 "Trump tariff: Why ‘sanctioning’ India is a strategic folly")
The very word sanction is a paradox. Rooted in the Latin sancīre, “to make sacred”, and institutionalised in Roman law as the sanctio, it referred simultaneously to the solemn ratification of a statute and to the penalties for violating it. This duality has persisted: in modern usage, sanctions denote both authorisation and punishment. Yet, in Washington today, the term has been reduced to a rhetorical device.
When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared that Trump’s secondary tariffs on India’s imports of Russian crude amounted to “sanctions”, she was not drawing on the gravitas of Roman jurisprudence but engaging in political opportunism. Echoes of this rhetoric from Peter Navarro, Scott Bessent, and Stephen Miller reveal the manoeuvre for what it is: a mislabeling of tariff walls as moral instruments, and a dangerous trivialisation of sanctions as a tool of international statecraft.
While the vocabulary may be modern, the practice is ancient. The Megarian Decree of 432 BCE, in which Athens barred Megarian merchants from its ports and markets, stands as the earliest documented case of economic exclusion as coercion. Thucydides observed that this embargo “most embittered the Lacedaemonians and brought them to the decision of war” (History of the Peloponnesian War, I.139).
Rather than inducing compliance, the measure escalated conflict and helped trigger the Peloponnesian War. Rome later codified similar practices, bans on trade, property seizures, and naval blockades, embedding economic coercion into the fabric of imperial strategy. The historical lesson is clear: sanctions have rarely remained confined to the economic realm; they reshape alliances, provoke escalation, and generate enduring antagonism.
By the early modern era, sanctions were deployed at scale. Britain’s naval blockades during the Napoleonic Wars sought to strangle French commerce, while Napoleon’s Continental System of 1806 attempted to isolate Britain, both fuelling decades of continental polarisation. The United States’ Embargo Act of 1807, meant to punish Britain and France for maritime predation, instead devastated American shipping, demonstrating the self-harming potential of unilateral embargoes.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn the 20th century, sanctions were codified in international institutions. The League of Nations’ sanctions on Italy (1935) failed due to incomplete participation, exposing the fragility of collective enforcement. By contrast, the global campaign against apartheid South Africa in the 1970s-90s, trade bans, arms embargoes, and financial restrictions, exerted decisive cumulative pressure, illustrating that effectiveness depends less on severity than on coalition breadth and complementarity with domestic political currents.
The post–Cold War era elevated sanctions to the primary instrument of coercive diplomacy. Comprehensive sanctions on Iraq (1990–2003) inflicted humanitarian devastation without dislodging Saddam Hussein, prompting a shift toward “smart sanctions” targeting elites and financial flows. In Iran (2006–2015), coordinated US, EU, and UN measures on oil and banking isolated Tehran sufficiently to produce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Yet in Cuba and North Korea, decades of restrictions entrenched autarky and hostility without regime change.
The sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and 2022 revealed both the potency and the limits of financial warfare: cutting Moscow off from SWIFT and freezing reserves damaged its economy but also drove it closer to Beijing, accelerating systemic financial fragmentation. The empirical record is unambiguous. Sanctions can sometimes compel tactical concessions, but they consistently scar bilateral relations and often generate counter-coalitions.
It is worth noting that sanctions often prove counterproductive by forcing targeted states to internalise capabilities and achieve strategic autonomy. The Chinese nuclear sector illustrates this dynamic: following the 2019 US blacklist of China General Nuclear Power Group and suspension of key equipment licences, Beijing rapidly localised its supply chain, with over 90 per cent of reactor components now produced domestically. Indigenous designs such as the Hualong One were standardised and deployed on compressed timelines, reducing costs by 20-30 per cent compared to Western counterparts. Instead of constraining capacity, sanctions accelerated vertical integration, workforce scaling, and export competitiveness—transforming a pressure tool into a catalyst for sovereign industrial innovation.
India has repeatedly been at the receiving end of sanctions, especially by the USA. After its 1974 nuclear test, the United States suspended nuclear cooperation and technology transfers, straining ties without altering India’s strategic trajectory. The Glenn Amendment sanctions of 1998, following Pokhran-II, froze loans, military sales, and assistance at precisely the moment India was liberalising its economy, delaying but not derailing rapprochement. More recently, the spectre of CAATSA sanctions over India’s purchase of Russian S-400 systems again underscored Washington’s reflexive reliance on coercion.
In each case, sanctions failed to secure compliance but succeeded in hardening India’s resolve on sovereignty. Today, by branding punitive tariffs as sanctions, Washington risks repeating a cycle that has historically alienated New Delhi without shifting its calculus.
From the perspective of coercion theory, the measure is structurally flawed. Sanctions succeed when the costs imposed exceed the benefits of defiance and when compliance pathways are politically feasible. India’s diversified energy portfolio, capacity to reroute trade, and high political salience of strategic autonomy mean its elasticity of compliance is extremely low. The more coercion is applied, the greater the political payoff for resistance, making the exercise self-defeating.
From the vantage of alliance politics, sanctions on India heighten what Glenn Snyder called the “abandonment dilemma”. For New Delhi, the signal is that Washington is an unreliable partner, willing to punish rather than accommodate. This incentivises hedging strategies, dilutes trust within the Quad, and complicates US efforts to embed India in long-term defence-industrial cooperation. Instead of deepening coalition capacity, punitive tariffs framed as sanctions exacerbate the risks of drift and divergence.
From a geo-economic systems perspective, the misapplication of sanctions corrodes the architecture of US influence. Coercion accelerates India’s investment in non-dollar payment systems, alternative insurance and shipping networks, and localised refining and storage infrastructure. Over time, this builds systemic redundancies that blunt US financial leverage globally. What begins as a tactical measure against India thus metastasises into strategic erosion of America’s centrality in the international economic order.
The deeper lesson for India is that episodes such as these reaffirm the necessity of building hard geo-economic and technological levers, rather than relying on diplomatic goodwill. For a state that prizes strategic autonomy, dependence on U.S. and China creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited in moments of political friction. Sanctions, whether mislabelled tariffs or genuine embargoes, are reminders that leverage is manufactured, not granted.
India’s long-term strategy must therefore prioritise the development of its own chokepoints: rupee-based settlement and payment systems to bypass dollar-clearing, expanded petroleum reserves and an indigenous tanker-insurance pool to secure energy flows, equity stakes in overseas hydrocarbon assets through ONGC Videsh, and localisation of critical technologies from semiconductors to rare-earth processing. Such capabilities would ensure that external coercion is not met with compliance but with credible countervailing power.
Diplomatically, New Delhi and Washington may well reach a modus vivendi, just as India has managed to negotiate its way out of earlier sanction episodes in 1974 and 1998. Yet the erosion of trust is irreversible. Each recurrence of coercion reinforces the perception that partnership with the United States is conditional, fragile, and prone to politicisation. This is the paradox Washington fails to grasp. Punitive measures intended to discipline India only accelerate its determination to diversify dependencies, deepen coalitions with Europe, Japan, and ASEAN, and invest in sovereign levers of economic and technological strength.
For India, the current episode is not a temporary tariff dispute but a structural reminder that strategic partnerships can endure only when insulated from coercion, and that in the final analysis, autonomy rests not on rhetoric but on the levers a state can wield.
Aditya (X: @adityasinha004) writes on macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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