The list of countries on which the USA imposes sanctions grows every year, as does the severity of the sanctions, despite they hardly seem to work.
Traditional thinking is that imposing sanctions on any particular country is but a pin prick for the USA economy, it is a massive burden for the other country. My thinking is that as the list grows, those pin pricks turn into a proper wound, and things get markedly better for countries on the naughty list.
If the USA imposes sanctions on Country Z, then that's bad for the USA, very bad for Country Z but rather good for all the other pariah countries who now have a new trading partner. So Cuba can now trade with Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia and whoever else is on the list this week.
If the USA goes mental and imposes sanctions on PR China for having the temerity to trade with today's Bad Boys North Korea, and by extension on every country which trades with PR China, then I would assume that the rest of the world would decide to cut the USA loose and merrily trade with each other and with Russia, Iran etc and it would be the USA losing out massively, in which case, one would assume, it would meekly come back to the table.
But while I was reading around, I stumbled across this fine article explaining why sanctions don't achieve the desired effect with the concept of the J-curve (scroll down to end of article). Which is probably far more interesting than my hypotheticals above.
Debate Magazine
