Trump's Erratic Sanctions Undermine Dollar Power
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- Trump lifted Syria sanctions during his May Riyadh visit, signed a June executive order revoking six prior orders, and pushed Congress to repeal the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act he had signed in 2019.
- The Trump administration has issued more than a dozen OFAC general licenses enabling U.S. firms to operate in Venezuela since the detention of Nicolás Maduro in January, and also lifted sanctions on his successor Delcy Rodríguez in April.
- Trump withdrew a general license for trading Iranian oil after the June MoU with Tehran—a move the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said gave Iran "the ability to fund its rearmament without any oversight by the United States."
- Trump blacklisted Russia's Rosneft and Lukoil last October but failed to impose secondary sanctions on Arctic 2 LNG; China's Beihai terminal became the first buyer of that LNG after the August 2025 Trump-Putin Alaska summit.
- Trump invoked the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes over Jair Bolsonaro's trial, then reversed course in December, and separately sanctioned Colombian President Gustavo Petro before hosting him at the White House—the first blacklisted individual to receive that honor.
- Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary injunction on May 13 suspending the OFAC designation of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—the first-ever suspension of an OFAC blacklist designation on First Amendment grounds.
- A Swiss bank was shut down in a day in February after Washington threatened to cut off its dollar access over alleged sanctions violations, illustrating the extraterritorial reach that the source says Trump's uneven application now threatens to erode.
Why it matters: The dollar's role as the enforcement backbone of U.S. secondary sanctions depends on predictability; when a sanctioned Colombian president is hosted at the White House while a Brazilian judge is briefly blacklisted, the source argues, foreign businesses gain cover to hedge against OFAC, weakening the geoeconomic tool that has defined U.S. foreign policy for two decades.
