U.S. President Donald Trump has long had a unique relationship with the use of sanctions, Washington’s most popular geoeconomic instrument. Less understood is that Trump’s approach in his second term has also differed sharply from his first. And the result has been a weakening of sanctions as a tool of U.S. foreign policy going forward.

Trump’s 2024 election campaign saw him repeatedly criticize sanctions, telling Bloomberg that sanctions were “forcing everyone away from us.” In a September 2024 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump declared that sanctions should be used “judiciously” and “as little as possible,” acknowledging that while “I was a user of sanctions … I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible” and warning that their continued expansion ultimately “kills the dollar.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has long had a unique relationship with the use of sanctions, Washington’s most popular geoeconomic instrument. Less understood is that Trump’s approach in his second term has also differed sharply from his first. And the result has been a weakening of sanctions as a tool of U.S. foreign policy going forward.

Trump’s 2024 election campaign saw him repeatedly criticize sanctions, telling Bloomberg that sanctions were “forcing everyone away from us.” In a September 2024 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump declared that sanctions should be used “judiciously” and “as little as possible,” acknowledging that while “I was a user of sanctions … I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible” and warning that their continued expansion ultimately “kills the dollar.”

Indeed, in his second term, Trump has demonstrated a willingness to lift sanctions, albeit only after he perceives that U.S. geopolitical and economic interests have been secured. Despite the failure of the U.S. memorandum of understanding with Iran, it should have been little surprise that Trump was willing to rapidly concede on sanctions in exchange for a deal with Tehran—even as doing so evoked opprobrium from some of his most steadfast allies and advocacy groups; for example, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) labeled the decision to do so as giving “Iran the ability to fund its rearmament without any oversight by the United States.”

During the first foreign visit of his second administration, Trump announced in Riyadh last May that he would lift sanctions on Syria, with the main U.S. sanctions authority—the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—subsequently issuing a wide-ranging license suspending many thereof. At the end of last June, Trump signed an executive order revoking the six previous such orders that had underpinned the Syria sanctions regime and removed hundreds of Syrian individuals and entities from its blacklist. He pushed Congress to repeal the last........

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