Why is the U.S. obsessed with sanctions?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The United States imposes more sanctions than any other country on Earth. Since the 1960s, sanctions have become a core element of U.S. diplomatic strategy, with countries like North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Russia, China and Iran all being subject to these economic penalties.
Today, Elahe Izadi speaks with White House economics reporter Jeff Stein about how the United States fell in love with sanctions, about whether the country’s current strategy is sustainable and about whether sanctions truly work as a diplomatic tool.
Plus, Elahe reports from Chicago on the opening scenes of the Democratic National Convention.
Today’s show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy and Ariel Plotnick, with help from Trinity Webster-Bass. The show was mixed by Sean Carter and edited by Reena Flores, with help from Lucy Perkins. Thanks to Mike Madden.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think the breadth of US sanctions is the kind of thing that I hadn't really |
| 0:07.4 | realized when I started reporting and the more I looked into it the more I was |
| 0:12.0 | just staggered by how many countries we have these programs on. |
| 0:18.3 | Like what surprised you the most? Let me just read the list of countries that we have. This is a |
| 0:24.3 | I see you pulling up a list right now and it's very long in detail. |
| 0:27.1 | Okay. I will be very quick. I will not. No, no, yeah, let hit me with it. |
| 0:30.0 | This is this is an incomplete list. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Yemen, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Burma, |
| 0:37.0 | Libya, Sudan, Belarus, Lebanon, Mali, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Somalia, Somalia, |
| 0:41.0 | and the Democratic Republic of Congo. |
| 0:42.8 | I'm very impressed with how quickly you said that partial list. |
| 0:47.2 | That's my co-host, Alahayasati, talking with reporter Jeff Stein. |
| 0:51.6 | Jeff covers economics for the post. That includes covering the Treasury |
| 0:55.6 | Department and for almost a year now he has been working on a project to |
| 1:00.1 | understand why the US government has been imposing a lot more sanctions now than it ever has before. |
| 1:07.0 | And I am on the Treasury Department's news lists or where they email all the reporters what they're up to and I kind of noticed |
| 1:15.3 | that it felt like every single day I was getting another email from them with another |
| 1:21.0 | sanction being imposed in another country or on another person that I had never heard of. |
| 1:26.5 | And it led me down this rabbit hole of, wait, how often do we do this? |
| 1:31.1 | How often are these things being imposed? And what I found was that the |
| 1:36.0 | reason I felt like they were in my inbox every day with another press release about this was because |
| 1:41.3 | in fact we have massively increased the use of this tool. |
| 1:45.4 | And I didn't want that unexam reports. I'm Martine Powers. |
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