On the eve of the US presidential election, incumbent President Joe Biden appears to be on track to become the president who waged the most economic sanctions in US history, a Sputnik correspondent’s analysis of publicly available sanctions-related data showed.
Frequent Sanction Actions
After taking office in January 2021, Biden’s approach to economic sanctions during his first year in office appeared to be similar to those of recent US presidents such as Donald Trump or Barack Obama. However, after the full escalation of the military conflict in Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration responded by introducing sweeping economic sanctions against Russia.
The Biden administration has maintained a steady pace of waging economic sanctions, not only against Russia, but also against other countries such as China and Iran, since February 2022.
When the US government introduces economic sanctions, the targeted person or entity is usually added to two lists: the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List, maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the US Treasury, and the Entity List managed by the US Department of Commerce.
Compared to the Entity List, which included over 400 entities by the end of 2023, the SDN List is the most important indicator of the scope of US economic sanctions, with over 12,000 names on the list.
Updates to the SDN List, usually released as the new "designations," are a good indicator of how many new actions related to economic sanctions the US government took that year.
According to the latest figures from the OFAC’s website, the Biden administration has added 421 updates of new "designations" to the SDN List since January 2021.
From January 2021 to February 22, 2022, the number of new updates to the SDN List under the Biden administration was 92, which was on par with the number of changes under his predecessor Donald Trump each year. During Trump’s four years in office from January 2017 to January 2021, the number of new updates to the SDN List stood at 362, or about 90 per year.
However, the number of new updates to the SDN List has expanded rapidly since February 22, 2022, rising to 98 that year and jumping to 118 in 2023. Since the beginning of 2024, 113 new updates have been added to the list.
Compared to the 362 new updates to the SDN List under the Trump administration, the 420 updates under the Biden administration represented a 15.5% rise.
At the same time, the number of updates to the SDN List during Obama’s eight years in office was merely 559, while the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009 saw 291 new updates to the list.
While the number of updates to the SDN List did not detail how many new names were being added each time, the frequency of new updates to the list is still a good indicator of how many sanctions-related actions were taken by each administration.
Even though Trump took more sanctions-related actions than Obama and Bush, Biden's four years in office appear to have made him the president who imposed the most economic sanctions in US history, as indicated by the number of updates to the SDN List under each president.
Expansive Sanctions on Russia
The changes in the number of new updates to the SDN List each year also matched the sanctions-related statistics released by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a nongovernmental organization, in its annual reports on economic sanctions.
A total of 2,500 persons were added to the SDN List in 2023, with sanctions related to Russia accounting for 61% of new updates, according to CNAS.
The focus of the sanction programs that dominated the new SDN listings also changed throughout the years from 2009 to 2021, before the escalation of the military conflict in Ukraine in early 2022.
For example, sanctions under the counternarcotics program accounted for about 67.8% of new names added to the SDN list in 2009.
By 2020, Iran-related sanctions accounted for about 40% of new names added to the SDN List that year.
During Biden’s first year in office in 2021, sanctions related to Belarus, Myanmar and China contributed to about 32% of the 765 new names added to the SDN List that year.
Before the Biden administration fully waged the tool of economic sanctions because of the military conflict in Ukraine in 2022, there were signs of easing of economic sanctions in certain areas.
While 765 new names were added to the SDN List in 2021, 787 names were removed or delisted during the same year.
However, the delisting trend has slowed dramatically since 2022, as the US Treasury only delisted 218 names in 2022 and 422 names in 2023, while adding over 4,700 names to the SDN List in those two years, according to the report.
The start of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, marked a turning point and the beginning of a serious deterioration in bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington, with a significant expansion in the scope and severity of US sanctions against Russia. The measures included financial sanctions, export controls, and sanctions against Russian banks. The sanctions also targeted Russia's aerospace, shipbuilding and electronics sectors. In addition, Washington imposed a ban on oil and other energy imports from Russia in March 2022.
Russian officials have repeatedly said that the Western sanctions have dealt a serious blow to the global economy and have actually increased the prices of electricity, fuel and food products in Europe and in the United States. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that despite the unprecedented number of sanctions imposed on Russia, the country is overcoming the problems created by them, including by using its own capacities and resources.
The next US presidential election will be held on November 5. The incumbent vice president, Kamala Harris, a Democrat, and Donald Trump, a Republican, are contesting for the country's top job.