There is nearly universal consensus that certain egregious violations of international laws and norms demand a forceful and concerted response. Think only, for example, of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the development of nuclear weapons capabilities in Iran and North Korea. Harsh economic sanctions have long been viewed as the answer.

The eternal question, though, is: What comes next? When do sanctions stop working? Or worse, when do they start working against the United States’ best interests?

These are important questions because, over the past two decades, economic sanctions have become a tool of first resort for U.S. policymakers, used for disrupting terrorist networks, trying to stop the development of nuclear weapons and punishing dictators. The number of names on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list has risen steadily, from 912 in 2000 to 9,421 in 2021, largely because of the growing use of banking sanctions against individuals. The Trump administration added about three names a day to the list — a rate surpassed last year with the flurry of sanctions that President Biden announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Given their increasing use, then, it is useful to understand not only how sanctions can be a tool for successful diplomacy but also how, when not employed well, they can ultimately undermine American efforts to promote peace, human rights and democratic norms across the globe.

The Invisible Costs of Sanctions

Policymakers turn to sanctions so frequently — the United States accounts for 42 percent of sanctions imposed worldwide since 1950, according to Drexel University’s Global Sanctions Database — in part because they are seen as being low cost, especially compared with military action.

In reality, the costs are substantial. They are borne by banks, businesses, civilians and humanitarian groups, which shoulder the burden of putting them into effect, complying with them and mitigating their effects. Sanctions can also take a toll on vulnerable people — often poor and living under repressive governments, as academics are increasingly documenting.

Officials rarely factor in such costs. While sanctions are easy to impose — there are dozens of sanctions programs administered by multiple federal agencies — they are politically and bureaucratically difficult to lift, even when they no longer serve U.S. interests. What’s worse, sanctions also escape significant public scrutiny. Few officials are held responsible for whether a particular sanction is working as intended rather than needlessly harming innocent people or undermining foreign policy goals.

Mr. Biden came into office promising to rectify that lack of accountability. The Treasury Department conducted a comprehensive review of sanctions in 2021 and released a seven-page summary that October. The review process was an important step. It concluded, among other things, that sanctions should be systematically assessed to make sure they are the right tool for the circumstances, that they be linked to specific outcomes and include our allies where possible and that care should be taken to mitigate “unintended economic and political impacts” on American workers, businesses, allies and other innocent people.

The Treasury Department is making some progress in carrying out the review’s recommendations, but Treasury is just one of many government agencies responsible for fulfilling sanctions. Every one of them should conduct regular, data-driven analyses to ensure that the benefits of sanctions outweigh the costs and that sanctions are the right tool, not just the easiest one to reach for. It is also important that the results of such analyses are communicated to Congress and the public.

Sanctions Need Clear, Achievable Outcomes

What is already known is that sanctions are most effective when they have realistic objectives and are paired with promises of relief if those objectives are met. Perhaps the best example is the 1986 law targeting apartheid-era South Africa, which laid out five conditions for sanctions relief, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Sanctions by the United States and other nations helped convince South Africa’s whites-only government that its policies mandating racial segregation were unsustainable.

Sanctions on Communist Poland in 1981 in response to the crushing of the Solidarity movement are another example of how this can work. The United States and its allies gradually lifted sanctions with the release of most imprisoned activists, helping usher in a new era of political freedom in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

It’s notable that the sanctions against South Africa and Poland were aimed at bringing about free and fair elections, not regime change. Sanctions aimed at regime change often incentivize defiance, not reform. They have a terrible track record, as the cases of Cuba, Syria and Venezuela make clear.

In Venezuela, open-ended sanctions with sweeping ambition — to oust the dictator Nicolás Maduro — have so far achieved the opposite. After he dissolved the democratically elected National Assembly in 2017 and was declared the winner of a sham presidential election in 2018, the Trump administration imposed maximum-pressure sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to cut off a crucial source of funds to the Maduro dictatorship.

While harsh individual sanctions against Mr. Maduro were necessary, the blacklisting of Venezuela’s oil sector has exacerbated a humanitarian crisis: As this editorial board warned, cutting off oil revenue deepened what was already the worst economic contraction in Latin America in decades. Sanctions on the oil industry, which accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s exports, caused dramatic cuts in government revenue and significant increases in poverty, according to a study last year by Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

The policy, meanwhile, failed to push Mr. Maduro out of power. He instead consolidated his grip on Venezuela, blamed its economic misery on American sanctions and drew his country closer to Russia and China. Sanctions are deeply unpopular in Venezuela, according to numerous opinion polls. Even the representative of Venezuela’s opposition in the United States, a group that previously supported broad sanctions, recently called on Mr. Biden to lift oil sanctions.

