The debate over tightening sanctions against Iran is once again taking center stage. But it is taking place in a reality in which Tehran itself is using economic and strategic tools to exert pressure on its rivals. The Strait of Hormuz has become a major lever of pressure against the United States, and the threat to shipping routes in the region is expanding the confrontation into global trade and energy markets.
Against this backdrop, it is easy to assume that further tightening of sanctions will increase the pressure to the point where the Iranian regime will be forced to change its policies.
Yet history and economic research offer a more complex answer. There is no doubt that sanctions can cause damage. They can reduce exports, cut banks off from the international payments system, make it harder to obtain technologies, and reduce government revenues. The more interesting question is whether economic damage actually achieves the stated purpose for which sanctions are imposed: bringing about a change in policy decisions?
What Counts as Success for Sanctions?
To assess the effectiveness of sanctions, it is first necessary to define what they are intended to achieve. Sometimes the goal is denial of capability: preventing a country from acquiring chips, missile components, equipment for a nuclear industry, or military technology.
But sometimes the goal is deterrence: persuading a leadership to refrain from taking an action it is considering. In other cases, the aim is coercion: inducing a country that has already chosen a particular policy to change it. And sometimes the objective is even more ambitious: destabilizing the regime or bringing about domestic political change.
A sanction can succeed by one measure and fail completely by another. An embargo that makes it harder for a country to produce weapons may be effective even if its leadership does not change its policy. Conversely, a severe recession in the target country does not prove that sanctions have achieved their political objective. This distinction lies at the heart of a scholarly debate that has continued for decades.
The research literature reveals disagreement even over the facts: the number of times sanctions have succeeded. One of the most comprehensive and influential studies in the field is Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, by economists and researchers Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly Elliott, and Barbara Oegg. In its third edition, the authors examined around 170 cases of sanctions since World War I. Their work led to a relatively optimistic conclusion: under certain conditions, economic sanctions can contribute to achieving political objectives. But the findings sparked intense debate.
Researcher Robert Pape reexamined the cases classified as successes in the earlier study. He argued that in many cases, the change attributed to sanctions was actually the result of military force, other political developments, or factors that could not be attributed to sanctions. After applying stricter criteria, he argued that only five of the 115 cases he examined could be considered convincing successes of economic coercion. The enormous gap between the conclusions is not merely a statistical dispute. It exposes a fundamental problem: it is extremely difficult to isolate the impact of sanctions. Countries do not operate in a laboratory. Alongside sanctions, diplomatic pressure, military threats, economic incentives, and domestic political changes are often brought to bear.
A later study, the Global Sanctions Data Base, mapped bilateral and multilateral sanctions around the world from 1950 onward. The researchers found that sanctions do indeed hurt trade, particularly when they involve broad restrictions, but also that success rates vary greatly depending on the type of sanction and the objective. A meta-analysis published in 2025 that reviewed 37 studies conducted over more than three decades reached an illuminating conclusion: even after decades of research, there is no clear scholarly consensus on the extent to which some of the factors thought to determine whether sanctions succeed actually have an impact. In other words, the question “Do sanctions work?” is too simplistic.
The Most Successful Sanction Is the One Never Imposed
There is another interesting methodological problem in the research question. Researcher Daniel Drezner has pointed to what is known as the “selection problem”: if a country believes that the sanctions it is likely to face will be extremely painful, it may give in simply in response to the threat of imposing them. In such a case, the sanctions are never actually imposed, and therefore the success does not appear in a database of “successful sanctions.”
By contrast, the sanctions we actually see are sometimes precisely those that were imposed because the threatened country had already decided that it was prepared to bear the cost. This creates a paradox: examining sanctions that were actually imposed may make them appear less effective than they really are. The Arab oil embargo imposed on Israel in 1973 is an excellent example of the gap between the scale of economic damage and the political outcome. Following the Yom Kippur War and U.S. aid to Israel, Arab oil-exporting countries imposed an embargo on the United States and other countries and cut production. The price of a barrel of oil rose from around $2.90 before the embargo to approximately $11.65 in January 1974, almost fourfold.
The impact on the global economy was enormous. The energy crisis contributed to inflation and economic slowdown and brought about a long-term shift in the energy policies of Western countries. But the stated political objective was far more ambitious. The Arab countries demanded, among other things, an Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967. That objective was not achieved through the embargo.
