Richard Nephew, a former senior US official who was instrumental in constructing the global sanctions wall around Iran, is now warning that Washington’s fondness for sanctions as a foreign policy tool could have serious repercussions for the US.

Nephew is now at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs where he has produced a paper on The Future of International Sanctions in a Global Economy. It argues that the US, as the world’s sole superpower, has been able to exploit an asymmetric advantage in imposing economic sanctions, but that advantage is fast eroding and it is time to rethink:

As with the use of cyber warfare and drone strikes, the United States may find in the future that, having created a precedent that targeted sanctions are an appropriate response for all circumstances determined by the United States unilaterally, it is facing similar measures against its own companies, banks, and citizens.

In other words, the US is in danger of becoming Frankenstein and sanction’s its monster. Nephew said in a phone interview:

My base level question is: are we making these decisions with a clear understanding of the implications? It’s very easy to sit at a meeting at the White House and be asked: What can we do to make life hard for cyber terrorists, or Iranians, or Libyans. But it’s only after you aggregate all those decisions and you start to add them up that you may be turning international views of the [US] economy toxic.

Nephew was indeed that guy in the White House coming up with sanctions ideas. He was director for Iran on the National Security Council where he managed a period of intense expansion of US sanctions on Iran, and was lead sanctions expert on the US negotiating team at the Iran nuclear talks. From February 2013 until leaving government at the end of last year, he was principal deputy coordinator for sanctions policy at the state department.

As an American official, I spent an awful lot of time talking to foreign companies about getting out of business with Iran, and one day a foreign company gets very upset with me and says: How would you like it if our government did the same thing to General Motors? And I thought: That’s kind of interesting. I’m actually not sure what we’d do.

Nephew’s recommendations are for American policymakers to think long and hard about the impact of each set of sanctions they are considering, including longterm boomerang effects in a multipolar world.

I would always say to my bosses: let’s take a moment and look at the sanctions regimes we have. And if you have more than you have fingers and toes to count then you maybe take a deep breath and decide whether this is the direction you want to go.

Even when all the long-term consequences are taken into account, Nephew said, sanctions may still be the best available policy, almost always preferable to military options. He thinks that sanctions on Iran were decisive in forcing Tehran to come to the table and negotiate seriously about its nuclear programme. He is reasonably confident that those talks will lead to a good agreement in the next month or two, and believes that it will not be too hard to unpick the web of sanctions he helped spin around Iran.

You are looking at permitting international investment in Iran’ energy sector. You’re looking at permitting Iranian exports of not just crude oil, but all oil products. You’re looking at removing all the financial sanctions except those associated with terrorism and human rights. And you can do that if you get the major [Iranian] gives on the centrifuges and the plutonium reactor and transparency.

On the US side, sanctions relief would be carried out by presidential waiver for the first few years of the agreement’s lifetime. The main danger to US policy, Nephew argues, will be its success. It could become a totem of the effectiveness of sanctions. The risk is, if a hammer is your favourite tool every problem begins to look like a nail.