Iran Nuke Deal: Do Economic Sanctions Work After All?

Economic sanctions have had a bad rap. Ever since 1919, when Woodrow Wilson suggested that boycotting the goods and services of rogue nations could serve as a peaceful substitute for wars, critics have been claiming that sanctions are woolly, ineffectual, and counterproductive. And there have been many times when they didn’t work out as planned, such as the sanctions that the League of Nations imposed on Mussolini’s Italy following its invasion of Abyssinia; the U.S. embargoes of Cuba and North Korea, both of which date back more than fifty years; and the U.S. and European sanctions on Zimbabwe, which have been in effect for over a decade.

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