Sanctions (Rails-Control)

sanctions measures structural power as the exercise of control over the financial rails — the capacity to exclude others from the clearing/settlement system they cannot route around, and to make third parties conform to that exclusion. The structural question is: who can credibly deny others access to the system everyone must use, and force others to comply? — not how many sanctions programs a state runs. Sanctions are not a Strange structure; they are an exercise of financial structural power, scored as such.

Strange's defining illustration of structural power is system-ownership that leaves others no alternative, and she shows sanctions as an effect of that structural reach:

• "even the Soviet Union, when it buys grain, accepts this way of doing things… Anyone who needs insurance has to go along with this way of doing things. Structural power, in short, confers the power to decide how things shall be done" (Strange 1994, p.25) — the inescapable-system logic.
• "The power to create credit implies the power to allow or to deny other people the possibility of spending today and paying back tomorrow" (Strange 1994, p.90) — the exclusion lever.
• Poland: "when Poland got into the same difficulty — exacerbated this time by US sanctions against the imposition of martial law by Jaruzelski — the German government was unable to come to the rescue and the German banks had to write off their debt" (Strange 1994, p.110) — US structural reach made a third party's rescue impossible: extraterritorial denial.
• Iraq: "the Americans reserved to themselves the right to decide unilaterally when to abandon sanctions" (Strange 1994, p.241) — unilateral exclusion power.

A raw tally of sanctions programs, by contrast, measures nothing structural: "The development of quantitative techniques… has not advanced theory. The choice of what is to be counted is too arbitrary" (Strange 1994, p.10).