At the same time, defining the embargo simply as a “failure” would also be simplistic. It demonstrated the newfound power of oil-exporting countries, changed global energy relations, and increased the urgency of diplomacy in Washington. The West, for its part, responded by improving energy efficiency, developing alternative sources, and reducing its future vulnerability.
In other words, the sanction changed the world, but not necessarily in the way its initiators intended.
Iraq: The Economy Collapsed, Saddam Did Not Withdraw
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the UN imposed a particularly comprehensive sanctions regime on Baghdad.
The impact on the Iraqi economy was enormous. But Saddam Hussein did not decide to withdraw from Kuwait because of the economic cost. The withdrawal was forced after the military campaign by the international coalition. Even in the years that followed, Saddam’s regime survived under severe sanctions.
On the other hand, the picture here too is more complex. The sanctions and international monitoring limited Iraq’s ability to rebuild some of its military capabilities. Therefore, anyone who defines their objective as “bringing down Saddam” will see them as a failure; anyone who also considers them as a tool of containment may reach a different conclusion. The Iraqi case also illustrates a central moral problem: sometimes the regime succeeds in shifting much of the cost onto the population.
South Africa: Sanctions Helped, Partially
South Africa is often presented as one of the great successes of sanctions. For years, the apartheid regime faced an arms embargo, trade and investment restrictions, cultural and sporting boycotts, and financial pressure. Eventually, the apartheid regime fell.
Yet historical research finds it difficult to attribute the outcome to sanctions alone. Studies indicate that in the early stages, some sanctions even helped the regime rally support and adapt. Only in the 1980s, when South Africa was already facing an economic crisis, strong domestic opposition, labor mobilization, and profound political changes, did the intensification of external isolation contribute to pressure on the ruling elite. The conclusion is not that sanctions did not work. It is that they worked as part of a much broader system of pressures.
Libya: Successful Sanctions
The Libyan case is a particularly important test of the claim that sanctions do not succeed. Following the Lockerbie bombing, international sanctions were imposed on Libya. Over the years, its political and economic isolation intensified. Tripoli eventually entered negotiations with the United States and Britain. The Libyans were presented with a clear deal: concrete steps on their part would lead to the removal of sanctions. In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi announced that Libya was abandoning its weapons of mass destruction programs and allowed international inspectors access to its facilities.
It is difficult to prove that sanctions alone brought about the decision. Diplomatic pressure, security concerns, and positive incentives all played a role. But that is precisely why the case is important: sanctions were not a strategy in themselves. They created a cost, while at the same time a clear path was offered for removing it. This is probably one of the most important formulas for successful economic coercion: not only a stick, but also a clear way out for those willing to change their behavior.
Iran: An Ambiguous Success
Iran may be the best example of the difficulty of determining whether sanctions “worked.” The sanctions that were intensified at the beginning of the previous decade had a significant impact. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Iranian oil exports fell from around 2.5 million barrels per day in 2012 to approximately 1.1 million, a decline of almost 60%. Iranian banks were cut off from large parts of the global financial system, and access to oil revenues was restricted.
The pressure was one of the factors that brought Iran to negotiations that culminated in the 2015 nuclear agreement. If the objective was to bring Iran to the negotiating table and persuade it to accept significant restrictions on its nuclear program, the sanctions contributed to achieving that goal. But if the objective was to resolve the Iranian nuclear threat once and for all, it is clear that the result was far more limited. This is precisely the difference between a tactical achievement and a strategic solution. Sanctions can create leverage. They do not guarantee that an agreement reached through that leverage will hold forever.
North Korea: Sanctions Without Civilian Impact
The North Korean case represents the other extreme. Pyongyang has been under heavy international sanctions for years, yet it has continued to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. A study published in 2024 in Global Studies Quarterly points to several reasons: the ability to circumvent sanctions, uneven enforcement by other countries, and the regime’s ability to develop trade and diplomatic networks that reduce its isolation.
North Korea also demonstrates how difficult it is to force a leadership to give up something it regards as a guarantee of its survival.
From the perspective of the Kim regime, nuclear weapons are no longer simply an economic project that can be exchanged for benefits. They are viewed as a vital strategic asset. The more important the objective that sanctions seek to change is to the regime, the greater the price it is willing to make its citizens pay to preserve it.
