Lifting Failed Sanctions: Alliances, Reputations, and Instrumental Deference
Why do states persist in failed economic sanctions, and why do they sometimes abandon them without securing concessions? Existing scholarship overwhelmingly focuses on the target of sanctions, seeking to explain when and why targets comply. Far less attention has been devoted to the sender’s decision to maintain or terminate sanctions. This omission is striking. Sanctions frequently fail to compel targets, yet senders often maintain them for years or even decades, despite the economic costs of maintaining such sanctions. At other times, senders abruptly lift sanctions in the absence of concessions. What explains this variation? I argue that states maintain failed sanctions to protect a valuable reputational asset: their reputation for sanctions resolve. Reputation for sanctions resolve refers to other states’ beliefs about a sender’s willingness to impose and sustain economic sanctions in the absence of concessions. Because resolve cannot be directly observed, foreign audiences infer it from past behavior. Lifting sanctions without concessions signals that a sender is unwilling to bear costs over time, thereby reducing the effectiveness of future coercion and deterrence. To avoid these reputational costs, states frequently persist in sanctions even when they appear ineffective. Yet if reputational concerns incentivize persistence, why do states ever abandon failed sanctions? I contend that sanctioning states face a tradeoff between maintaining their reputation for sanctions resolve and preserving alliance cohesion. Public pressure from allies to lift sanctions alters this tradeoff in two ways. First, visible intra-alliance disagreement raises the diplomatic and security costs of continued sanctions by signaling disunity that adversaries may exploit. Second, allied pressure provides diplomatic cover for capitulation. When a sender lifts sanctions in response to public allied demands, observers face uncertainty about whether the decision reflects low resolve or a strategic effort to repair alliance cohesion. This attributional ambiguity mitigates the reputational damage of abandoning sanctions. I call this instrumental deference: the strategic yielding to allied demands to preserve alliance relationships while limiting reputational harm. To test these expectations, I employ a multi-method research design. First, I construct an original dataset of sanction programs from 1950 to 2022 and develop new measures of third-party public diplomatic pressure to lift sanctions. Using multinomial logistic regression and survival analysis, I demonstrate that public pressure from allies significantly increases the likelihood that senders terminate sanctions in the absence of target concessions. These results persist after accounting for alternative explanations, including domestic political factors, trade dependence, rivalry, leadership change, and target behavior. Second, I conduct detailed case studies of three major sanction episodes: the lifting of the US grain embargo against the Soviet Union, the termination of US pipeline sanctions following martial law in Poland, and the removal of the US arms embargo on Turkey after the Cyprus crisis. Drawing on archival documents and elite statements, I show that policymakers explicitly weighed reputational concerns against alliance-management considerations. In each case, leaders initially maintained sanctions to protect their reputation for resolve but ultimately concluded that allied pressure had raised the diplomatic costs of persistence while simultaneously providing diplomatic cover for capitulation. Alternative explanations rooted in domestic economic pressure or bilateral bargaining fail to account for the timing and logic of termination. This dissertation makes three core contributions. First, it shifts sanctions scholarship from a target-centric to a sender-centric framework, demonstrating that sanction termination is a strategic decision shaped by reputational and alliance-management considerations rather than merely target behavior or domestic fatigue. Second, it advances debates about reputation in international politics by theorizing and testing a distinct reputation for sanctions resolve, and by specifying how situational factors—namely allied pressure—condition the reputational consequences of policy reversal. Third, it highlights the ideational influence of third parties in economic statecraft. Beyond materially weakening sanctions through evasion or sanctions-busting, allies can shape outcomes through public diplomatic pressure that alters the sender’s reputational tradeoffs. In doing so, the theory of instrumental deference identifies a mechanism through which smaller allies can induce more dovish policies from stronger partners, challenging simple entrapment logics and expanding our understanding of alliance influence in coercive diplomacy.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations