By Julia Kril, Executive Director at B&K Agency
After four years of grinding global conflict, the victors sought to build an international mechanism to preserve peace through economic sanctions…
No, we are not talking about our wish for 2026. This story goes back a hundred years ago to 1919, when world leaders, scarred by the devastation of World War I, agreed on the need for a new form of deterrence.
That year, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson described sanctions as “something more tremendous than war” — “the threat of an absolute isolation that brings a nation to its senses just as suffocation removes from the individual any inclination to fight.” He envisioned sanctions as a peaceful, silent, economic remedy that would eliminate the need for military force.
Back in the day, the instrument described by Wilson was called “economic weapon”, which later evolved into the concept of “economic sanctions” – completely changing the approach to war and peace. The initial drive to institutionalize this mechanism came at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where Lord Robert Cecil and Léon Bourgeois advocated for equipping the League of Nations with a powerful enforcement tool. This mechanism of collective economic isolation marked a new legal and diplomatic category.
Today, deterrence is an established pillar of Western security. It is at the core of the United States foreign policy, which has the largest, most advanced military deterrence in the world. Its global reach, advanced technologies, and nuclear triad provide the backbone of NATO’s security and deterrence posture. In 1919, economic sanctions have become a deterrence tool.
What made interwar sanctions a truly new institution was not that they could isolate states from global trade and finance but that they could do so in peacetime. A coercive policy that used to be possible only in times of war – isolating human communities from exchange with the wider world – now became possible in a wide range of situations. This marked a fundamental shift in the way war and peace were understood. Economic sanctions came to be seen as an alternative to war, even though — paradoxically — the intention was to avoid ever having to use them.
Over time, sanctions evolved. In a pre-nuclear world, a comprehensive economic blockade could devastate a nation, driving it toward collapse. Today, sanctions are just one of several coercive instruments — often employed without any guarantee of success. From the oil embargo on Cuba to sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, and Russia — including the Magnitsky Act, sanctions over Crimea, and more recent measures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the use of sanctions has become routine.
As history tends to repeat itself, the Israel-US military action on Iran raises the very question about the limits of sanctions. The United States has launched a ballistic missile on Iran to physically destroy Iran’s nuclear capability which has been a subject of sanctions from the UN, the US, the EU, and others. The 2015 JCPOA deal was initially celebrated as a triumph of diplomacy – a successful sanctions vs negotiations strategy. Yet, it didn’t work. Since 2022, Iran has supplied drones to Russia for attacks on Ukrainian civilians. It has continued sponsoring terrorist groups — Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas — while developing enriched uranium and expanding its nuclear efforts.
On 12 June 2025, for the first time in 20 years, the IAEA officially declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Together with the US military involvement on 22 June, this effectively means that decade of US foreign policy in the region has failed to contain Iran’s ambitions. Sanctions did not work, and the US policy of containment has proven ineffective.
Can we still talk about sanctions as a deterrent mechanism?
Just like in 1919, the world now faces hard questions: What non-military tools can global powers use to prevent escalation and global war? Will sanctions be forced to take even more severe forms to continue serving as diplomatic deterrent?
Not all societies are driven by material needs in ways that make them susceptible to economic coercion. Sanctions, and other forms of containment and de-escalation, cannot deter regimes that are rooted in fundamentalist ideologies. When Iran uses religion to justify violence and destruction, no measures that we understand in the Western world can force policy change on non-democratic fundamentalist regimes.
At the same time, modern day deterrence has evolved. It spreads beyond sanctions – it requires strong military force, a combination of conventional and non-conventional warfare. And, most importantly, full-spectrum resilience. At the end of the day, deterrence is what preserves peace. It gives diplomacy weight, protects sovereignty, and allows nations to live freely. The question is, however, which global powers are up for the task.
