No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works.

The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.

The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.

That's the theory, but has it ever worked?

That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.

Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all.

I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".

In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.

Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.

We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available.

Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.

This works about a third of the time [1].

What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it.

(On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].)

[1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159

[2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...

Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions.

Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.

After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?

Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).

Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives.

I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable.

”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.”

Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best.

Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.

Then?