The Coordination Gap: Improving G7 Economic Sanctions Alignment

Recent G7 economic sanctions have focused on issues deadlocked in the UN Security Council. Countering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or limiting Iran’s oil revenue from China through UN-led sanctions face the veto powers of both China and Russia. Correspondingly, G7 nations have increasingly leveraged their autonomous economic sanctions programs to pursue these objectives. The result is a plurilateral approach that offers speed and policy autonomy but often produces coordination challenges.

Our research shows that over the past two decades, average currently active annual U.S. economic sanctions designations have grown roughly 13-fold, yet the share matched by the European Union and United Kingdom has stayed essentially flat. Based on public economic sanctions list data, the years following major geopolitical events see allied alignment fall significantly, as Washington pursues a long tail of unilateral designations while partners concentrate on a smaller set of targets, primarily individuals rather than entities. Closing the alignment gap—through a standing coordination mechanism, sustained resourcing beyond a crisis moment, and harmonized designation criteria—is among the most tractable ways to make plurilateral pressure more effective.

The Rise of U.S. Sanctions

Over the last decade, the United States has deployed an ever-larger volume of economic and financial sanctions, both in response to specific adversary conduct and in pursuit of broader thematic priorities. The pace at which new entities, individuals, and property have been added to U.S. sanctions lists has far outstripped the pace of removals. The result is that more subjects than ever have had their access to the U.S. economy and the dollar blocked, and their U.S. assets frozen.

Whether these measures achieve their strategic goals remains an open question. Sanctions have raised the cost of adversaries’ military ambitions and restricted their access to Western technology, yet they have not stopped a war outright or directly removed hostile foreign actors from power. They can also impose harsh penalties on foreign civilian populations and cause price shocks at home. CSIS experts argue both sides of this debate in a March 2025 commentary.

The criteria for an effective sanctions regime are themselves contested, but one point of broad agreement is that the degree of coordination among sanctioning states is strongly associated with better strategic outcomes. Potential sanctions targets can move assets to jurisdictions where they are not sanctioned, so maximizing coverage across jurisdictions restricts the targets’ capacity for circumvention. Understanding how well U.S. programs achieve and maintain that coordinated pressure is therefore a necessary first step toward designing more effective measures.

Defining Coordination

There are three distinct approaches to sanctions coordination: UN-led sanctions, synchronized plurilateral sanctions, and unsynchronized plurilateral sanctions.

The United Nations currently administers 15 economic sanctions programs. Because each must pass the Security Council, their range of action is heavily constrained. As a result, these programs have concentrated on common global priorities such as terrorism, pursuing country-specific regimes only where there is no veto between the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia.

When there is no consensus at the UN, the G7 has deployed synchronized plurilateral sanctions in its absence. These regimes consist of several jurisdictions’ autonomous lists designating common targets within a shared timeframe; this paper treats designations made within 90 days of one another as synchronized. In 2022, for example, several G7 nations adopted sanctions on hundreds of Russian oligarchs and elites within days of one another. By synchronizing the timing of designations across the coalition, the G7 narrowed the window for its targets to shift assets into non-aligned jurisdictions before they could be frozen.

Finally, there are unsynchronized plurilateral sanctions, under which jurisdictions designate common targets on separate timelines. This is the most common form of alignment, but the lag often gives targets time to restructure holdings and evade sanctions before the remaining jurisdictions catch up.

While the United States and its partners frequently pursue the same geopolitical goals, the specific companies, individuals, and property named across their lists are not always identical. Each may have “sanctioned Russia,” but for a company doing sensitive business there, it can remain unclear which conduct is blocked by which jurisdiction. Where designated subjects diverge, sanctions are unilateral in practice even when policy is shared. Such unilateral designations make up the majority of U.S. sanctions over the past two decades—driven both by this subject level mismatch and by the sheer size of U.S. programs relative to those of its allies.

Synchronized plurilateral sanctions were most widely used following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but unsynchronized plurilateral sanctions have been the most common form of alignment over the past two decades. Across many policy priorities, the timing of designations differs sharply from one allied government to the next. UN-led sanctions, meanwhile, have grown increasingly rare, largely replaced by these plurilateral approaches.

Measuring Alignment

Between the 2000s and the 2020s, average currently active annual U.S. Specially Designated National (SDN) listings rose about 13-fold, yet the rate of alignment among the United States, European Union, United Kingdom—across any alignment type—has stayed largely flat. That rate is measured as the share of U.S. designations also adopted by partners, so it is sensitive to the relative size of each program. Because U.S. listings grew far faster than allied ones over this period, a flat share reflects a roughly proportional rise in the absolute number of coordinated designations.

