On April 13, Iran launched an unprecedented retaliatory drone and missile attack on Israel, leading the U.S. and its allies to reach once again for their favorite weapon of war—sanctions.
This knee-jerk reaction was as predictable as it was ill-founded, according to the scholarly research. In Nicholas Mulder's 2022 treatise The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, he traces the history of sanctions from the blockades in World War I to today's morass of economic sanctions. Mulder concludes that "the historical record is relatively clear: most economic sanctions have not worked."
