Vahid Salemi/AP Photo
A COVID-19 patient breathes with an oxygen mask at Amir Al-Momenin Hospital in the Iranian city of Qom, south of the capital Tehran, September 15, 2021.
As President Biden took office in January, a complex lattice of U.S. sanctions hampered the ability of Iranians to get access to basic COVID treatments and supplies, like syringes, infusion pumps, and testing kits. Desperate doctors had been forced to plead with global audiences for relief.
While the full pandemic-era toll of U.S. sanctions is difficult to track, the Brookings Institution estimated that, between May and September of 2020, U.S. sanctions were responsible for an additional 13,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Iran alone. The full devastation is likely much greater, as U.S. sanctions have been dramatically ratcheting upward around the world in recent years. Two decades ago, there were 912 designations in place internationally; today there are more than 9,000.
Initially, there were indicators that these harsh policies might change. The day after Biden was inaugurated, he issued a review of how U.S. sanctions are “unduly hindering responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.” That very day, at her nomination hearing, Janet Yellen said the Treasury “will conduct a careful review of sanctions to ensure that they are targeted, effective, and minimize unintended consequences.” And then in March, a senior official said a review of the sanctions program was ongoing.
Biden says he wants to reorient his foreign policy away from the “forever wars” he repeatedly denounced on the campaign trail. But on the issue of sanctions, the administration has been downright retrograde, and it’s impossible to turn the page from forever wars without halting these cruel policies.
During a global pandemic, a time when the U.S. should be acting with compassion, the imposition of sanctions regimes takes on a particular moral repugnance. Members of Congress like Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and grassroots leaders across the U.S. and the world understand sanctions to constitute war by other means. This form of economic warfare only makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone: Any policy that worsens the outbreak anywhere threatens public health everywhere, as uncontrolled outbreaks lead to new and more dangerous variants.
During a global pandemic, a time when the U.S. should be acting with compassion, the imposition of sanctions regimes takes on a particular moral repugnance.
Stunning cruelty defined former President Trump’s advancement of devastating sanctions. In Iran, Trump began ramping up draconian, unilateral sanctions in 2018 after withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
These sanctions wreaked havoc on Iran’s economy, cut off vital medical supplies well before the pandemic, and spooked many businesses and banks from doing any business at all with the country. This suffering was not incidental to U.S. policy—it was the point.
In Venezuela, the Trump administration significantly escalated sanctions. The consequences have been devastating. A paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank, determined that Trump-era sanctions on the country were responsible for an estimated 40,000 excess deaths from 2017 to 2018.
But throughout the pandemic, these Trump-era policies took on new severity. There are signs that U.S. sanctions are hindering the ability of Cuba to obtain syringes needed to administer vaccines, as Natasha Hakimi Zapata reported in August. Some of Venezuela’s initial payments to COVAX, the global vaccine distribution effort, appear to have been blocked by U.S. sanctions, although those payments were eventually delivered. Populations devastated by pandemic-era hardship, meanwhile, also have economy-strangling sanctions to contend with.
Any delay in unwinding these sanctions means more lives lost, particularly as the COVID pandemic rages. On September 7, more than seven months after Biden’s initial policy review, 47 peace and humanitarian organizations sent a letter urging the Biden administration “to implement significant and structural changes to U.S. sanctions policy.” Activist groups still held out hope that a policy review could play a role in bringing the U.S. closer to granting sanctions relief.
But the Treasury Department’s 2021 Sanctions Review, released this month, was not a ray of hope but a crushing, short, and vacuous report.
Based on interviews with “hundreds of sanctions stakeholders,” the report outlines five steps that should be taken to “adapt and modernize the underlying operational architecture by which sanctions are deployed.” Yet the recommendations are so vague and generic they approach meaninglessness. Worst of all, they are still predicated on the assumption that sanctions regimes should remain in place, but simply be “improved.” The report does nothing to criticize the harsh sanctions regimes Biden inherited from Trump, nor indicate any intention to pivot away from those policies.
