On July 9, 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese became the latest target of unilateral U.S. sanctions. There has rightfully been much outrage at the Trump administration’s unprecedented move, both domestically and across the globe, including from the United Nations and other Special Rapporteurs.
While violating international law, the sanctions against the UN Special Rapporteur are grounded in a particular U.S. law, specifically, the Trump administration’s February 2025 sanctions order against the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. government’s decision to sanction Albanese is, however, about far more than the ICC or the national security rationales on which the ICC order was based. Rather, it is, first and foremost, about protecting the economic interests of the United State and the profits of U.S. corporations, which Albanese’s recent work has threatened.
These aspects of the Albanese sanctions are not aberrational. Instead, they represent long-obscured elements of U.S. unilateral sanctions policy. Unilateral sanctions—especially where used by the United States—have long been decried as tools of colonial and imperial power, as war by other means, as a violation of the human rights of impacted peoples, as ineffective, and as counterproductive. Yet as the sanctions against Albanese demonstrate, this damning list of disreputable motives, perverse consequences, and systemic failures is incomplete. When it comes to the U.S. government, unilateral sanctions are also used to preserve and uphold the state’s economic interests and objectives, including the interests of its corporations.
This post sets out some of the economic and corporate interests that have been promoted by certain U.S. sanctions programs, including the sanctions against Francesca Albanese. Those sanctions—against a human rights expert whose work threatens U.S. economic dominance and the reputation and bottom lines of several major American corporations—are perhaps no better exemplar of the economic and corporate goals that are part and parcel of U.S. sanctions policy.
Economic Interests and U.S. Sanctions
According to the orthodox view, the purpose of economic sanctions is not to advance the sanctioning state’s economic interest or objectives, like obtaining trade concessions or instituting trade protectionism. Instead, they are foreign policy and national security tools, designed to substitute military action with economic coercion, in order to achieve certain political ends. They are meant to pressure targets to change their existing political activities or policies, punish them for those activities or policies, or deter them from pursuing those activities or policies in the first instance.
This view of economic sanctions as wholly political has always been problematic. Sanctions are, inevitably, also about economic policies. Even where sanctions are used to pursue political objectives, economic considerations come into play when deciding what sanctions tools should be levied and against whom.
Sanctions can, for example, have negative economic impacts on the sanctioning state’s consumers and corporations. Typically, U.S. sanctions prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in trade and economic transactions with sanctioned countries and foreign nationals. This may prevent those U.S. persons from accessing goods and services they need or depend upon. Secondary sanctions—which prohibit other governments, as well as nationals of third-party countries located outside the sanctioning state from transacting with sanctioned entities and persons—may have adverse economic consequences for these third parties as well.
While such consequences may not always shape U.S. sanctions policy, they sometimes do. This has been particularly evident with regards to Western sanctions against Russia. While the United States and EU have levied increasingly harsh sanctions against Russia’s energy sector since the latter’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, those sanctions, at least until recently, “largely left Russia’s ability to maintain current upstream production and supply global markets untouched.” U.S./EU sanctions were, in short, designed to avoid the devastating economic consequences that would result for Europe and the rest of the globe if Russian energy sources were sanctioned.
Additionally, the role of “economic” considerations in U.S. sanctions is reflected in the domestic economic benefits they can and have created, including by protecting domestic industries and transferring wealth to the United States. For example, the first set of U.S. sanctions instituted against Iran in November 1979—which supposedly responded to the Iranian hostage crisis—was, in fact, initially designed to protect U.S. banks from Iran’s withdrawal of assets from those institutions. Similarly, in the 1990s, congressional representatives from oil-producing U.S. states favored tightening sanctions on Iraq based, in part, on fears that Iraqi oil would compete with the U.S. oil industry.
Other sanctions-related wealth transfers involve the indirect benefits that accrue to U.S. banks holding sanctioned assets. As one court has noted, blocked assets that remain “idle in the banks’ vaults” can potentially be put to “beneficial use” and otherwise profit the bank. Various federal laws have also made sanctioned assets available to certain categories of private litigants in the United States. Under those laws, plaintiffs are able to attach certain sanctioned assets—which may be worth billions of dollars—to fulfill outstanding court judgements. In doing so, those litigants and their lawyers are able to seize what are otherwise unseizable assets belonging to sanctioned countries, foreign entities, and persons, and effectively transfer that wealth from those countries, entities, and persons to the United States.
But perhaps the most blatant, large-scale use of sanctions to transfer wealth to the United States and otherwise further American economic interests is the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The most sweeping of those tariffs are based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA. Enacted in 1977, IEEPA is the beating heart of the U.S. sanctions regime and gives the U.S. president wide-ranging authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency. Using his expansive IEEPA authorities, Trump has invoked IEEPA, for the first time in history, to institute tariffs against nearly all U.S. trading partners.
The first set of major IEEPA tariffs came on February 1, 2025, when Trump issued several Executive Orders against Mexico, Canada, and China, instituting tariffs on goods from those countries. While these tariffs are variously based on national security concerns, regarding “illegal immigration” and illicit drug trafficking into the United States, they are also achieving the traditional economic benefits associated with tariff policies, namely, generating revenue for the U.S. government—a clear goal of the administration’s overall tariff policies.
