Equals or Outcasts? Public Opinion on Reconciliation with Sanctioned States

The intended negative effects of sanctions imposition on the economy of targeted countries have received significant scholarly attention, as have their unintended effects on human rights, democracy, and health outcomes. We examine another potentially undesirable effect of sanctions policy: Sanctions may make rapprochement more difficult once the time for reconciliation has come. We ask whether having sanctions in place complicates reconciliation with estranged foreign states, examining this question from the perspective of public opinion in the sanctioning country. We expect that the public will be significantly less likely to support normalizing relations with a sanctioned foreign government, all else equal. We hypothesize that reconciling with an ‘outcast’ country of this sort will be interpreted as weakness on the part of the sanctioning government. We ran an original, pre-registered vignette experiment fielded in the US with a quota-representative sample (n = 1.303) to test our argument. Contrary to our expectations, having sanctions in place against a country does not make ordinary Americans meaningfully less likely to favor rapprochement. We support the experimental results with an exploratory analysis of open-ended responses and a follow-up survey in the wake of the debates around sanctions relief for the Syrian transitional government. Our results go against the conventional wisdom that leaders tie their hands by imposing sanctions. We argue that sender governments may have more leeway when imposing and terminating sanctions than is often assumed, especially on medium- and lower-profile sanctions and foreign policy measures.