When sanctions fail, power turns to seizure: The unraveling of the western coercive order

As Washington's sanctions model collapses, its desperate measures reveal not strength but a system in decline.

Peiman Salehi

The Cradle

The recent escalation in US–Venezuela tensions is often framed narrowly in tactical terms: the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker, new sanctions targeting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s inner circle, and a publicized diplomatic exchange with Moscow.

Individually, these developments appear episodic. Together, they signal the decay of a coercive model that no longer delivers, one that is mutating into forms of pressure more overtly securitized and legally precarious.

Sanctions as doctrine, now unraveling

For decades, the US treated sanctions as a tool of choice: an economic weapon designed to force political compliance without military engagement. 

Washington’s broader ambitions in Venezuela are rooted in a deeper strategic drive to control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Years of financial isolation, asset freezes, and trade blockades were intended to destabilize and dismantle the Bolivarian state.

Instead, the Venezuelan state adapted. Oil exports were rerouted to alternative markets, payment channels shifted away from US-dominated financial systems, and strategic partnerships with Russia, Iran, and China deepened. What was intended as economic suffocation became a catalyst for diversification and geopolitical realignment beyond Washington’s reach.

The recent tanker seizure must be understood in this context. When sanctions fail to deliver the desired political outcomes, pressure does not disappear; it transmutes. Economic coercion gives way to measures that increasingly blur the line between financial pressure and overtly securitized action. Asset seizures, secondary sanctions, and public legal measures are often presented as enforcement, but they signal diminishing leverage rather than strategic confidence.

Europe’s hesitation reveals structural fragility

This mutation is not confined to US policy toward sanctioned states in the Global South; it is increasingly visible at the core of the western financial system itself.

That same pattern of coercive fatigue is mirrored in Europe. The EU, despite immobilizing over $300 billion in Russian central bank assets since the Ukraine war, has failed to move from freeze to outright seizure. The hesitation is not a matter of will, but of structural fear.

Full seizure would set a precedent that undermines the legal foundations of western financial systems, raising fears of capital flight, reciprocal retaliation, and the erosion of trust in European jurisdictions as neutral custodians of global wealth. 

As a result, European policymakers have resorted to half-measures, such as redirecting interest generated by the assets while leaving the principal untouched. This paralysis is itself revealing. It illustrates that when sanctions lose their coercive effect, escalation does not automatically restore leverage. 

Instead, it exposes the limits of a system that depends on legal legitimacy to exercise power. The inability to move from freeze to seizure reflects a deeper crisis: the sanctions regime can immobilize assets, but it cannot safely convert economic pressure into strategic resolution without destabilizing the very order it was designed to protect.

As economist Francisco Rodriguez, who has studied sanctions efficacy extensively, notes: “If sanctions fail, as the empirical evidence tells you that most of the time they do, they do not reach their intended ends.” Venezuela, in this regard, is not an exception but a particularly glaring example.

The difference now is that Washington is operating in an international environment where escalation carries higher systemic risk and with fewer mechanisms guaranteed to maintain influence.

Institutions under pressure, not just states

As state-level sanctions stall, the coercive net is widening to ensnare institutions. The International Criminal Court (ICC) became a target after pursuing investigations that could implicate US or allied personnel in war crimes. Earlier this year, Washington imposed sanctions on ICC officials, including French judge Nicolas Guillou, who described the outcome as being “effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system.”

But such tactics are losing bite. A growing bloc of Global South nations now rallies behind targeted institutions, offering financial workarounds and political solidarity. The sanctions regime is encountering not only diminishing returns but also active defiance.

From sanctions to speech suppression

As economic coercion loses traction, the impulse to suppress dissent has entered the digital sphere. Sanctions logic now extends to information ecosystems: account suspensions, deplatforming, and opaque moderation policies are being deployed against analysts, academics, and commentators critical of US-aligned militarism – especially in contexts like the genocide in Gaza.

These are not formal sanctions, but they function similarly. They aim not to persuade, but to exclude – limiting access to audiences, resources, and professional networks.

What distinguishes western intervention is not dissent itself, but dissent that challenges the moral legitimacy of powerful institutions or allied states – and it is this that often triggers economic or informational pressure.

But as with financial repression, these methods are producing countercurrents. Just as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) emerged from the ruins of sanctions, decentralized platforms and alternative media are rising to challenge western monopoly over digital discourse.

When power relies on silencing rather than engagement, it signals not strength but constraint. The attempt to suppress dissenting voices mirrors the broader exhaustion of coercive authority in a world no longer organized around a single hegemonic center.

Venezuela and the counter-coercion pivot

The human cost of sanctions has also been repeatedly documented by international observers. In an official visit to Venezuela, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures found that sectoral sanctions and asset freezes had a “devastating impact on the entire population,” exacerbating economic collapse and undermining access to basic services.

This assessment is not unique to Venezuela. It captures the core contradiction of the sanctions order: vast human suffering without corresponding political transformation. Sanctions do not merely impose costs on elites. They ripple through societies, intensifying social hardship without guaranteeing compliance.

For much of the Global South, this reality is neither abstract nor new. Decades of exposure to economic coercion have produced adaptation rather than submission. Financial sovereignty, energy diversification, and strategic nonalignment have become necessities rather than ideological choices. States that once relied on western systems have increasingly cultivated alternatives through regional partnerships and non-western economic networks.

Venezuela today reflects this broader shift. Rather than isolation, it has pursued alternative integration. Rather than political collapse, it has reinforced strategic partnerships with those who share similar experiences of coercion. The outcome is not fragmentation but consolidation outside western frameworks.

This pattern is mirrored in other contexts, such as Iran and Russia, where sanctions intended to isolate have instead accelerated the development of parallel economic and diplomatic structures. Energy routes, payment mechanisms, and financial linkages once considered peripheral are now central to global economic flows.

Washington’s response to these developments has been to intensify pressure even as returns diminish. But coercion without legitimacy is difficult to sustain. Each new round of sanctions exposes structural limits rather than reinforcing authority.

The collapse of the sanctions order will not be linear. It will be uneven and contested. But its direction is clear. Instruments built for a unipolar era no longer function in a multipolar world, where targeted states share support networks, distribute risk, and build autonomy.

What is unfolding there is not a localized dispute but part of a broader transition away from economic coercion as the organizing principle of global power. Once a strategy, it has become theater – and the curtain is already starting to fall.