But while these punishments were unprecedented—both in their breadth and in the depth of international cooperation around them—for years now, they’ve become more and more central to U.S. foreign policy. Once mostly limited to embargoes against the United States’ Soviet-era adversaries—and more longstanding adversaries like Cuba or North Korea—the 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 applications—as in its ban on selling cutting-edge semiconductor chips to China.

The number of American sanctions doubled between 1990 and 2000—and 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?

In the twenty-first century, Newman says, global networks have come to rely extensively on the U.S. in one way or another—whether 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 leverage—and 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 States’ 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.

Abraham Newman: It’s discovered a new form of power to influence adversaries and allies in the international system with—and 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 way—and 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 instance—a network of banks that facilitate trade among companies worldwide—but 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 points—for 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 rules—and with our sanctions on these countries, these companies, these individuals.

The use of sanctions we’re seeing today isn’t 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, and—after 9/11—to weaponize it. Since, they’ve used it against North Korea and Iran. Today, they’re using it most prominently against Russia.

“In 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 internet—which tend to foster economic integration—often 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. doesn’t articulate a larger strategy for how it’s going to use these choke points—and how it’s not going to use them—people can start to worry that sooner or later, they’ll be the targets.”

“The worst-case scenario for unanticipated consequences is that sanctions won’t 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 what’s behind the conflict today in the Middle East today.”

“I don’t see a grand strategy behind it. I don’t even think the U.S. intentionally uses these tools as part of an economic-security strategy at all. It’s much more of a crisis response. It’s important to understand, despite how some people might talk about it sometimes, the U.S. government isn’t 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 they’re just trying to figure out how best to respond.”

Out of Court

With the Alabama state Supreme Court having recently banned in-vitro fertilization, or IVF—the process of fertilizing an egg outside the womb—Lands ran on a platform emphasizing the idea of reproductive rights: “Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”

Last April, Mary Ziegler explored the political fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning the legal precedent that had codified women’s right to an abortion in 1973. To Ziegler, the Court’s 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 issue—with Democrats likely to rely on reproductive rights as a central political issue until Republicans found a response.