The United States frequently uses sanctions or embargoes to rein in malign actors. When policymakers become dissatisfied with the results, they often embrace military action next. Washington, for example, applied sanctions on Iraq for more than a decade before invading the country in 2003. It did the same with Iran, using sanctions to pressure the government into nuclear negotiations in the 2010s and then, after withdrawing from the resulting agreement in 2018, going to war with Tehran in February 2026.

Washington follows this pattern of behavior because sanctions alone rarely—if ever—make a problem disappear, such as by toppling the government responsible. This frustrates Americans, who tend to seek simple, quick, and permanent fixes to foreign policy problems. Many interpret the persistence of these problems as evidence that sanctions are futile. But the effectiveness of sanctions is measured in crises that do not occur—the nuclear test that never happens, for instance, or the shipping lane that remains undisturbed. These successes are invisible, but an adversary’s continuing provocations are not. As a result, American officials often conclude that it is necessary to turn to war.

This logic reflects a misunderstanding about how sanctions work. Sanctions may not be able to achieve maximalist aims, yet when they are deployed in concert with other policy tools, they can help manage problems. They do this by reliably depressing the target country’s economic growth over time. Although this hurts innocent civilians in the targeted countries as their leaders shift the costs from regime supporters to the politically disenfranchised, no government can escape the inexorable math of slowing economic growth.

If an economy starts out with a three percent growth rate—roughly the global average—it will double in size in around 23 years. But if sanctions reduce annual growth to one percent, doubling in size will take 70 years, three times as long. Just compare the North Korean and South Korean economies, or look at nighttime satellite imagery of the Korean Peninsula, to see the compounding effects of sanctions over generations. Although sanctions may not change the targeted regime’s aspirations, they reduce its financial wherewithal and may deter other governments from emulating the behavior that precipitated the sanctions.

Wars can overthrow adversarial regimes, but usually only after years of fighting, and fixing the damage afterward takes considerable time and money. Too often the United States misidentifies its foreign policy problems as solvable on the cheap. It took an Allied occupation force of over 1.5 million soldiers to garrison Germany, a country of 80 million, after World War II. Fast forward 60 years, and Washington was not interested in raising the numbers of troops necessary to subdue Iraq, a country of nearly 30 million.

Americans today are likewise unwilling to make sacrifices on the scale necessary to vanquish Iran, with its 90 million people—much less China, with its 1.4 billion. The challenges these countries might pose are too large to solve at an acceptable cost. In such cases, sanctions offer an economically sustainable strategy to manage troublesome situations in the long term.

THE FIRST MISTAKE According to the conventional wisdom about sanctions, these measures discourage unsavory behavior by raising its economic costs. If force becomes necessary, they also weaken the adversary in advance of war. This logic has endured since 1935, when the League of Nations sanctioned Italy for invading Ethiopia, in the hope that doing so would induce Italy to call off its invasion or at least temper its ambitions. Yet because the countries imposing sanctions were unwilling to include vital commodities such as oil and coal on the list of sanctioned items, the effort was ineffective.

Sanctions have evolved since 1935. Today, unlike broad sanctions that inflict significant collateral damage, so-called smart sanctions target specific institutions or individuals and are enforced through the banking system, blocking financial transactions linked to sanctioned activities. UN sanctions against Iraq starting in 1990 were, in a sense, the last gasp of the old sanctions regime. Their lifting was contingent on Iraq’s dismantling its weapons of mass destruction program and agreeing to respect Kuwaiti sovereignty.

Because verification of the former proved difficult, many of the sanctions remained in place after a 1991 armistice, and they continued through the 2003 Iraq war. After U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and overthrew Saddam Hussein, it became apparent that the sanctions had been effective. Isolation from the global economy had prevented Iraq from restoring its economy, rebuilding its military, and resuming its development of weapons of mass destruction.

Between the two wars, however, many observers believed that international sanctions were unable to deter Iraqi aggression and neutralize its weapons programs. Worried that Iraq’s Sunni government still posed a threat to Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, the United States, the United Kingdom, and, for a short time, France imposed two no-fly zones over those regions, without UN consent. In 1998, after Baghdad expelled UN weapons inspectors, the United States and the United Kingdom bombed Iraq.

The same year, a group of hawkish scholars and former government officials sent an open letter to U.S. President Bill Clinton describing the sanctions-based Iraq policy as “dangerously inadequate.”Many of these signatories would return to government in the George W. Bush administration to implement their recommendations.

To a certain extent, the critics had a point. Political divisions within the United States and between Washington and its partners had constrained international efforts to contain Saddam. Arab governments may have been wary of hurting their relationships with the United States, but Arab publics were sick of Western imperialism. The growing U.S. military presence in the Middle East further antagonized both the anti-imperialist left and radical Islamists, and many Europeans resented American unilateralism. No government can escape the inexorable math of slowing economic growth.

