Why do U.S. sanctions now reach into nearly every country in the world? Abraham Newman on global interdependence, economic choke points, and unanticipated consequences. Recently at The Signal: Liana Fix on [how neo-Nazis become the second most popular party in Germany](. Today: Why do U.S. sanctions now reach into nearly every country in the world? Abraham Newman on global interdependence, economic choke points, and unanticipated consequences. Also: Mary Ziegler on how changes in U.S. abortion law are reshaping American politics. Nowhere to Hide Juniper Photon When the United States and its allies imposed [sanctions on Russia]( after the invasion of Ukraine, they were ground-breaking: Western banks froze the Russian Federationâs assets abroad; governments seized oligarchsâ and Kremlin croniesâ foreign property; and Washington cut off Russian banks from the SWIFT international finance system. But while these punishments were unprecedentedâboth in their breadth and in the [depth of international cooperation around them](âfor years now, theyâve become more and more central to U.S. foreign policy. Once mostly limited to embargoes against the United Statesâ Soviet-era adversariesâand more longstanding adversaries like [Cuba]( or [North Korea](âthe measures have dramatically expanded since 1990 under U.S. presidents from both political parties. Now Washington uses sanctions for a range of goals, forbidding trade with people and companies it suspects of engaging in terrorism, human-rights abuses, or undermining democratic institutions in unstable countries. At the same time, Washington has been imposing export controls on technologies with potential military applicationsâas in its [ban on selling cutting-edge semiconductor chips to China](. The number of American sanctions doubled between 1990 and 2000âand had doubled again by 2020. Today, the U.S. has put them on more than 12,000 individuals, firms, and even whole industrial sectors, across more than 190 countries. Their effectiveness, however, remains controversial. Comprehensive studies have found that less than a third of sanctions are even partly successful. Imposing them also creates risks: Allies are upset by unilateral American moves to isolate non-American businesses; targeted countries impose harsh counter-measures against American businesses; and bans tend to push sanctioned countries to build their own capabilities for producing high-tech tools and weapons. So why does the U.S. keep expanding its use of sanctions? Advertisement Abraham Newman is a professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University, the director of the universityâs Mortara Center for International Studies, and the co-author of [Underground Empire](, a 2023 book on U.S. economic statecraft. As Newman sees it, the increasing economic integration of so much of the world after the fall of communism in Europe created new opportunities for the U.S. to use globalization as a medium for coercion. In the twenty-first century, Newman says, global networks have come to rely extensively on the U.S. in one way or anotherâwhether on the dollar in the financial system; on the American tech firms dominating the internet; or on critical, American-controlled production chains, as with semiconductor chips. Washington has learned how to turn this reliance into leverageâand that leverage, ultimately, into a powerful political weapon, responding to new overseas crises by turning to sanctions again and again. Meanwhile, though, the practice often leads to outcomes that undermine the U.S.-led global order. Many of the United Statesâ closest partners, Newman says, experience economic harm as a result of sanctions imposed on U.S. foes. Targeted countries tend to react by building new economic structures protected from, and even invisible to, Washington and other Western governments. But as the severity of American economic sanctions rises, so do the chances that those sanctioned will respond not just with economic countermeasures but with military force. Michael Bluhm: Why has the U.S. expanded its use of tools like economic sanctions and export controls so drastically? Abraham Newman: Itâs discovered a new form of power to influence adversaries and allies in the international system withâand is using it. Washington discovered this new form of power in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. As the government was scrambling to confront a new, unexpected set of adversaries, they began to map the global economy in a new wayâand at the center if it, they found choke points they could use to put significant pressure on adversaries. Global finance has a dollar-clearing system, for instanceâa network of banks that facilitate trade among companies worldwideâbut those banks route transactions through a few core U.S. banks. If a European or Asian company engages in trade abroad, its business is cleared through these banks. The U.S. Treasury Department specifically realized it could limit access to these central choke pointsâfor any firm in the world. In a case where, say, a European bank is helping a European and an Asian company complete a transaction, then the U.S. can say, If your bank wants access to this dollar-clearing system, then you have to comply with our rulesâand with our sanctions on these countries, these companies, these individuals. The use of sanctions weâre seeing today isnât the result of an intentional, grand-master strategy that the U.S. had been plotting for decades. The protagonists of American foreign policy just started to understand that they sat at the center of a new type of power, andâafter 9/11âto weaponize it. Since, theyâve used it against North Korea and Iran. Today, theyâre using it most prominently against Russia. From Marwool More from Abraham Newman at The Signal: âIn our book Underground Empire, Henry Farrell and I introduced the idea of weaponized interdependence. The idea is that global economic networks like the banking system, production chains, or the internetâwhich tend to foster economic integrationâoften involve critical choke points in the United States, and the U.S. government is now controlling access to them. Private corporations like Google, J.P. Morgan, or the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company are examples: The U.S. can control access to the goods and services these businesses offer. One problem with this new dynamic, though, is that if the U.S. doesnât articulate a larger strategy for how itâs going to use these choke pointsâand how itâs not going to use themâpeople can start to worry that sooner or later, theyâll be the targets.â âThe worst-case scenario for unanticipated consequences is that sanctions wonât stay confined to economic networks. Actors could feel so constrained by the economic fences that they decide to use military responses. In a book called The Economic Weapon, the historian Nick Mulder argues that in the run-up to World War II, U.S. and Western sanctions actually accelerated German and Japanese military actions. You could see the sanctions on Iran and its proxies as part of whatâs behind the conflict today in the Middle East today.â âI donât see a grand strategy behind it. I donât even think the U.S. intentionally uses these tools as part of an economic-security strategy at all. Itâs much more of a crisis response. Itâs important to understand, despite how some people might talk about it sometimes, the U.S. government isnât some gigantic, all-seeing, all-knowing machine. When it comes to sanctions, the people running them tend to be a few overworked, stressed-out people who had one agenda but then got hit by crisis after crisis, and now theyâre just trying to figure out how best to respond.â [Members can read the full interview here]( Enjoy The Signal? Send this newsletter along to a friend whoâs as curious about the world as you are. Someone send it to you? Sign up [here](. FROM THE FILES Sean Nangle Out of Court In the U.S. on March 26, the Democratic politician Marilyn Lands won a special election for a seat in Alabamaâs state legislature. A Republican had previously held the seat, and the Republican President Donald Trump carried the district in the 2020 elections. But Lands flipped it. With the Alabama state Supreme Court having recently banned in-vitro fertilization, or IVFâthe process of fertilizing an egg outside the wombâLands ran on a platform emphasizing the idea of reproductive rights: âOur legislature must repeal Alabamaâs no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.â Last April, Mary Ziegler [explored the political fallout from the U.S. Supreme Courtâs decision overturning the legal precedent that had codified womenâs right to an abortion in 1973](. To Ziegler, the Courtâs ruling had made the issue of abortion far more important to many American voters, especially among women and Generation Z. The decision also raised the stakes of state-level elections, Ziegler says, as both parties realized the new political significance of the issueâwith Democrats likely to rely on reproductive rights as a central political issue until Republicans found a response. 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