Transatlantic Approaches to Sanctions: Principles and Recommendations for Action

In today’s security environment, the United States and Europe face many common challenges, from preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to countering international terrorism, and promoting democratic government.  The problems require strategies to deal with state actors such as Iran, North Korea, and Belarus, as well as with a whole host of non-state entities. However, despite this prevalence of overlapping foreign policy objectives, transatlantic cooperation in pursuing common goals is prone to breaking down in debates over which means to use.

 

Few policy areas illustrate this dilemma more clearly than that of the design and application of international sanctions. The use of sanctions as an effective and manageable instrument of national foreign policy or multilateral action has come under serious question in recent years, and it is clear that both sides approach the question of sanctions from very different perspectives. Yet, with differences over the utility and use of force likely to persist well into the future, it is imperative that U.S. and European leaders make a serious effort to develop a more coordinated approach to the use of sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. 

 
Read the executive summary