Saddam also pushed doctored stories about civilian hardship arising from sanctions, which Western journalists readily covered. Iraqi suffering was very real, but it was largely a result of Saddam’s own policies, which channeled resources to his regime rather than to the civilian population. Starting in 1995, the UN’s oil-for-food program allowed Iraq to sell some oil to pay for civilian necessities, but Saddam used the profits to pay kickbacks instead.

He signed lucrative oil deals with China, France, and Russia, enticing these permanent UN Security Council members to weaken their support for sanctions. It was around this time that the UN and civil society groups started calling for smart sanctions, to narrow the scope of economic punishment and avoid causing wide-scale economic pain, although it would take several more years for the United States to refine this tool.

In the meantime, in Iraq, sanctions and no-fly-zone enforcement became increasingly frustrating, costly, and unpopular. Because their main purpose was to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction and funding malign activities such as international terrorism, they required constant vigilance. Then came the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, where a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban regime within months, suggesting that wars—at least those conducted by the highly trained, technologically advanced U.S. military—could solve problems, unlike the sanctions that left dictators in place.

When U.S. President George W. Bush announced the Iraq war on March 19, 2003, he described its goals as “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”This danger was Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and its links to al-Qaeda, the group behind 9/11. At first, Washington intended to leave the task of reconstructing Iraq to the UN, but it had to abandon that strategy five months after the invasion when foreign jihadists bombed the UN’s local headquarters, killing the head of the mission and 22 others. Within weeks, the UN withdrew most of its 600 staff members, leaving the United States fully in charge.

Rather than ending the trouble Iraq caused, occupation created more problems. The war lent credence to al-Qaeda’s accusations that Washington oppressed Muslims, attracting would-be jihadists around the world to join the cause. In 2006, al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a holy site for Shiites, triggered brutal Sunni–Shiite fighting. More than 4,000 Americans lost their lives over the course of the war, while more than 200,000 Iraqis lost theirs.

After the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, much of the Middle East and North Africa went up in flames. Foreign jihadists and remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party formed the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and overran much of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and 2015. U.S.- and Iranian-backed forces gradually and at great cost pushed the group out, but many of its fighters simply took up arms elsewhere. Some went to Sahelian Africa, exacerbating violence there.

Others joined the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. And the refugee crisis sparked in part by the Islamic State’s initial expansion continues to roil Europe.

Whereas war brought spiraling instability to the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, international sanctions were more effective than U.S. policymakers thought. While they were in place, Iraq was unable to build weapons of mass destruction, and it dismantled many of its existing programs to secure sanctions relief. The 2003 war was not nearly as successful and cost far more than sanctions enforcement. Washington went in with the aim of building a free and stable Iraq allied to the United States and Israel, but it quickly became clear that goal was out of reach.

HISTORY REPEATS Another unintended consequence of the war was the unleashing of Iran, which for years Saddam’s Iraq had kept in check. Iran and the United States had been at loggerheads since the Iranian revolution of 1978–79. In November 1979, Washington sanctioned Iran for taking the U.S. embassy’s staff members hostage, lifting them upon the staff’s release in 1981. The Reagan administration reimposed sanctions in 1984 in retaliation for Iran’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, only to violate them by selling arms to Iran (and using the funds to arm anticommunist Nicaraguan rebels, in defiance of Congress) in what became the Iran-contra scandal.

The Clinton administration, concerned about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, added sanctions between 1994 and 1996. After the International Atomic Energy Agency found Iran to be in noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2005, the Bush administration imposed additional sanctions, but they targeted specific entities, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, rather than Iran as a whole to minimize the humanitarian costs. Then, in 2007, the world got behind a UN Security Council resolution sanctioning Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Finally, in 2010 and 2011, the Obama administration, with congressional backing, limited Iran’s ability to sell oil and gas abroad, “virtually grinding the Iranian economy to halt,” as the president bragged.

The growing strength and scope of sanctions contributed to Iran’s election of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, in 2013 and empowered the Iranian factions advocating a negotiated settlement to the nuclear standoff. In 2015, Tehran agreed to a nuclear deal with the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the EU. The agreement capped Iran’s uranium enrichment levels, reduced its operational centrifuge numbers, required Iran to repurpose its nuclear weapons development facilities, and established more rigorous international inspections to verify compliance.

Sanctions relief would occur in tandem with verification over a 15-year period. Thereafter, either the signatories could negotiate a new agreement, or the sanctions would snap back into place. Critics complained, justifiably, that the 2015 deal did not prevent Iran from supporting proxy groups or limit its ballistic missile program. But the deal did offer a sustainable way to delay Iran’s nuclear weapons development and thereby manage the most important problem posed by a hostile Iranian regime.