Russia: Inflicting Damage Without Succeeding
Western sanctions against Russia began following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and were dramatically expanded after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They restricted access to capital, technologies, components, and certain markets, while increasing the costs of trade and war. But they did not cause Russia to return Crimea, nor did they lead the Kremlin to abandon the war.
Moscow adapted. Some trade was redirected to China, India, and other countries; mechanisms for payments and sanctions evasion were developed; and energy trade was redirected to new markets. The fact that the Russian economy did not collapse does not prove that the sanctions have had no impact. The very need for circumvention networks, intermediaries, a “shadow fleet,” discounts on oil, and longer import routes imposes real costs on Russia.
But once again, the gap between two different tests becomes apparent: increasing the cost of war is not the same as causing Putin to end it.
Sanctions on the Regime or on the Citizen?
The debate over sanctions is not only a question of effectiveness, but also of how the cost is distributed. The political assumption behind broad sanctions is often that economic deterioration will create internal pressure on the government. But authoritarian regimes can control the distribution of foreign currency, food, energy, and jobs and protect groups close to them. At the same time, sanctions can harm citizens who have no real influence over the regime’s policies.
Studies have found a link between sanctions regimes and deterioration in social and health indicators. An international study published in 2025 in The Lancet Global Health examined the relationship between international sanctions and mortality across age groups in different countries. Even when food and medicine are formally exempted, a phenomenon known as “overcompliance” can occur: banks, insurance companies, and shipping companies avoid perfectly legal transactions because they fear running afoul of the sanctions regime. Therefore, measuring success by the depth of a recession or the decline in living standards can be misleading. Significant economic damage does not necessarily amount to a significant strategic achievement. Sanctions also have another, long-term effect. When countries know that their access to the dollar, the Western financial system, or Western markets could be blocked, they invest in building alternatives.
Russia has deepened its economic ties with China and other countries. Iran has spent years developing networks to circumvent restrictions on oil exports. Countries are making greater use of intermediaries, shell companies, vessels operating under changing flags, and alternative payment systems. This does not mean that sanctions do not hurt them. On the contrary: the very need to build circumvention systems is evidence of the cost they impose. But as alternative systems develop, some of the leverage available to those imposing the sanctions may erode.
So When Do Sanctions Work?
Historical experience does not provide a simple formula, but it points to several conditions that recur time and again: the chances of success are higher when the objective is limited and clearly defined; when the target country is highly economically dependent on the countries imposing the sanctions; when there is a broad international coalition that makes circumvention difficult; when the demand is not perceived as a threat to the regime’s very survival; and when, alongside the cost, there is a credible path toward removing it in return for a change in behavior.
By contrast, the chances are lower when an authoritarian regime is being asked to give up an objective it regards as vital to its security, when large alternative markets exist, when sanctions can be circumvented, and when the country’s leaders have no reason to believe that even if they give in, the pressure will actually be removed. There is another important lesson: sometimes the most effective sanctions are precisely those that never need to be imposed. If the threat is credible and the expected cost is high enough, the other side may compromise before they take effect.
Will Sanctions Against Iran Succeed?
This is also where the current debate over Iran needs to begin. The question is not whether Iran’s economy can be subjected to further damage. It can. The question is what exactly that damage is supposed to achieve. If the goal is to make it harder to acquire certain components, reduce oil revenues, or restrict access to technology, the sanctions can be assessed using relatively clear metrics. If the goal is to bring Iran to the negotiating table, history shows that economic pressure can help. But if the goal is to cause the Iranian leadership to completely abandon an objective it regards as vital to its security, its regional standing, or the survival of the regime, the burden of proof is far higher.
And the current reality adds a new dimension: Iran itself holds economic levers of pressure through the Strait of Hormuz and regional trade routes. This creates a situation in which both sides are trying to inflict economic pain on each other and translate it into political concessions. Therefore, the strategic question is not “How many more sanctions can be imposed?” but rather: What behavior are we seeking to change, what cost would cause the leadership to change it, and what are we offering in return if it does so? Sanctions are not useless. Nor does the claim that they always work stand up to historical scrutiny. They are a tool. Sometimes a powerful tool, sometimes a blunt one, and sometimes a tool that produces results entirely different from those its initiators intended to achieve.
The real test of a sanctions policy is not how many banks were cut off, how many billions were lost, or how many new packages were announced. It is simpler and more difficult: What did we ask the rival state to do, and as a result of the pressure we brought to bear on it, did it actually do so?
