Abstract

In the early 1980s, when Secretary of State George Shultz deplored “light switch diplomacy”, and President Ronald Reagan criticized Jimmy Carter for restricting US agricultural exports to Russia, it seemed that economic sanctions would become a less prominent feature of international affairs. Quite the contrary happened, starting in the Reagan Administration. The imposition of sanctions not only proliferated. There were some 20 on-going sanctions cases in 1960, but by 2014 the figure reached 170 cases (Felbermayr et al 2019). The 3rd edition of Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (Hufbauer et al., 2009) covered episodes through 2000, and that year will serve as the point of departure when asking “What's New?” in this essay. Roughly, this essay looks at the evolution of sanction over the past two decades, but with greater emphasis on more recent events. New technology has enabled the nature of sanctions to be expanded from traditional trade restrictions to finance, travel and contract cancellation measures. Not only states but also non-state actors have become senders as well as targets of sanction. New actors and new weapons tend to produce new goals of sanctions, compared to traditional actors and weapons. Excellent analysis and a meticulously collected sanction database – presented at the workshop “Sanctions: Theory, Quantitative Evidence, and Policy Implication,” in Drexel University, Philadelphia in April 2019 – are surveyed to highlight potential venues for future research on sanctions regimes. Finally, the New Cold War between the United States and China has dramatically altered the landscape of sanctions by blurring the line between commercial and political diplomacy. The new landscape is now straining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). America's allies in NATO have become targets of US secondary sanctions, intended to punish Iran and China. WTO commercial rules have been superseded by “national security” trade restrictions. The evolution of sanctions that merge security and economic spheres challenges the survival of those organizations. Hence, the essay is divided into five parts: New Weapons; New Actors; New Goals; New Data and Analysis; and New Cold War. It is more qualitative than quantitative, and examines possible consequences arising from the use of new weapons in the New Cold War context.

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