Washington Runs 30+ Sanctions Programs. Can Anyone Name the Strategy?

The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control — OFAC — currently administers over 30 active sanctions programs. That list includes Iran, Russia, North Korea, China's military companies, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Belarus, Burma, and more, according to the official Treasury Department OFAC website.

Thirty programs across regimes with vastly different strategic importance.

Some are comprehensive. Some are selective — targeting specific individuals and assets. All of them carry the full weight of the U.S. financial system as a weapon.

The Tool That Became a Reflex

Ohio State historian Benjamin Coates, writing for Origins, traced how sanctions evolved from a diplomatic option into Washington's default setting. His conclusion: the more the U.S. leans on unilateral sanctions, the less effective — and less legitimate — they become.

The appeal is obvious. Sanctions promise foreign policy results without sending troops. They feel decisive. Politicians love them because they look tough without requiring a body count.

But Coates points out a hard truth: overuse is killing the tool. When Washington sanctions everyone for everything, adversaries adapt, alliances fracture, and rivals like China build alternative financial infrastructure specifically to route around U.S. pressure.

Tariffs Are Getting the Same Treatment

Fox News ran an op-ed from Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna — yes, a Democrat on Fox News — arguing that Trump's tariff strategy is failing American workers and that Washington needs a harder line specifically on China's intellectual property theft and trade manipulation.

Khanna's argument cuts against the typical partisan grain. He's not defending free trade. He's saying the tariffs are hitting the wrong targets or being applied without enough strategic follow-through.

Allies Are Part of the Problem Too

The Hill reported on this year's Special 301 Report — the annual U.S. Trade Representative review of intellectual property violations worldwide. The key finding: the report is now calling out allies, not just adversaries, for behaviors that hurt American workers.

The U.S. has historically given trade partners like the EU and Canada softer treatment on IP enforcement. The 2025 Special 301 report apparently breaks from that pattern.

Equal standards across the board are necessary to build credible trade policy. Letting allies steal your intellectual property because they're politically convenient undermines any coherent strategy.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Left-leaning outlets treat every tariff as economic illiteracy and every sanction on a U.S. adversary as dangerous escalation. Right-leaning coverage frames every trade action as bold America-first genius. Both miss the complexity.

The U.S. sanctions architecture — built over a century, expanded aggressively under every president from Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump — is a genuine strategic asset. But it requires discipline. You can't sanction 30 countries and dozens of individuals simultaneously and expect each action to carry the same punch it did when sanctions were rare.

China specifically has spent the last decade building systems — including the CIPS payment network — designed to insulate itself from dollar-based financial pressure. The more Washington threatens everyone with sanctions, the faster those alternative systems get built and adopted.

China Is the Real Priority. Act Like It.

OFAC maintains a specific "Chinese Military Companies" sanctions program. That's correct and necessary. Chinese espionage costs U.S. firms an estimated $600 billion per year, according to figures Fox News cited in related coverage.

Six hundred billion dollars. Every year.

Yet Washington simultaneously runs sanctions programs on Yemen, Mali, Central African Republic, and rough diamond trade controls — many of which are outdated, minimally enforced, and drain OFAC resources.

Maintaining strategic focus on China — the actual peer competitor threatening U.S. economic and military dominance — becomes impossible when your sanctions apparatus is spread across 30+ programs of wildly varying strategic importance.

What Needs to Happen

First: triage the sanctions list. Consolidate or sunset programs that aren't delivering strategic results. Congress and the Treasury Department should be doing this review annually. They are not.

Second: apply the Special 301 standard consistently. If Canada or the EU is ripping off American intellectual property, say so publicly and apply pressure. The same rules that apply to China should apply to Brussels.

Third: stop treating tariffs and sanctions as interchangeable or as substitutes for actual trade negotiation. They are different tools. Conflating them produces incoherent policy.

Fourth: build a China-specific economic pressure strategy that is coordinated, sustained, and allied. Unilateral sanctions work best when they're targeted. Multilateral pressure on China — combined with allied coordination — would be exponentially more effective than the current scatter-shot approach.

The Frustration Is Real. The Strategy Isn't.

American workers are right to be frustrated. Their jobs, wages, and industries have been undercut by Chinese trade manipulation, IP theft, and currency practices for decades.

But frustration is not a strategy. Thirty sanctions programs running simultaneously is not focused pressure. Tariffs without follow-through are not protection.

Washington — under both parties — has turned its most powerful economic tools into reflexes. That's how effectiveness erodes without producing results.

The weapon still works. But only if you aim it.