Economic sanctions remain central to Biden policy

WASHINGTON. — The Trump administration has imposed sanctions at a record-shattering pace of about three times a day during the president’s time in office: a slew of measures targeting companies, individuals and even oil tankers tied to Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela and Russia.

President-elect Joe Biden’s team is promising a top-to-bottom review of sanctions operations, but don’t expect a significant slowdown on his watch. About seven weeks before the inauguration, Biden’s picks for top administration slots are making clear that economic restrictions on countries will remain an essential tool, even if they don’t like everything about the way Trump used them.

Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, chosen by Biden to be the No 2 official at Treasury, plans to review how the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence unit, or TFI, at Treasury operates, people familiar with the matter said. That includes an evaluation of current programmes, staffing and budgets, according to the people.

Yet the conviction that sanctions remain crucial underscores just how central they have become to the way the US conducts foreign policy, using its economic might as much as its military power to get what it wants abroad, even when close allies disagree. And as much as Biden wants to distance himself from Trump’s policies, experts and observers say he is likely to keep up Trump’s aggressive approach.

In their determination to push through an “America First” approach to geopolitical crises, Trump’s team innovated new forms of economic coercion, melding run-of-the-mill sanctions designations with tariffs, export controls and secondary sanctions to punish friends and enemies alike. “They’ve used these tools, tariffs, export controls as a one-two-three punch going after folks like China and others,” said Adam Smith, a former senior adviser in the Treasury Department’s sanctions unit and now a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Trump went after NATO ally Turkey over its detention of an American pastor and threatened to punish Germany for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Ignoring the warning that China’s economy was too big, and too closely intertwined with America’s, Trump repeatedly sanctioned Chinese officials and firms, including 14 top legislators on Monday. He blew past warnings that unilateral sanctions against Iran would be ineffective, crippling that country’s economy, without the help of European partners. — Bloomberg.