A more comprehensive solution, however desirable, was not feasible at the time. Too often the United States misidentifies problems as solvable on the cheap.

The United States is discovering, yet again, that military action has delivered a far worse outcome than sanctions. After the first Trump administration withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, Iran restarted its weapons program. The second Trump administration and Israel went to war early this year in an ostensible effort to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions but proved unable to destroy all its nuclear sites. The United States and Israel assassinated Iran’s leadership, including the supreme leader and much of his family, yet the regime remains intact.

Tehran has promised retribution for these killings, and there is no reason to think it will not follow through on the threat. Meanwhile, the war has wreaked global havoc with no end in sight. Iran responded to U.S. and Israeli attacks by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz and striking oil, gas, and military infrastructure across the Middle East. The disruption of exports of petroleum, fertilizer, and helium has contributed to inflation, portends crop shortfalls, and even threatens computer chip shortages in countries around the world.

Although U.S. military casualties remain low, U.S. losses in destroyed infrastructure and depleted munitions stocks amount to billions of dollars, and some of it may be irreplaceable. The American military depends on satellite communications and radar to detect and target incoming enemy missiles and aircraft. Iran has heavily damaged or perhaps destroyed air defense systems the United States and its partners deployed at bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, as well as two satellite communications terminals at a U.S. naval base in Bahrain.

Iranian strikes also destroyed radomes, the outer shells that protect radar antennae, in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The United States has lost at least 43 warplanes, including specialized refueling and surveillance aircraft and a surveillance plane worth $700 million. Many U.S. military bases are now inoperable, including the main regional naval base, in Bahrain. Because U.S. aircraft cannot operate safely from nearby bases, the war effort has relied on distant aircraft carriers positioned in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Seas, where they can avoid the dangers of Iranian missiles, drones, and mines.

Far from removing the Iranian regime, the war has demonstrated that it has the power to hold the global economy hostage. By comparison, the prewar sanctions that devastated Iran’s economy, hobbled its military, and discouraged it from seeking nuclear weapons were a bargain.

THE BEST YOU CAN DO Sanctions have a far better track record than war in managing unsolvable problems at an acceptable price for a protracted period. With sanctions, the target country—including its civilian population, unfortunately—pays the costs. In war, by contrast, the costs are shared by both sides, and the collateral damage can be global, drawing the ire of countries distant from the battlefield.

Managing a problem through sanctions can contain it and contribute, along with other measures, to victory in the long run. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders understood that any military attack on the Soviet Union would trigger a ruinous nuclear war. Instead, they managed the Soviet threat for generations with a strategy of containment, which relied heavily on sanctions that blocked exports—the Soviet economy’s means of earning hard currency—and starved the Communist bloc of high-tech imports.

The United States established the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls for this purpose in 1949, together with Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey would eventually join. To enforce the controls, the 1951 Mutual Assistance Control Act authorized the cutoff of U.S. economic and military aid to violators. East–West trade plummeted.

After the Korean War, Washington reluctantly bowed to European pressure to relax some restrictions. But after détente failed, the Carter and Reagan administrations again limited high-tech exports and tried to block Soviet sales of gas. With sanctions, the target country pays the costs. In war, the costs are shared.

The Soviet Union could never overcome the economic damage from these measures. Sanctions greatly exacerbated the bloc’s preexisting economic weaknesses, such as its prioritization of heavy industry over consumer goods, its isolation from the free exchange of ideas, and its inefficient central planning based on mountains of inaccurate statistics. Soviet residents were left queuing up for subpar consumer goods. By the 1980s, new Soviet leadership concluded that their system could never close the growing economic, technological, and military gap between East and West, and they called off the Cold War.

Economic pressure by no means assures victory. But the alternative, war, rarely works as intended. In Iran today, U.S. leaders are learning that big ships and fast planes can close but not open narrow seas. A war ends when both sides agree it is over, so Iran can prolong the conflict even if the United States wants out. And even if the fighting ends soon, none of the prospective deals the Trump administration has announced to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program improve on the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement.

The now defunct memorandum of understanding that Washington and Tehran signed in June promised to lift sanctions and funnel billions to Iran in return for Iran’s reopening the Strait of Hormuz, possibly with Iranian tollbooths. Before the war, freedom of navigation through the strait was not in question.

There are two ways to end conflicts: either remove the capacity to resist or remove the will. Both sanctions and military action diminish an adversary’s ability to resist, but the bloodshed of war makes it more likely than sanctions to harden will. War, therefore, can make the underlying problem even more difficult to resolve. The cases of Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2026 show that there was a better way. Sanctions alone would not have ended either threat, but even at their least effective, they proved useful at managing both situations, and they did so at a lower cost.

Rather than a silver bullet, sanctions should be understood as a form of diplomatic chemotherapy to shrink the tumor and thereby diminish the threat. Sometimes that is the best option.