How Regime Stability and Friendship Shape Economic Sanctions

Why This Question Matters

Countries commonly use economic sanctions to pressure foreign governments into policy changes. Elena V. McLean and Mitchell T. Radtke ask when sanctioning states will take into account the targeted leader's political prospects—and how that calculation interacts with whether the target is an ally or an adversary. Understanding this trade-off matters for explaining puzzling patterns in who gets sanctioned and for predicting the political consequences of coercive diplomacy.

How the Authors Test Their Idea

McLean and Radtke propose a simple but consequential logic: sanctioners balance two goals—extracting policy concessions and shaping the target regime's political future. A decline in the likelihood of a target leader's survival is a cost if the target is friendly (removing an ally is bad for the sanctioner) but a benefit if the target is an adversary (weakening a rival can help the sanctioner). The authors evaluate this mechanism using two complementary approaches:

• Statistical analysis that tests whether sanction incidence varies with the interaction of bilateral political relations (friendly vs. unfriendly) and indicators of the target leader's political stability; and
• Two historical case studies of U.S. sanctions on Chile, drawing on declassified primary sources to trace decisionmaking and illustrate how policymakers weighed leader survival against bilateral ties.

What They Find

• Economic coercion is more likely to be directed at friendly governments when those governments are politically stable—sanctioners are willing to press allies when doing so is unlikely to topple their leaders.
• Conversely, unfriendly governments are more likely to be sanctioned when their leaders are politically vulnerable—sanctioners exploit instability in adversaries to increase the chance of removing or weakening hostile leaders.
• Declassified U.S. documents on sanctions against Chile provide qualitative evidence that U.S. officials explicitly considered ally/adversary status and the domestic durability of target leaders when weighing sanctions.

What This Means for Policy and Scholarship

These results show that sanctions are not applied only according to international rivalry or demands for policy concessions; they also reflect strategic calculations about leader survival and alliance costs. The framework helps explain why allies are sometimes punished and why opponents are targeted more aggressively at moments of weakness, with implications for scholars and practitioners who assess the likely success and political side effects of economic coercion.