Effectiveness within the domain is not the same as strategic success.
Sanctions have become the instrument of first resort for Western statecraft in a way that would have surprised observers of the system even fifteen years ago. The apparatus that was constructed to manage financial pressure on Iran, and then deployed against Russia with unprecedented scale in 2022, has been extended to Venezuela, Belarus, Myanmar, and a range of secondary actors. The infrastructure of economic coercion — secondary sanctions, entity listings, correspondent banking restrictions — has grown into a vast and complex system.
The system works. Within its domain, it is effective at what it does: excluding targeted actors from dollar-denominated financial infrastructure, restricting access to specific goods, creating real costs for sanctioned economies. The costs borne by Russia since 2022 are substantial. The denial of specific technologies has created real constraints.
But effectiveness within the domain is not the same as strategic success. The strategic question is whether the costs imposed produce the political changes sought. On this measure, the record is considerably more mixed. Sanctioned regimes have demonstrated a consistent capacity to adapt, substitute, and endure at costs that their political systems absorb more readily than anticipated.
The deeper structural shift is in the international financial architecture itself. The extensive use of dollar-based financial coercion has accelerated existing trends toward alternatives — not because the alternatives are competitive, but because the incentive to develop them has sharpened. The renminbi's share of international settlement is rising from a low base. Bilateral currency agreements are multiplying. The system is not fragmenting rapidly, but the direction is visible.
Sanctions work best as targeted measures against specific actors within a system whose rules they depend on. They work least well as comprehensive tools of regime change against states with significant resources and external support. The geography of sanctions has expanded. Their strategic yield has not expanded with it.
