Ilhan Omar Is Wrong About Sanctions

After supporting several previous Ukraine funding bills, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar cast the single Democratic vote against the Support Ukraine Act in early June. The act garnered enough bipartisan support that it passed anyway, but the move provoked some shock and led the Representative to clarify on social media that while she supports Ukraine, she could not support the bill. In her words,

I have always, and will continue, to stand with the Ukrainian people and unequivocally condemn Putin’s illegal and brutal invasion. I voted against the Ukraine Support Act because of its inclusion of broad economic sanctions. The foreign policy establishment continues to return to the same failed playbook and expects different results. Economic sanctions fail to achieve their desired goals and in most cases are counterproductive to ending war. Time and again, sanctions like these fail to achieve their stated goals while inflicting real suffering on ordinary people. Opposing Russian aggression does not require us to support policies that punish ordinary civilians who did not ask for this war. I remain committed to supporting diplomacy, peace, and justice for the Ukrainian people affected by this horrific conflict. But I could not in good conscience support legislation that wages economic warfare on innocent civilians.

For supporters of Ukraine, the initial instinct may be an immediate negative knee jerk response. But while Representative Omar is in fact incorrect about sanctions on Russia, her point is correct about many other kinds of sanctions. It is worth delineating the differences in the purposes and reasons for types of sanctions, and their track records. While sanctions aimed at changing state behavior or improving human rights have indeed offered mixed at best results, the purpose of sanctions on Russia is not to change their minds but to weaken their ability to wage war. In this role, sanctions can be effective and offer an alternative to the military defense of Ukraine which the US is unwilling to mount.

Omar’s reference to the ‘same failed playbook’ reflects decades of US foreign policy that treated the cutting off of trade in goods and services—especially financial services—as an immediate response to other states taking actions the US disapproves of. The embargo on Cuba is an early and particularly long running example. After the Communist Cuban government nationalized American property after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US responded with sweeping trade sanctions in an effort to punish the Cuban government, as part of a broader goal of forcing regime change. Despite some efforts at liberalizing relations with Cuba, this embargo has largely remained intact—and under Donald Trump, extended to a full-on blockade. Since the end of the Cold War, sanctions for a variety of reasons have proliferated, with famous examples including North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela.

When these sanctions have aimed to shift behavior, their efficacy has been mixed at best. Faced with foreign demands to shift policy, populations have a tendency to harden their positions. And sanctions give governments a handy scapegoat for explaining away its own failures. The embargo on Cuba has not shifted the Cuban regime noticeably, the North Korean regime shows few signs of weakening, and both Baathist Iraq and Chavista Venezuela lasted until American military intervention forced regime change.

Sanctions have, however, impacted populations, often in a manner even more indiscriminate than military intervention. A 2025 study published in The Lancet  found that “Sanctions have substantial adverse effects on public health, with a death toll similar to that of wars,” with the overall estimated mortality being above a half a million excess deaths globally per year. This is likely exacerbated by the fact that most of the countries targeted by sanctions already face economic hardship. Sanctions targeting Iraq inhibited its ability to rebuild after the Gulf War, for example, while sanctions on Venezuela further deepened the economic crisis created by falling oil prices and mismanagement of oilfields. The people of Iraq suffered even as Saddam and his sons continued to enjoy their golden palaces. For this reason, many scholars have been skeptical of sanctions as a tool of foreign policy, and Liberal Currents has repeatedly asserted that in many cases they are inappropriate and overapplied. 

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine presents a different situation on two counts, relating to both the goal of the sanctions and the situation of the target country. While sanctions have proven ineffective at altering state policies, even their harshest critics will admit they are successful at undermining target economies. This is the point of sanctions on Russia: not to change Russia’s war goals or overthrow the regime, but to weaken Moscow’s ability to wage war. In this sense they are something like the sanctions on the Assad government in Syria. At no point were sanctions able to compel any behavior from Assad’s regime, but they did weaken it to such an extent that it was unable to complete its reconquest of the country. In part because of this weakness, it was ultimately overthrown in 2024. Whether or not one agrees that sanctions were justified in that case, they were certainly effective.

