Unilateral U.S. sanctions face mounting pressure around the globe

Sanctions have been a handy tool for U.S. politicians to name and shame foreign entities. However, more and more people are calling for the trend to stop.

An example is a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden on August 12, signed by hundreds of lawyers around the world, saying unilateral sanctions are illegal and inhumane.

Though sanctions are not wars, the impact they have on civilians can be "just as indiscriminate, punitive and deadly," the letter said.

The U.S. government often intentionally uses sanctions to punish innocent people in countries, the letter said, in the hope these people will revolt against their own government due to financial desperation.

The authors quoted then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as saying poor living conditions in Iran could spur popular revolt.

"I just don't think that people really understand the horror that sanctions wreak on the people," rather than the government of a targeted country, Marjorie Cohn, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild who signed the letter to Biden, told Bloomberg.

The authors point to resolutions from the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council that challenge unilateral sanctions as violations of the UN Charter. They also cite the fourth Geneva Convention, which calls collective punishment a war crime.

Hurting innocent people is not the only side effect. The unilateral sanctions are also destroying the so-called "rule-based order" the U.S. has been trying to defend, according to an opinion piece written by Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, in Foreign Policy magazine.

Sabatini argued that the U.S. sanctions have driven many economies out of the dollar system. Instead of just waiting for destruction, these economies are looking for an alternative, which the U.S. cannot control.

As U.S. sanctions grow to an unprecedented number during the Biden administration, the U.S. is slowly losing its grip on the global economy, Sabatini wrote. "It's time to reconsider how these punitive measures are eroding the very Western order they were meant to preserve."

Additionally, many U.S. tech companies are complaining that tech sanctions against China have in return hurt their profitability. They argued that sanctions disabled them from selling products to China, leaving a major market for Chinese competitors to freely occupy.

The sanctions against China also hurt China-U.S. ties. The latest U.S. sanctions on Chinese firms imposed on August 24 received negative response from the Chinese government – what they've been doing since the China-U.S. trade tensions.

The spokesperson for China's embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said Beijing "firmly opposes unilateral sanctions based on 'long-arm jurisdiction'" and added that "normal trade between China and Russia should not be undermined, still less turned into an instrument to smear and contain China."