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has taken steps to modify the sanctions against Venezuela to add specific, achievable objectives. His administration lifted some oil sanctions by giving Chevron permission to do limited work in the country, prompted by the spike in oil prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The White House has promised additional relief if Mr. Maduro takes steps toward holding free and fair elections next year. Francisco Palmieri, the State Department’s chief of mission of the Venezuelan affairs unit in Bogotá, Colombia, recently released a detailed list of what has to be done in order for sanctions to be lifted. It includes setting a date for next year’s presidential election, reinstating candidates who have been arbitrarily arrested and releasing political prisoners.

Mr. Maduro hasn’t complied so far. On June 30, he barred yet another well-known opposition figure from holding office. Nevertheless, this more modest policy, which supports a gradual return to democracy rather than abrupt regime change, is a better approach.

The Biden administration should be more explicit about which sanctions in Venezuela would be lifted and when, especially those on the state-owned oil company. That would make American promises more credible. An agreement in November between Mr. Maduro and the opposition to use Venezuela’s frozen assets for humanitarian purposes was another promising step, but it is in limbo because the funds have yet to be released.

The delay is causing Venezuelans to lose hope in a negotiated solution to the crisis, according to Feliciano Reyna, the president and founder of Acción Solidaria, a nonprofit organization that procures supplies for public hospitals in Venezuela. Although he has a special license to import supplies, he said he still had trouble obtaining what he needed. Some companies, he said, preferred not to sell to Venezuela rather than deal with the headache of making sure it was legal — a phenomenon known as overcompliance.

“The situation internally is really dire,” Mr. Reyna said.

The loss of hope is, in part, why more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, with more than 240,000 arriving at the U.S. southern border in the past two years. Many experts view sanctions as an important driver of migration from Venezuela because they worsen the economic conditions that push people to leave. In response, a group of Democratic lawmakers — including Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who co-chairs Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign — implored him to lift sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.

In addition to making good on its commitments in Venezuela, the Biden administration can do much more to show that the United States is changing its sanctions policy to make it more humane. The first step would be to follow through on the recommendations of its 2021 review and formally take the humanitarian cost of any sanction into account before it is imposed. The Treasury Department in May hired two economists to take on that task; that should become standard practice for any agency with the responsibility for carrying out sanctions.

Sanctions Need to Be Reversible

Once the government begins conducting systematic reviews of existing sanctions, it’s crucial to ensure that any sanction imposed can be reversed.

Consider the most glaring failure to do this: the open-ended trade embargo against Cuba. President John F. Kennedy put the embargo in place in 1962 with the stated goal of “isolating the present government of Cuba and thereby reducing the threat posed by its alignment with the Communist powers.”

In the years since, American presidents have sent wildly different messages about what it would take to remove sanctions. Barack Obama moved to lift many of them in 2014 — an effort that Donald Trump reversed three years later. Last year Mr. Biden lifted some of the Trump-era sanctions. Yet only an act of Congress can end the embargo.

Peter Harrell, who served on the National Security Council staff under Mr. Biden, argues that sanctions should automatically expire after a certain number of years unless Congress votes to extend them. That would cut down on cases of zombie sanctions that go on for decades, long after U.S. policymakers have given up on the sanctions’ achieving their goals.

For sanctions to incentivize change rather than merely punish actions in the past, the United States should be prepared to lift sanctions — even against odious actors — if the stated criteria are met.

Sanctions, as attractive as they are, rarely work without specific goals combined with criteria for sanctions to be lifted. That applies to current as well as future sanctions. Without goals and relief criteria, these measures — among the most severe in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal — risk working against American interests and principles in the long run.

Last Saturday, dozens of former aides, friends, supporters and dignitaries gathered at the former synagogue that houses the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s headquarters on the South Side of Chicago to commemorate the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s second presidential campaign 35 years ago. The organization’s founder, once a college football star towering at over six feet with broad shoulders, is now wheeled around by a group of trusted aides. Parkinson’s disease has ravaged Mr. Jackson’s body and arrested his speech — though according to those around him, it hasn’t slowed his mind.

Fifty-two years ago at the age of 30, Mr. Jackson broke away from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had been led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before his death, to form his own organization, Operation PUSH, which first stood for People United to Save Humanity and later, People United to Serve Humanity (and which then merged with the Rainbow Coalition). Mr. Jackson, now 81, announced he would be shifting day-to-day leadership of the organization to the Rev. Dr. Frederick Haynes III, a Texas-based pastor, 62.

It has been 39 years since Mr. Jackson first ran for office, and yet what he stands for — a living link to the civil rights movement and a symbol of the work that remains to fulfill that movement’s dream of full equality for Black people in America — is something precious. Perhaps all the more so given that Mr. Jackson remains a complicated, enigmatic figure whose work is as misunderstood as it is seemingly ubiquitous.

Mr. Jackson left seminary to march beside Dr. King in Selma, Ala., eventually making his way into the inner circle. He was there on the day that Dr. King was killed, wearing a shirt he famously said was stained by Dr. King’s blood. From that moment on, he would use his extraordinary oratory skills and knack for attracting media attention to become one of the most well-known Black people in America and perhaps the world.

