Reexamining Economic Sanctions: Why Trump’s Syria Sanction Decision Was a Smart Move

In his second term, Trump has worked on trying to make Greenland great again by offering to buy it, as well as trying to make Gaza great again by proposing an annexation. Now Trump has his sights on making Syria great again by saying that he will remove economic sanctions. This decision is a considerable change in how the United States has dealt with Syria in the past few decades. 

The United States has implemented at least some form of sanctions on Syria since 1979, which is when the U.S. declared Syria a terrorist state. Sanctions intensified in 2004, and again in 2011 when the civil war began in Syria. The purpose of these sanctions, particularly the 2011 version, has been to deprive the al-Assad regime of resources to harm their citizens, as well as ultimately transition to a democratic regime. 

I am not here to say that the sanctions were the only thing to shock Syria in recent year. In addition to the civil war and the sanctions, there was the COVID pandemic, the Lebanese banking crisis that limited Syria's access to credit, an earthquake in 2023, the fluctuation in food prices caused by the Russia-Ukraine War, and regional conflicts that disrupted trade flows. That being said, it took about 13 years of civil war to finally overthrow Bashar al-Assad, and Syria is still not a democratic regime. Aside from that, the results do not look good:

• The World Food Programme reported in 2023 that "following 12 years of conflict, an economy crippled by runaway inflation, a currency that has collapsed to a record low and soaring food prices, 12 million people do not know where their next meal is coming from."
• As a February 2025 report from the United Nations Development Programme mentions, "Sanctions have played a key role in isolating Syria from the global financial system, restricting trade, increasing import costs, and significantly reducing both exports and remittances. These factors have contributed to the continued depreciation of the national currency." 
• A research paper from Security in Context shows how the sanctions deteriorated the humanitarian situation by bludgeoning the agriculture and health sectors (Arslanian, 2024).
• Even with carveout exemptions, financial institutions were wary of doing business with Syria, thereby cutting off banking channels and making it difficult to process transactions for humanitarian aid, trade, and private sector engagement (Human Rights Watch).
• Reuters reported on how the sanctions hit Syria hard. One such outcome was resorting to the black market for ill-gotten gains, particularly from fuel smuggling production of an amphetamine-like substance called captagon.

It is clear that the sanctions on Syria have not deterred human rights abuses, but rather has exacerbated human suffering in Syria. This is hardly the first time that economic sanctions have failed. As the Cato Institute points out in its academic review, sanctions can range from ineffective (see Pape, 1997) to backfiring because an oppressive regime's response to the desperation caused by the sanctions is to be even more repressive (e.g., Wood, 2008). 

A meta-analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) analyzing 200 economic sanctions from World War I to the early 2000s found that sanctions made at least "a modest contribution to a goal that was partly realized" 34 percent of the time (Hufbauer et al., 2007). If we are going to be fair to economic sanctions, economic sanctions have the potential to work when the scope is limited and the goals are targeted in nature. 

However, that has hardly been the case for Syria. The broad sanctions on Syria have caused humanitarian suffering to the point where 90 percent of Syrians live in extreme poverty, as well as having undermined Syria's ability to economically recover. If this recent transition has any chance of succeeding, Syrians need to see that their economic wellbeing is improving. 

This is not to say that removing the sanctions comes with zero risk. As the American Enterprise Institute points out, it is not clear that the current leader, Ahmad al-Sharra, has complete control of Syria. AEI also mentions that this could have spillover effects in terms of accelerating terrorist aggression in the Middle East. 

Forget for a moment that such an argument comes with mission creep and is well beyond the initial mission of quelling Assad's attack on his own people. Much like the Brookings Institution argues, continuing the sanctions could likely be more costly because Syria needs economic relief to best guarantee  a legitimate political transition. Given the humanitarian and economic situation in Syria, Trump is right in acknowledging that the costs of the sanctions outweigh the potential benefits.