Sanctions targeting oil are often ineffective at changing governmental policy and often impose additional costs on companies and consumers.

Amid the current media firestorm around L’Affaire Epstein, few people other than Chevron shareholders noticed the headline last Friday about the Trump administration loosening sanctions on Venezuela a bit to allow the company to resume some operations in the country.

But the decline in earnings at America’s second-largest oil company is only one of the plethora of negative economic externalities absorbed by the countries imposing sanctions that target the production and sale of oil. Since the 1990s, oil sanctions have become the key “go-to” policy tool Washington policymakers reach for first in trying to modify the behavior of producer countries that are problematic to us.

Some of the predictions that critics have cited, such as undermining the reserve currency status of the US dollar, have failed to materialize. But the overall track record of oil sanctions is extremely mediocre. They seldomly are decisive in targeting countries’ decisions and then only work when coupled with a serious negotiating strategy that leads to lifting them.

The near-term change, if the reporting by Reuters pans out, is that several foreign partners of Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA oil company — most importantly Chevron — will be granted licenses that will allow them to resume work in Venezuela under limitations. These would include Chevron being paid in oil........

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