Sanctions are a form of economic warfare: they are intended to make broad swaths of the population suffer, with the goal of producing general discontent. A discontented civilian population means an unpopular war, and unpopular wars are harder to wage. Or so the theory goes.
I can only see a list of suffering people without expected outcome: North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, URSS, Cuba, etc.
(Genuine question to History geeks) Do we have an exemple of mass sanctions on a country that worked? Why are we repeating strategies that do not seem to work?
Theses sanctions seems to be designed to only short term please the people/voters/journalists of the sanctioning countries but are terrible to the sanctioned country/people long term without solving anything.
I'm not enough of a history buff to say whether sanctions are consistently successful. But I will point out that the point of (broad) sanctions isn't to win wars: it's to punish governments by punishing their people, who are then expected to pressure the government to acquiesce.
Among the targets of US sanctions in the last 50 years, contemporary Russia is somewhat unique: it has a relatively large and urbanized middle class, one that's used to the benefits of global trade and cheap European travel. Sanctions that hurt those people seem, on face value, more likely to impact Putin's decision making than e.g. sanctions on North Korean peasant farmers.