The same seems to be true, although more slowly, of sanctions on Russia. After years of budget surpluses, the war and accompanying sanctions have brought about a steep federal deficit in Russia, in addition to high inflation and interest rates. Reducing the cash available for the Russian government is crucial to limiting its ability to continue the war. Key weapons components, from engine parts to computer chips, have to be imported from abroad for Russia to continue waging war. One might hope for targeted sanctions on specific war materiel, but this is impractical for at least two reasons. First, many items are ‘dual use’, and thus impact on civilian usage is inevitable if any meaningful sanctions are to be attempted. Second, and more importantly, most of the world is not sanctioning Russia. Russia is able to import what it needs through intermediaries in China and elsewhere, as well as source components directly from Chinese firms. Therefore, the only meaningful way to impair Russia’s economic capacity to wage war is to limit the cash available to the Russian state for making these kinds of purchases. Broad-based economic sanctions are a crucial component of any strategy that seeks to accomplish this.

Russia’s capacity for purchasing weapons components and other goods abroad points to another difference between Russia and many other sanctioned countries: Russia is not poor. Indeed, while much has been made of Russia’s greater size and population than Ukraine, equally relevant is the fact that Russians are on average much wealthier than Ukrainians. Even before the war, Russia’s per capita GDP was roughly triple Ukraine’s, largely due to its brisk fossil fuel export business. Ukraine has of course been subjected now to four years of aerial bombardment and conscription that have sapped its civilian economy, while Russia has suffered only a fraction of that damage.

As a result, Russia has been able to continue growing its military budget largely by raising taxes and cutting social spending, while Ukraine has been forced to take out extensive loans to keep its own military afloat. Sanctions on Russia seek to equalize this massive disparity. Any danger Russia faces of economic collapse that could have humanitarian consequences comparable to that in Venezuela or pre-2003 Iraq exists only due to the diversion of resources towards a war of choice. The Russian economy is more than capable of taking care of its people, even under sanctions, if it simply did not direct so much of its budget to killing Ukrainians.

This is, it must be emphasized, an exceptional case. How can these cases—situations where, contrary to the normal, sanctions are both justified and effective—be identified? The simplest rule is to think about sanctions as so profoundly destructive that they can only be justified in cases where a military intervention would also be warranted, but for some reason ill advised. This is an easy enough sorting heuristic and can be readily applied to the world today. For example, since most liberals agree that the war on Iran is unjustified, and a war in Cuba would be unjustified, both are cases where sanctions, too, should be subject to strict scrutiny. By contrast, a war to defend Ukraine would certainly be justifiable: there is a clear cut aggressor and a legitimate, even democratic, government defending itself. But this is an easier heuristic to state than to apply. The United States in particular has shown a very sweeping and inconsistent idea of when war is justified, and the lower cost of sanctions relative to war makes them tempting to overuse.

Therefore, another important condition for when sanctions are appropriate is that they have a realistic goal and a reasonable causal explanation for how they can achieve it, given what we know about their effects. Curbing a country’s manufacturing, for example, is a reasonable outcome to expect of sanctions, and a step on the path to accomplishing the goal of hampering Russia’s effort to subjugate Ukraine. On the other hand, there never was a clear path from ‘impoverish Venezuelans’ to ‘regime change in Venezuela.’ The immediate outcome of sanctions was predictable, but there was no plausible way it advanced a foreign policy goal. This can provide clarity and consistency in dealing with future interstate conflicts where the US lacks the will or ability to decisively intervene.

Hopefully if it comes for a vote again, Congresswoman Omar will reconsider her stance on supporting Ukraine through sanctions on Russia. It is important, too, to understand where she and other anti-sanctions activists are coming from. Sanctions are not costless, either to the US or to target countries, and US foreign policy is certainly guilty of overreliance on sanctions as policy. A more sparing use of sanctions, limiting them to the cases with the clearest justification and with a realistic eye for what they can accomplish, can in the future make it easier to rally left and liberal political support for applying them in those exceptional cases where they are unambiguously called for—as with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Featured image is "2nd Battle Squadron," author unknown, circa 1914.