with a choice is doing the sensible thing. The joint outcome is the opposite of the announced one, and it is stable — which is why sanctions regimes routinely outlive the governments that imposed them.

This is the Law of Strangulation seen from the other end. The theory of the measure is that hardship transmits upward: the population suffers, the population pressures the government, the government concedes. That transmission requires a mechanism by which a population can impose a cost on its own rulers. Where such a mechanism exists, the state was not the kind of target that gets sanctioned. Where it does not, the pressure lands and stops.

What would change the game

Three things, and none of them is severity.

The first is coverage. A measure that a large third party declines to enforce is a redirection, not a restriction. The binding variable is the number of available buyers, not the number of prohibited goods.

The second is targeting the allocator rather than the economy. Measures aimed at named individuals and their access to the financial plumbing operate on players who can actually choose. Measures aimed at trade volumes operate on people who cannot.

The third is time horizon. Every player above is playing a longer game than the coalition that imposed the measure, because the coalition changes governments and the target does not. A sanction is an instrument that requires more patience from the impatient party.

The test

Take any long-running sanctions regime you know of. Write down what it was announced to achieve. Write down what it has reliably produced, measured in decades rather than in the communiqué. Then ask whether remedies existed and were refused.

Where the divergence has persisted that long while alternatives were available, the honest reading is not that the instrument failed. It is that the instrument is doing something else, and the announced objective was never the operative one.