The use of sanctions as a tool of foreign and international policy increased dramatically in the 20th century. Yet as the crumbling sanctions on Iraq show, their track record in ensuring compliance is pitiful. They inflict pain on ordinary citizens while imposing questionable costs on leaders who are enriched and strengthened on the back of their impoverished and oppressed people.
As the use of force for the pursuit of national goals became increasingly anathema to the modern conscience, the international community placed ever more normative, legislative and operational restrictions on the recourse to war. Coercive economic sanctions developed as a conceptual and policy bridge between diplomacy and force. Yet their track record in ensuring compliance with Security Council resolutions was described by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as "uneven" in his Millennium Report.
In a debate in the U.N. Security Council in April 2000, not one country was prepared to offer unqualified support for the existing system and practice of sanctions. France and Russia called in vain for sunset clauses in sanctions resolutions, which would require complete reviews rather than periodic rollovers of sanctions once imposed by the Council. The United States took the contrary position, arguing that sanctions should remain in place until the target regime changes behavior. Considering that the U.S. imposed sanctions more than 100 times over the 20th century, this was not surprising. What is surprising is that Washington should persist with a policy of trying to destroy economies and destabilize governments by resorting to a tool that has almost never worked.