Lee Jones explains why economic sanctions aren’t a very useful tool. Here he addresses whether sanctions helped produce the nuclear deal:

Well, again, it depends on what you think was gained from that. The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate [in 2007] indicated that Iran abandoned its nuclear program in the early 2000s. If that’s the case, there was no military nuclear program to halt in the first place. The deal Obama struck with Iran is basically the same deal that Iran offered in 2005 [bold mine-DL]. Domestically, all of the different Iranian factions support the nuclear program. So it becomes hard to see how sanctions could bring into power someone who would end Iran’s nuclear program. With this deal, you have the rehabilitation of Iran, the recognition by the U.S. that it needs Iranian help to sort out the mess it created in the Middle East. The U.S. needs Iranian cooperation against ISIS, in Syria, and in Iraq, and it needs to try and tamp down the Saudi-Iranian rivalry that is ripping apart the Middle East. Now Iran has returned to the main diplomatic forums to help sort out all these issues, and it’s looking forward to a significant economic boom. So who’s won? A lot of people in Iran lost out because there’s no doubt sanctions caused huge damage to the Iranian economy, but they did very little politically.

The Iranian case should be an especially sobering one for advocates of economic sanctions. The sanctions on Iran achieved nothing that an earlier diplomatic compromise on our side wouldn’t have already achieved a decade earlier. This is a point that has been made here and elsewhere for years. Unfortunately, it has already hardened into accepted wisdom that Iran is an example of how sanctions “worked.” In fact, it is more clearly an example of how sanctions weren’t necessary if the U.S. had been prepared to accept something less than the complete elimination of Iran’s nuclear program. Clinton likes to boast about her role in adding sanctions that “brought Iran to the table,” but this misses that Iran had been “at the table” making essentially the same offer the U.S. and our allies finally accepted before the sanctions had been imposed.

It was the determination to pursue maximalist demands that made a deal with Iran impossible a decade ago, and it was only by dropping those demands (over the loud, repeated objections of domestic hawks and useless regional clients) that a deal once again became possible. In the meantime, Iran expanded its nuclear program in reaction to the sanctions to show that they weren’t going to be forced to give up everything. The lesson here is that sanctions aren’t very good at compelling another state to do what the U.S. wants, imposing sanctions can backfire by encouraging the other state to engage in the very behavior that they are supposed to be discouraging, and more often than not imposing sanctions on another state inflicts suffering on the people in the affected country for no good reason.

After watching sanctions regimes fail repeatedly over the last two decades, it seems to me that sanctions are good for just two things. They temporarily satisfy domestic political demands to “do something” about some problem in another part of the world at relatively little cost to us, and they inflict damage on the other country and thus satisfy the desire to punish a behavior that Washington dislikes. When they are judged on whether they have the desired effect on regime behavior, they fail in almost every case, and along the way they have usually done substantial harm to the people of the country that typically have little or no control over the regime behavior in question. Sanctions routinely fail to have the desired effect, they cause disproportionate damage along the way, and in many cases they help to strengthen the targeted regime’s grip on power. There are few more useless and perverse foreign policy tools, and yet sanctions remain the default answer because they don’t cost us very much and create the impression that Washington takes a particular issue “seriously.”