From Ancient Greece to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Faced with the imminent possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and what appears to be a deteriorating diplomatic stand-off, NATO and other Western allies are again turning to sanctions in the absence of other viable options. Since the Second World War, governments around the world have turned to sanctions to solve their foreign-policy dilemmas on more than 700 occasions.

Recorded history notes sanctions going back as far as Ancient Greece, when the Athenians banned merchants from nearby Megara because the Megarians had farmed land that was sacred to the Athenians and killed an Athenian herald. Megara enlisted the aid of Athens’ arch-rival Sparta, allegedly sparking the Peloponnesian War, which brought Greece’s golden age to an end. 

The League of sanctioners

But it was another cataclysmic conflict, the First World War, that brought the use of sanctions back into vogue. After the Armistice that brought the fighting to an end – and searching for an alternative to the violence that had claimed over 14 million lives – the leaders of the victorious powers devised the League of Nations to maintain international peace and empowered it with the right to prevent trade with any country that might threaten that peace.

As US president – a major player in the establishment of the league – Woodrow Wilson proclaimed:

“A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”