Economic embargoes and targeted sanctions have a long but mixed legacy as tools of statecraft. The first major American attempt to employ sanctions dates back as far as the Embargo Act of 1807, which intended to punish Great Britain and France for interfering with American shipping during the Napoleonic phase of the wars of the French Revolution. Economic sanctions have become increasingly popular as a way of achieving a variety of goals—deterrence, coercion, the protection of human rights, raising the cost of aggression, bolstering allies, virtue-signaling or choosing the least bad means for addressing an international threat when the alternatives of doing nothing or resorting to force appear worse. The United States now employs sanctions of varying comprehensiveness and severity against more than thirty countries and terrorist entities, including Russia, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. 

Strategika Issue 60 is now available online. Strategika is an online journal that analyzes ongoing issues of national security in light of conflicts of the past—the efforts of the Military History Working Group of historians, analysts, and military personnel focusing on military history and contemporary conflict.

A doctrine is a set of guiding principles shared widely by an organization or a nation. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 stated that any effort by a European nation to take control of any North or South American country would be viewed as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” In 1962, the Doctrine was invoked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the support of the Organization of American States (OAS), President Kennedy established a naval quarantine around the island.

“I think we’re going to be strategic partners,” said President Donald Trump on June 29 at his Osaka G-20 press conference, in response to a question from Olivia Qi Zhang, a reporter for Caixin, the Chinese news organization. “I think we can help each other. I think, in the end, we can—if the right deal is structured, we can be great for each other.”