Sanctions & Finance
Extraterritorial sanctions work because almost every major bank needs access to dollar clearing. Cut off correspondent banking and a country is effectively unplugged from global finance, regardless of its own laws.
You don't have to control a country's banks. You just have to make sure no bank that matters will touch them.
Iran lost ~$200B in oil revenue to extraterritorial sanctions (2018–2022)
Sanctions & Finance
SWIFT does not transfer money. It transfers instructions. Understanding that distinction is the difference between policy debate and policy theatre.
Cutting a bank off SWIFT does not freeze its deposits. It cuts its ability to coordinate settlement with the rest of the planet.
Member banks on SWIFT: ~11,000 across 200+ countries
March 21, 2026
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Sanctions & Finance
Timothy E. Kaldas at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy has built the most detailed public account of how Egypt's repeated IMF programs since 2016 have stabilized the Egyptian pound while leaving the underlying political economy structurally unchanged.
The IMF lends. The pound stabilizes. The military's share of the economy grows. The next currency crisis arrives. The IMF lends again. The pattern is now the policy.
Egypt's cumulative IMF lending 2016-2024: about $25B across four programs (2016 EFF, 2020 RFI, 2020 SBA, 2022 EFF, with 2024 augmentation; IMF data; Kaldas 2024 TIMEP briefs).
March 13, 2026
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Sanctions & Finance
Daniel Drezner's 1999 book *The Sanctions Paradox* and his subsequent two decades of follow-up work remain the empirical foundation of academic sanctions analysis. The headline finding is uncomfortable for sanctions enthusiasts and sanctions sceptics in equal measure.
Sanctions work when the cost to the target is concentrated, the demanded change is specific, and the imposing coalition is wide. Most prominent sanctions episodes meet none of these.
Sanctions episodes 1971-2020 coded as achieving stated policy goals: roughly 34% (Hufbauer-Schott-Elliott-Oegg dataset; Drezner's revised reading: closer to 30%).
March 11, 2026
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