What Are Sanctions — Do They Work, and Who Pays the Price

This contemporary application episode examines the doctrine of comprehensive economic sanctions as the operating instrument of post-Church Committee American regime-change policy. Opening with the May 12, 1996 60 Minutes exchange between Lesley Stahl and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright — and the structural surprise of Albright’s unanimous Senate confirmation as Secretary of State eight months later — the episode traces the substitution thesis (paramilitary instruments replaced by economic instruments after 1975), the explicit regime-change language in the statutory record (Cuban Democracy Act, Helms-Burton, maximum pressure), and the honesty test of when sitting officials state the doctrine openly versus when they launder it through human rights or nonproliferation framing. Five case studies follow: Iraq as the moral foundation (engaging the Dyson/Cetorelli 2017 methodological revision honestly while preserving the moral indictment); Cuba as the doctrine in real time (the live ratcheting through Executive Order 14404 and May 8, 2026 designations); Iran as the medical case (butterfly children, MAHAK leukemia patients, hemophilia); Venezuela as the continuum exposed (sanctions failed for nine years, kinetic phase began January 3, 2026); and Russia as the closed loop (Maidan substrate, sanctions regime failing as realism predicted, strategic overextension at the level of the global monetary order). The episode closes with the constitutional argument that comprehensive sanctions are blockades and blockades are acts of war, with a principled libertarian rejection of sanctions as an illegitimate exercise of state authority over foreign actors not convicted of crimes against Americans — distinguishing that rigorous position from the reformist position the episode declines to endorse — and with a forward pivot to Episode 19, which examines what happens when the policy moves from the laundered to the unlaundered version of regime change.