A threat works only if people believe you will carry it out. Sanctions are threats with paperwork attached, and the same rule applies. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has demonstrated, repeatedly and publicly, that its sanctions can be lifted as quickly as they are imposed. Every demonstration makes the next threat weaker.
The president has never hidden the approach. During the 2024 campaign he told Bloomberg that sanctions were driving everyone away from the United States. In a September 2024 speech he said they should be used judiciously and as little as possible, describing himself as a user of sanctions who put them on and took them off as quickly as possible. He also warned that expanding sanctions would ultimately undermine the dollar. The second term has followed the script.
Start with Syria. On his first foreign trip of the term, in Riyadh in May 2025, Trump announced he would lift Syria sanctions. A month later he signed an executive order revoking the six orders that underpinned the entire regime, removed hundreds of people and entities from the blacklist, and pushed Congress to repeal the Caesar Act, a law he himself signed in 2019. Whatever one thinks of the Syria policy, the speed was the message: a sanctions architecture built over a decade came down in weeks.
Venezuela shows the same pattern with added confusion. After US forces captured Nicolas Maduro in Caracas on January 3, the Treasury issued more than a dozen general licenses letting American firms operate in the country. Washington formally recognized Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as head of state in March, and lifted sanctions on her in April. Yet Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello remains sanctioned, with a $25 million bounty on his head, even as he has repeatedly met with US officials. The signal is hard to read and easy to mock: a wanted man sits down with the people who want him.
Iran is the clearest case of the new logic. After the memorandum of understanding with Tehran collapsed, the administration was still willing to trade sanctions relief for a deal, issuing a general license for trading in Iranian oil. Critics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the license would let Iran fund its rearmament without any oversight by the United States. The license was later withdrawn, but the offer had already been made. The Foundation also noted the license appeared to violate the law requiring Congress to have a say in agreements with Tehran, a precedent that matters directly for Russia sanctions under the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
Russia is where the record gets genuinely mixed. In October 2025 the Treasury blacklisted Rosneft and Lukoil, the two companies that produce nearly half of Russia’s crude exports, in the most significant tightening of Kremlin sanctions since 2023. Britain had moved against the same firms a week earlier. That was a real blow. But the follow-through has been uneven. Secondary sanctions on Arctic LNG 2 worked at first: for months, no buyer touched the project’s cargo. Then China’s Beihai terminal bought in, and Washington imposed nothing. By June of this year, Reuters reported, Beijing was planning to expand its terminals for accepting sanctioned Russian LNG. The lesson China drew is the lesson everyone draws from an inconsistent enforcer: wait, and the pressure will pass.
The damage is not only to individual programs. Every on-off reversal teaches two audiences at once. Adversaries learn to outlast the pressure. Allies and neutral countries learn to hedge, to keep their options open, because today’s blacklist may be tomorrow’s white list. Enforcement becomes a bargaining chip rather than a rule. Even the courts are pushing the same way: the administration declined to appeal a ruling that gutted sanctions enforcement against Tornado Cash, the crypto-mixing service that exists to launder money, leaving a hole that money launderers now walk through.
Sanctions were always Washington’s favorite weapon because they cost no American lives. That is still true. But a weapon is only worth what people fear it can do. The administration has spent the past eighteen months teaching the world that American sanctions bend with the wind, and the world has been paying attention. The next time Washington threatens a country with sanctions, that country will remember Syria, Venezuela, Iran and Arctic LNG 2, and will calculate that the pain will probably pass. The threat will still be printed, signed and announced. It just will not be believed the way it once was.