Sanctions Past, Present, and Future with OFAC Director Brad Smith

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Over the past several decades, financial sanctions have become one of the most widely used tools in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal. And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Biden administration has wielded them in a number of innovative ways. At the same time, some of these uses have also triggered concerns about U.S. overreach, something that could have consequences for both U.S. national security and the health of the U.S. economy.

To better understand how the U.S. government is approaching its financial sanctions policies today, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Contributing Editor Brandon Van Grack sat down with the man who manages them: Brad Smith, the Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (or “OFAC”) at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. A veteran of U.S. sanctions policy, Smith walked through some of the history of sanctions, lessons the Biden administration has learned from past efforts, and how these lessons are being applied to new challenges, including from Russia.

This is the latest entry in our special “The Regulators” series, co-sponsored with Morrison Foerster, in which Brandon and Scott sit down with some of the senior officials working at the front lines of U.S. national security policy.

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Transcript

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0:56.4	visit Iuk.K.K.org. We're always going to be looking for new points of pressure to bring them to bear on Russia and our objectives are pretty straightforward. of for its war machine. And second we want to deny Russia the goods that it uses to produce
1:26.2	the war material that it's trying to lob into Ukraine. And those very simple objectives
1:31.5	have been at the forefront of the policy over the last two years
1:35.0	and really have been at the center of every action that we have taken.
1:39.0	Now there are nuances there because we're aware of Russia and its presence in the energy world and
1:44.4	we are trying to find ways in which we can take these actions without unduly
1:48.9	destabilizing the global economy and perhaps undermining the broader objectives that are at play.
1:55.0	I'm Scott Ar Anderson and this is the Law Fair Podcast for February 29, 2024.
2:00.0	Over the past several decades, financial sanctions have become one of the most widely used tools in the US foreign policy arsenal.
2:06.0	And since Russia's invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the Biden administration has wielded them in a number of innovative ways.
2:12.0	At the same time, some of these uses have... has wielded them in a number of innovative ways.
2:13.2	At the same time, some of these uses have also triggered concerns about U.S.
2:16.6	overreach, something that could have consequences for both national security and the health of the
	...

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