Two months later, on April 2, the administration issued another Executive Order also based on IEEPA to impose an across the board “reciprocal” ad valorem duty of 10% on all imports into the United States, subject to certain exemptions, with even higher duties imposed on imports from nearly 60 countries and the European Union. Beyond generating revenue for the government, these reciprocal tariffs are explicitly aimed at addressing broader U.S. economic concerns, namely the “large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits.” On April 9, the Trump administration paused most of the higher, country-specific duties for 90 days, but maintained the 10% duties on most imports into the United States. On July 7, the administration extended the 10% duty until August 1, 2025.
While at least two courts have held so far that IEEPA cannot serve as a basis for the Trump tariffs, both decisions have been stayed, so the administration’s tariffs remain in effect. Whether or not the courts ultimately uphold those tariffs, the Trump administration’s use of IEEPA to engage in economic policy-making is a dramatic demonstration of how U.S. sanctions authorities are used to benefit and realize U.S. economic interests. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that IEEPA’s broad language can include tariffs, and one of the two courts left open the possibility that IEEPA could be used to impose more limited tariffs in the future.
Corporate Interests and the Albanese Sanctions
The sanctions against Francesca Albanese are rooted in this legacy of U.S. economic and corporate interest protection. Albanese squarely threatened those interests when she published a report on June 30, 2025 titled, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. That report, which was issued in Albanese’s capacity as Special Rapporteur, details how corporate actors have profited from, contributed to, and been complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, settler-colonialism, and genocide against the Palestinian people. Various prominent U.S. corporations are named in the report, including Lockheed Martin, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Airbnb, Blackrock, Vanguard, and Palantir. Albanese’s report calls for these corporations to be held accountable for their unlawful profiteering, including through criminal investigations and prosecutions of those corporate entities and their executives by the ICC and national court systems.
While the Trump administration could have conceivably sanctioned Albanese when it first issued its ICC sanctions or at any point thereafter, it only did so after the report published. Beyond this suspicious timing, various statements by U.S. officials, including the sanctions announcement made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as a private letter sent by the U.S. Acting Representative to the UN, Dorothea Shea, to UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, make the close relationship between Albanese’s report and the sanctions against her difficult to dispute.
In his sanctions announcement, Rubio implicitly referenced Albanese’s report, specifically mentioning letters she had sent to named U.S. companies notifying them of their violations of international law and providing them with an opportunity to respond before the report was issued. Rubio described those efforts as “economic warfare” threatening U.S. “national interests and sovereignty.” Similar arguments were included in Shea’s letter to Guterres written a few weeks before, on June 20. In that letter, which urged the Secretary-General to remove Albanese from her post, Shea also referenced the letters Albanese had sent to U.S. corporations, which Shea described as “many of the most prominent American corporations in varied sectors including technology, financial services, manufacturing, and hospitality.” Echoing Rubio, Shea claimed that “[t]hese letters constitute an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy.” Her letter ended with an ominous threat to take “significant actions in response to. . .[Albanese’s] misconduct,” if the UN did not act.
While Shea’s letter is filled with various baseless claims, she was right about one thing—the U.S. companies named in Albanese’s report are amongst the “most prominent American corporations.” As one commentator has observed, many of those companies represent the “crowning jewel of American power.” They are deeply “integrated into the U.S. military, the U.S. intelligence community” and “provide a lot of money to a lot of politicians in Washington.” Indeed, the corporations named in Albanese’s report are some of the most valuable in the United States. Tech companies, like Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, are among the largest companies by market cap, while Blackrock and Vanguard are important players in the financial services industry, which contributes a significant amount to the GDP of the United States.
By demonstrating how these companies have participated in and profited from Israel’s unlawful actions and crimes, Albanese’s report threatens the image and profits of those corporations—which may now face consumer boycotts and even prosecutions in domestic jurisdictions—and strikes at the heart of U.S. economic primacy.
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The sanctions against Francesca Albanese are an unjustified, illegitimate, and unlawful attack on Albanese herself, the United Nations, international law, and justice and freedom for the Palestinian people. At the same time, they are a revelation when it comes to exposing what unilateral sanctions do and who they benefit. Far from being tools wielded exclusively by and for the national and foreign policy interests of states, unilateral sanctions can and do serve the economic objectives of states, including by promoting corporate accumulation and profit. These dynamics may not manifest themselves in the sanctions programs of all states, but they are certainly part of the United States’ sanctions policy.
Unilateral U.S. sanctions are being used to uphold U.S. global economic power. As reflected in the sanctions against Albanese, the United States seems to understand that primacy as tied, at least in part, to corporate impunity for complicity and participation in genocide and other international crimes. In that sense, at least, Albanese’s report is a threat to U.S. national security, since that security has long depended upon U.S. economic dominance, which feeds off perpetual war, boundless surveillance and repression, and the endless destruction of places and people, both at home and abroad.
There is perhaps no greater exemplification of the rot at the core of both the U.S. economy and U.S. unilateral sanctions than that.
