[wanderlust123]

Sanctions are an economic tool to punish opposition to and advance geopolitical aims of the sanctioning country.

The original poster is absolutely correct in this. Whether the excuse is human rights or something else, the key point being made is that its intention is to advance a geopolitical cause behind an excuse. It doesn’t matter what the excuse is.

[sillyfluke]

I think you and the original poster are being a tad careless in your reading. This article is specifically about sanctioned individuals not countries-- a sanctioned ICC judge who concurred with a very specific ruling. If you want to discuss sanctioning countries you should state explicitly that you're taking a slight tangent because though these topics are very related they are definitly not the same, and vastly different with respect to the magnitude of the practical consequences.

The article specifically states that there are some 15,000 sanctioned individuals, many of which are IS and Al Quaeda members. These actors are often considered non-state terrorists. If you wish to dispute the article's claim that these actors represent the majority of sanctioned individuals feel free to do so, otherwise please explain how much practical pressure sanctioning the rest of the lot-- those compromised mainly from the top brass of authoritarian regimes -- could have effects remotely comparable to sanctioning an entire country composed of millions of people. Those sanctioned individual are also the people least affected by sanctions, since they have direct access to their countrie's financial and natural resources and could care less whether their daughter's visa or mastercard works at that fancy ski resort in the Austrian Alps.

Trump is sanctioning ICC judges because their rulings are complicating his blatant direct personal enchrichment and his family business's real estate dealings for the "Gazan Riveria", which he wants implemented unopposed. It is just silly to say that this amount of in-your-face direct personal enrichment angle having an oversized impact on American foreign policy is just your regular American geopolitical machinations, as you would have to argue that the USA has always been a banana republic no different than any other.

[wanderlust123]

I think you should probably read a bit more on the history of sanctions, their effect and incentives before calling someone “tad careless”. Your argument basically devolves to semantics about the labelling of who is being sanctioned, vs the impacts.

Look up who the US has sanctioned historically, and what the geopolitical objective was. Someone is always being enriched, question is who.