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

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 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 <https://thecradle.co/authors/peiman-salehi>

DEC 22, 2025 -
https://thecradle.co/articles/when-sanctions-fail-power-turns-to-seizure-the-unraveling-of-the-western-coercive-order
Photo Credit: The Cradle

The recent escalation in US–Venezuela tensions
<https://thecradle.co/articles/venezuela-charges-washington-with-theft-piracy-after-seizure-of-oil-tanker>
is
often framed narrowly in tactical terms: the seizure of a Venezuelan oil
tanker
<https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-preparing-seize-more-tankers-off-venezuelas-coast-after-first-ship-taken-2025-12-11/>,
new sanctions targeting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/12/us-slaps-sanctions-on-maduro-family-venezuelan-tankers-what-we-know>’s
inner circle, and a publicized diplomatic exchange with Moscow
<https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-doubles-down-backing-maduro-amid-mounting-us-pressure-venezuela>
.

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
<https://thecradle.co/articles/gunboats-follow-sanctions-in-us-strategy-on-venezuela>
and legally precarious.

*Sanctions as doctrine, now unraveling*

For decades, the US treated sanctions as a tool of choice: an economic
weapon
<https://thecradle.co/articles/sanctions-as-deadly-as-war-lancet-study-finds-us-led-sanctions-kill-over-500000-people-annually>
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
<https://thecradle.co/articles/empire-repurposed-washingtons-final-frontier-is-venezuela>.
Years of financial isolation, asset freezes, and trade blockades were
intended to destabilize <https://thecradle.co/articles-id/34294> 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
<https://thecradle.co/articles/iran-and-venezuela-bypass-us-sanctions-with-ship-to-ship-oil-transfers-report>,
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
<https://www.dw.com/en/russias-frozen-assets-everything-you-need-to-know/a-75180873>
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
<https://www.securityincontext.com/posts/the-human-consequences-of-economic-sanctions-a-conversation-with-francisco-rodriguez?>:
“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
<https://www.state.gov/releases/2025/08/imposing-further-sanctions-in-response-to-the-iccs-ongoing-threat-to-americans-and-israelis>
on ICC officials, including French judge Nicolas Guillou, who described
<https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-french-icc-judge-sanctioned-by-the-us-you-are-effectively-blacklisted-by-much-of-the-world-s-banking-system_6747628_4.html?>
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
<https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-874946>,
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
<https://www.ilo.org/about-ilo/ilo-and-multilateral-system/ilo-and-brics#:~:text=The%20BRICS%20is%20a%20forum,South%20Africa%2C%20United%20Arab%20Emirates.>
and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO <https://eng.sectsco.org/>)
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 <https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/48/59/Add.2>,*”*
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
<https://www.sundialpress.co/2025/09/03/rising-parallel-economies-in-iran-a-threat-to-the-power-of-sanctions/>
 and Russia,
<https://jamestown.org/russian-sanction-evasion-drives-development-of-alternative-international-economic-system/>
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.
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