A third of the world’s nations are under some form of US sanctions, and bureaucrats in Washington can no longer handle the workload of maintaining such a complex web of economic penalties, the Washington Post has reported.
When the US Treasury Department first started to use economic sanctions against Washington’s adversaries in the 1990s, its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) worked from a single conference room, and according to a Washington Post feature published on Thursday, was primarily responsible for tasks like “blocking American sales of Cuban cigars.”
The use of sanctions exploded after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, however, and the US now imposes three times more sanctions than any other country or international organization. These penalties target “a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations,” the newspaper noted, including 60% of the world’s low-income countries.
In the US, this sanctions explosion has created chaos at OFAC’s offices, two anonymous sources told the newspaper. According to the sources, OFAC struggles to process “tens of thousands of requests from the private sector,” as companies seek to avoid criminal charges for sanctions violations, while the White House has reportedly outsourced decisions on what individuals and entities to sanction to nonprofits and think-tanks.
Meanwhile, demands by OFAC staffers to rein in the use of sanctions have been shot down by higher-ups at both the Treasury and State departments, the Post’s sources claimed.
“The abuse of this system is ridiculous, but it’s not Treasury or OFAC’s fault,” Caleb McCarry, a former State Department official, told the newspaper. “They want relief from this relentless, never-ending, you-must-sanction-everybody-and-their-sister, sometimes literally, system,” he continued, adding that “it is way, way overused, and it’s become out of control.”
US Sanctions often fail to achieve their intended goal. George W. Bush’s sanctions on North Korea failed to stop Pyongyang developing nuclear weapons; Barack Obama’s sanctions on Syria failed to remove Bashar Assad from power; Donald Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela failed to incite the overthrow of Nicolas Maduro; and Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia – numbering more than 6,000 in two years – have failed to bring an end to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.
While a major power like Russia has weathered these sanctions and continued to grow its economy, other nations have not been so fortunate. Starvation has been an ever-present threat in North Korea since the late 1990s, while Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela caused a major economic contraction and have been blamed for the deaths of up to 40,000 people between 2017 and 2019.
“The mentality, almost a weird reflex, in Washington has just become: If something bad happens, anywhere in the world, the US is going to sanction some people. And that doesn’t make sense,” Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to Barack Obama, told the Washington Post. “We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral damage of war, but we should.”