Last month, Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, a bill Congress passed to honor the late senator by codifying and expanding the extensive sanctions regime he devoted much of his career to building.
However, last Friday—two days before they were set to take effect—Trump signed an executive order waiving the sanctions that would have been imposed on Russian diesel.
This, of course, sparked a complete breakdown among establishment politicians and commentators who accused Trump of betraying Ukraine and, effectively, switching sides to back Putin in his “war on Democracy.”
This decade-old cliché about Trump’s allegiance to Russia carries a lot less force now that even its biggest proponents have abandoned the narrative that dominated much of his first term, where Trump was a “Russian asset” that Putin had collaborated with and planted in the White House to erode America’s institutions and to free the Russian President’s own hand to conquer Europe.
But that hasn’t stopped establishment Russia hawks from again suggesting that the President of the United States is acting directly, and unnecessarily, in the Russian government’s interest.
The truth is Trump is, unsurprisingly, trying to act in his own interest. Despite his bluster and near-weekly declarations of total victory, the war Trump launched on Iran back in February has not aged well.
The Iranian regime that Trump at least claimed at the time he sought to overthrow remains in power. In fact, according to some analysis, the war has helped transfer a lot of power into the hands of Iranian hardliners and made it more likely the regime decides to pursue a nuclear bomb than it was before the war.
Also, exactly like opponents of the war were warning about even before the first bombs were dropped, the volume of drones and rockets the Iranian regime unleashed on US assets and allies in the region in the first weeks of fighting has greatly depleted American munitions stockpiles—especially of interceptors, which are extremely expensive to produce and time-consuming to replenish.
That all but forced Trump to seek a pause to the all-out war and nightly missile and drone exchanges after only about a month and, importantly, it has further constrained what Washington can send to Ukraine.
In addition to that—again, completely predictably—the Iranian regime flexed its geographic leverage over global energy markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz, causing energy prices to skyrocket. Trump and his allies have since released substantial portions of their strategic petroleum reserves, worked to redirect oil across the Arabian peninsula and out through the Red Sea, and attempted to deploy naval forces to hamper Iran’s ability to disrupt shipping in the waters off its coast.
But despite some sporadic progress on a couple of these fronts, energy prices remain painfully high, with a real risk of climbing even higher as fighting escalates between Saudi Arabia and Iran’s allies in Yemen—threatening the only other major alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz. High gas prices and, especially in recent weeks, high diesel prices have become a major headache for Trump and his party as they fight to hold as many congressional seats as possible in the approaching midterms.
On top of that, as winter approaches, the Ukrainians and Russians have escalated long-range strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, which threatens to drive global energy prices even higher, especially given how depleted interceptor stockpiles are.
And that is the context behind Trump’s new “deal” with the Russians. It’s not some conspiracy to help Putin conquer Ukraine. From what administration officials have said, the move seems to have two purposes. First, to use the same word as Cabinet members Chris Wright and Doug Burgum, it’s to offer the Russians a “carrot” as Ukraine’s backers are forced to adapt to the new material realities of the war. And second, as Marco Rubio suggested, it will allow Americans to import some diesel to help bid prices down before election day.
Indeed, to get more specific about it, the waiver of sanctions is a legal necessity to carry out the supposed deal Trump struck with Putin earlier this month. Trump claims Putin agreed to supply the global market with 4 million tons of diesel. But for some of that diesel to reach American customers quickly and directly, the punishments for buying Russian diesel had to be waived. That’s what’s going on here.
As some have pointed out, the size of the diesel export agreed to in this supposed deal, and the scale of the sanctions that are being waived, are really quite small. This move is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the pain Americans are feeling because of the artificially high diesel prices or change Russia’s posture in the war. But the waiver is interesting for a different reason. Because it is, in many ways, an admission that those of us who oppose Washington’s reflexive use of economic sanctions are right.
It is remarkably well-documented that sanctions are atrociously bad at doing what we’re told they’re supposed to do—weaken and delegitimize a regime in the eyes of their domestic population to the point where they’re either overthrown or forced to change course by their revolting citizens. In the US government’s long history of pursuing regime change around the world, sanctions alone have virtually a 100 percent failure rate. The only cases where one could plausibly argue that sanctions did anything close to that were ones always accompanied by either direct military intervention or extensive covert support for an insurgency.
The fact that this is essentially undeniable suggests that the true purpose of sanctions is not what those enacting them say. And, like a lot of things, that also doesn’t mean there has to be one secret reason. For instance, sanctions can be beneficial for some domestic producers who don’t want to compete. Or they can be useful for justifying the massive national security and economic federal bureaucracies that are “necessary” for enforcing a large and complicated sanctions regime. Or, perhaps most of all, sanctions can let politicians look tough, or like they’re doing something about a foreign regime’s bad behavior without requiring much time or energy on their part.
If sanctions really did what those who use them—including the Trump administration—claim they did, the Ukraine war would have ended in a Russian defeat years ago. And, if it somehow didn’t and the Trump administration was in the increasingly difficult position they now find themselves in, the way to move the Russians in the direction the administration wants them to move would be to increase sanctions, not waive them.
Another point that we critics of economic sanctions also make is that they hurt ordinary people. Just because they are completely ineffective at taking out foreign regimes does not mean that they’re symbolic gestures. Sanctions cut entire populations off from trade, making them artificially poorer. That, at best, makes life a lot harder for the average person—just look at how much the so-called affordability crisis is impacting people here, in the richest country in the world. But especially when you’re talking about goods like food, energy, and medicine, sanctions can be life-altering, or even deadly for the old, sick, and poor.
But while the immorality of our government purposefully making the people living under its “rival regimes” poorer or cutting them off from the resources they need to survive is absolutely something we sanction opponents have been calling out, it’s also pretty obvious that that is not the reason Trump is waiving some sanctions on Russian diesel. Instead, what Trump’s waiver demonstrates is that his administration understands that sanctions also hurt Americans.
That’s pretty clear in this situation where a global diesel shortage is hurting not just farmers, truckers, and other American producers who need it, but also the people who need and use the products they produce or transport. Cutting Russian diesel off from global markets doesn’t just hurt the Russian people; it hurts us too. In a lot of ways, this waiver can be seen as Trump, the American president, giving sanctions relief to the American people.
But the same is true for all other sanctions. They make the American people worse off.
That can be easy to dismiss if you look at each sanction in isolation. Blocking some foreign country from exporting a commodity that American buyers can source elsewhere is not, by itself, going to cause a serious domestic meltdown. But the US federal government has more than 15,000 sanctions on the books, imposing economic restrictions on roughly a third of the world’s countries. Taken together, those restrictions are absolutely making the American people poorer than they otherwise would be.
And remember, that is not the unfortunate but necessary consequence of an effective foreign policy tool. Sanctions are remarkably ineffective, at least at accomplishing what we’re told they’re supposed to accomplish. Foreign governments with the perceived power to tax are far more resilient than the ordinary people who live under them.
If anything, they’re useful for these rival regimes of Washington as they try to stir up resentment and hatred within their population towards us—the country that is purposefully working to crash their economy. The American people would be far safer and more financially secure if Washington’s extensive sanctions regime were done away with.
In other words, Trump waiving some diesel sanctions on Russia is the right thing to do. Even if it is extremely limited, almost certainly temporary, and clearly a last-ditch attempt in the weeks before an election to partially mollify the global energy shortage he helped kick off earlier this year, it is a step in the right direction.
But more importantly, it’s revealing. Because the same logic that makes lifting these sanctions the right decision applies to the thousands of others that Trump and the rest of Washington are leaving on the books. There is no good reason to stop with this one small waiver.
