"Their economy collapsed (...) This is economic statecraft, no shots fired," U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said about Iran's nationwide protests at Davos in January 2026.
The triumphalism was unmistakable, and increasingly common among Western policymakers who have watched sanctions evolve from a diplomatic afterthought into the centerpiece of American grand strategy.
From aspirational tool to effective weapon
At the dawn of the liberal world order, when economic decay induced partly by an American arms race ended the USSR, sanctions had emerged as the weapon of a new era whereby Western elites could reshape the world in their liberal image through non-kinetic means.
They were framed as an ethical and inexpensive alternative to war, surgically operating on despots' incentive models by imposing reputational costs and coercing them into certain actions.
The decades following the 1990s have profusely shown sanctions do not work in this manner.
Dictators have rarely folded under restrictive measures, while sanctions regimes have morphed less into a function of diplomacy than a form of deferred warfare.
Violence is not avoided but displaced into time, and costs are not eliminated but dropped onto civilian populations.
Yet this shift matters precisely because sanctions are no longer judged by whether they change regime behaviour quickly or even topple regimes at all.
They are judged by whether they weaken adversaries over time, limit their external reach and reduce their strategic options.
On those terms, proponents have been vindicated and might be encouraged to plunge the world into more societal debasement, despotic tyranny, and more conflict down the line.
Sanctions as strategic attrition
Modern sanctions are best understood as a strategic patience mechanism which may look performative in the short term but prove highly efficient when rolled over decades by the issuer of the world's reserve currency.
Unlike shock and awe, they aim for attrition and degrade state capacity gradually while avoiding escalation, troop deployment, or domestic political backlash.
Their timeline is long by design; ten to twenty years is not a bug but the maturation period. This temporal displacement allows the U.S. to apply pressure continuously while remaining formally at peace.
There is no invasion to justify, no body bags to explain, no exit strategy to defend. The costs accumulate elsewhere, slowly and quietly.
Since sanctions are given an almost infinite timeframe to operate, the metric for their success becomes elastic.
A regime does not need to fall for sanctions to work. A weakened, inward-looking, distracted state already counts as a win.
Such a state projects less power, absorbs fewer resources, and poses fewer systemic risks. This explains why sanctions persist even when regimes survive for decades.
Failure is reinterpreted as insufficient pressure, humanitarian collapse is reframed as evidence of effectiveness, and time itself becomes proof of inevitability.
This self-validating logic makes sanctions politically addictive. They are low-visibility, require no congressional war authorization, and generate constant action through renewals and expansions.
Accountability is deferred indefinitely, and the political class can signal toughness without bearing the immediate costs of military intervention.
Hollowing out state capacity
Sanctions rarely cause immediate state collapse.
Governments persist and formal politics continue, but institutional capacity erodes beneath the surface as the sanctioned country effectively enters a parallel world.
The latest products may still be available on the market, but overall technology, know-how, and productivity fall behind international standards as foreign firms exit and trade partners contract.