Mr. Jackson had been sent to Chicago by Dr. King in 1966 to manage Operation Breadbasket. It had a bold mission: to address the economic conditions of Black people. Tasked with moving the movement beyond the sit-ins and protests aimed at securing basic decency for Black people in the South, Breadbasket targeted substandard housing conditions, persistent de facto and de jure racial exclusion and the diversity of products that stocked the store shelves in minority communities.

Mr. Jackson learned from and expanded on tactics Dr. King pioneered. In 1966, Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, briefly lived in a dilapidated housing project in Chicago to highlight the treatment of poor Black people by landlords, prompting the city to crack down on substandard living conditions. Months later, the threat of peaceful marches through the all-white Chicago suburb Cicero aroused the fury of the American Nazi Party, which sought to form a counterprotest. The march was called off after Dr. King reached an agreement with Chicago leaders to open more housing in the city to Black people. President Lyndon Johnson rode the momentum of national mourning in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination to push Congress to approve the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In the years after Dr. King’s murder, Operation Breadbasket’s boycotts and Mr. Jackson’s pickets of local businesses became legendary. Later the organization’s ambitions grew, and after Mr. Jackson’s break with S.C.L.C., he began to target more powerful interests, shifting to national companies such as Pepsico and the grocer A&P. A similar pattern played out in dozens of meetings with countless corporate entities over the course of decades. There were times when the simple threat of a meeting with Mr. Jackson would touch off a cascade of events that resulted in new opportunities for Black business owners seeking to buy into franchises and executives who were locked out of board positions and C-suite positions. At other times, seeking to avoid the heat, corporations proactively moved to diversify their boards or corporate ranks.

Mr. Jackson often said he considered himself a “tree shaker, not a jelly maker.” Those who worked for him knew the saying well: After all, they were the ones responsible for picking up the fruit from the floor to make the jelly.

Could anyone else shake the tree quite like Jesse Jackson? And even if they could, would America still value it? At a time when diversity is once again coming under political attack, the tactics that Mr. Jackson pioneered and the doors of opportunity he opened for countless women and people of color in corporate America are under attack as well.

Almost immediately after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Jackson moved to fill the vacuum that was left in the civil rights movement. But it wasn’t until more than a decade later that he began to look at politics. Mr. Jackson’s efforts to register voters in Chicago helped propel Harold Washington into office in 1983, making him the first Black mayor of that city. Mr. Jackson traversed the country to register voters, especially across the South. It would eventually fuel his unlikely national bid for the presidency. Despite years of living in Chicago, he never lost his South Carolina drawl or his connection to a network of Southern Black churches that sustained his ministry and activism. Mr. Jackson never actually pastored a congregation but ministered to a roving flock, preaching the virtues of civic engagement. His parable of unregistered voters (mostly in the South) as the pebbles in David’s slingshot in his fight against Goliath became a cornerstone of his presidential campaigns.

Mr. Jackson’s political influence was felt most acutely on the left, which has been shaped by the ideas he ran on in his presidential campaigns, his emphasis on increasing the electorate through widespread voter registration of youth and people of color, and by the scores of people who at some point made their way through his orbit. Among them: cabinet members like the former labor secretary Alexis Herman, Representative Maxine Waters, the political strategist Donna Brazile and the Housing and Urban Development secretary Marcia Fudge.

Many Americans, especially Black people, remember the spectacle of Mr. Jackson’s presidential ambitions: the massive rallies, the chants of “Run, Jesse, run!” But those campaigns also merged a unique platform of economic populism, social justice and moral urgency. While Mr. Jackson did successfully mobilize and energize Black voters, his candidacy is best remembered for mobilizing voters not on the basis of race but on moral imperatives and policy prescriptions that when compared with those of today’s Democratic Party seem prescient.

The shorthand of Mr. Jackson’s historic candidacies in the 1980s labels him correctly as the most serious Black candidate for the presidency until Barack Obama emerged two decades later. But Mr. Jackson’s greatest achievement was not, as some thought, his race but the policy platform he built. In 1984 and 1988, he ran to end economic inequality, introduce universal health care and promote America first policies that would have echoes in the decades to come. He envisioned a coalition of Black, white, Asian, Native, rural, urban, gay and straight people coming together to achieve social justice as much as economic justice.

“When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground, we’ll have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation,” Mr. Jackson said in his speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention. His unsuccessful campaigns had a concrete consequence: Mr. Jackson negotiated permanent changes to the Democratic Party’s nominating process, including ending its winner-take-all primary system, which made Barack Obama’s first victory in the Democratic primary possible. By the time of Mr. Obama’s run for office, an entire generation of Black Americans had seen and hoped for a Black man in the White House. “We lifted the low ceiling higher,” Mr. Jackson mused to me recently. “We lifted the ceiling up on Black possibility.”

Abby D. Phillip is senior political correspondent and anchor of “Inside Politics” on CNN. She is writing a book on Jesse Jackson’s legacy in American politics.

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