Remarkably, it does not mention the COVID pandemic that Biden initially cited as the impetus for conducting such a report in the first place. Those agitating for sanctions relief are alarmed. “This seems like someone procrastinated on a homework assignment and wrote it the night before,” said Cavan Kharrazian from the advocacy organization Demand Progress.
As long as sanctions are in place, people’s basic needs—from food to medicine to financial stability—will be under threat.
The report isn’t just short but ambiguous. The report has a section on the need to “modernize” sanctions, which may, on its face, seem like a good thing, but actually just amounts to a call for further investment in sanctions. In this case, modernization means more resources and personnel devoted to sanctions enforcement and infrastructure.
One of the calls for “improvements” is almost darkly comical: The report urges an updated and less cumbersome website “to offer clearer guidance to better support humanitarian groups and regulated entities, as well as sanctions targets themselves.” I’m sure Iranians desperately seeking care for their loved ones would find comfort knowing the Treasury Department wants to update the website.
The document also includes a section about the need for “multilateral coordination” among “allies,” which includes “advocating for UN sanctions when possible and appropriate to ensure global applicability of restrictive measures and amplify messaging.” This, however, appears aimed at better enforcing sanctions—not easing them. The report also urges better communication and coordination with “stakeholders affected by the use of financial sanctions,” but offers few details on what this would entail. Those advocating for the dismantling of sanctions are clearly not among the stakeholders taken seriously in the report.
The Treasury report does include a section on “Calibrating sanctions to mitigate unintended economic, political, and humanitarian impact,” but this, too, is vague.
While it’s positive that the report calls for more humanitarian exemptions, for example, these exemptions alone cannot relieve the associated humanitarian crises. Humanitarian exemptions on paper mean little where there is a climate of intimidation and fear surrounding transactions and aid to sanctioned countries. Many businesses and institutions over-comply and halt interactions, due to this fear alone. The grim reality is that, as long as sanctions are in place, people’s basic needs—from food to medicine to financial stability—will be under threat.
Ultimately, the best way to ease the harmful impacts of sanctions is to get rid of them. But that option is not even considered in the Treasury report. One of the few data points that is included shows a dramatic increase of sanctions use over the past 21 years. Yet this huge increase is not even necessarily presented as a bad thing.
In fact, there are no criticisms whatsoever of U.S. sanctions policy, nor acknowledgment of the continuities from the Trump to the Biden administration. This is despite the fact that the Biden administration has escalated some of Trump’s hard-line policies; in Cuba, for example, the Biden administration announced new sanctions in August. The report only contains “successful” examples, starting with sanctions imposed on Iran ahead of the 2015 nuclear deal.
That the Biden administration is unwilling to criticize the maximum-pressure campaign put forth by Trump gives the current White House leeway in continuing the failed approach. “There’ve been some tweaks on some general licenses,” says Kharrazian, “but in general, when it comes to the biggest broad-based sanctions, nothing has changed for Venezuela, and maximum-pressure sanctions are still very much on in Iran. All the major sanctions are pretty much the same as under Trump.”
According to Treasury officials, the lack of self-reflection was by design. At an October 19 hearing about the report, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) asked Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo for “one or two specific examples” of where U.S. sanctions have been ineffective, in order to “improve the statutes that govern these policies.” Adeyemo replied, “The review was focused on the idea of us looking into the future.” He added, “We did not spend time looking at the individual sanctions policies.”
As the pandemic continues its ruinous path, there is so much the United States should be doing and is not: aggressively pushing for the suspension of patent rules and redistributing resources to get as many vaccines in as many arms as possible. Stopping the harms of sanctions is such an obvious and bare-minimum measure, one that simply requires the U.S. to halt doing a bad thing. Every day the Biden administration does not urgently support sanctions relief, lives are being lost, and senseless violence is being enacted. When it comes to the domestic agenda, the left is finally part of the conversation. But internationally, we’re still talking about reports and reviews, not the material dismantling of the sanctions regimes that are inflicting tremendous cruelty, at a time when we should be responding with solidarity and open arms.