Notably, alignment spikes in 2011, 2014, and 2022—the years sanctions were introduced against Libya and Syria, against Russia for the annexation of Crimea, and against Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, respectively. In each case, a sharp rise is followed by decline in the years after. Realigning major event-driven sanctions programs to a common starting point—the year of the triggering event rather than the calendar year—makes the pattern starker, as shown in Figure 3.

Measured in event-time, plurilateral coordination is high in the year of an event but drops by half by the second year. One driver of this observation is capacity—sustaining coordination with partner governments is harder on high-output programs than on smaller ones, particularly as early designations exhaust the supply of high-value consensus targets. A second is differing policy and implementation emphasis: The United States tends to designate subjects faster and in greater volume, while the European Union and the United Kingdom often concentrate on a narrower set of targets rather than spending resources harmonizing their lists with U.S. subjects.

A final, persistent challenge is the difference in authorities between the United States and its partners. U.S. legal authorities allow the Treasury Department and State Department to quickly apply sanctions designations against subjects found to meet designation criteria, often across multiple authorities per targeted jurisdiction. On the other hand, EU sanctions packages require unanimity across 27 member countries. As a result, partner designations tend to trail U.S. sanctions—though, as Figure 4 shows, by margins that vary widely across programs.

For Iran-related sanctions, the median lag between U.S. and EU or UK designation runs from roughly 200 days to over 400, depending on the partner; for Russia-related designations, the timing is far closer. This gap often reflects the more recent expansion of European autonomous sanctions authorities relative to longer-standing U.S. programs, but it poses enforcement challenges regardless of cause. A malign actor with no U.S. financial touchpoints can keep operating in the interim—even in a jurisdiction where an earlier European designation alone might have curbed its behavior.

Alignment also varies sharply from one program to the next. Among country- and region-specific programs large enough to support a meaningful comparison, the share of U.S. designations also carried by the European Union or United Kingdom ranges widely. Myanmar-related sanctions sit near the top at roughly 65 percent, whereas Cuba-related designations, which European partners maintain mitigating measures against, are near the bottom. Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. Cuba sanctions appear on EU or UK lists under any program. Figure 5 maps this variation across programs, plotting each jurisdiction's alignment rate against the size of its program.

The relative size of U.S. programs is itself a driver of unilateralism: U.S. regimes tend to carry far more targets than their European analogues. A higher share of UK and EU designations appear on the U.S. SDN List than the reverse, yet significant portions still do not. This asymmetry splits the alignment gap into two parts that should not be conflated. The low U.S.-anchored rate is partly because the United States designates far more than its partners—much of the apparent shortfall reflects that the United Kingdom and European Union simply have not matched the sheer volume of U.S. listings, rather than real divergence.

Breaking out U.S. designations by entities versus individuals reveals where the divergence lies. Within the U.S. Russia sanctions program, 74 percent of the more than 1,900 designated individuals are matched by partners, compared with just 31 percent of the more than 4,300 designated entities. This trend holds across programs, and rather than reflecting overall size or political will, highlights which designations partners are most likely to mirror. The pattern is specific to the United States: EU and UK programs are smaller and weighted toward individuals, and they align at broadly similar rates across both target types. The United States, by contrast, has an inverted ratio, generating a large tail of unilateral entity designations.

Measured from the UK and EU side, 40–80 percent of all currently active designations are matched by the United States. This means that London and Brussels continue to designate a meaningful share of targets that Washington does not. While the headline U.S.-anchored shares overstate the coordination failure, a two-sided divergence persists even once the size effect is stripped out. Closing it would require both expanding designations within the United Kingdom and European Union and closer coordination at the subject level.

No clear pattern emerges in how individual U.S. authorities affect plurilateral alignment. The most aligned U.S. authorities are generally ones for which targeting has been limited, focused on individuals, and closely tracked to European policy priorities. More of the variation in alignment is explained by differences between programs (Russia vs. Iran) than by differences within them (Russia E.O. 14024 vs. Ukraine E.O. 13661).

Recommendations

Allocate Resources to Coordination: The United States should focus its sanctions resources on achieving higher levels of alignment within the G7, rather than unilateral volume. Its sanctions effort holds a significant advantage over partners in its ability to scale output, but it increasingly spends that advantage designating entities that partners do not, dragging down coordination rates as raw designation counts climb. Directing capacity toward harmonizing with partner lists would help close enforcement gaps, particularly in jurisdictions with substantial European touchpoints and few U.S. ones. In practice, the Departments of Treasury and State could dedicate analytic capacity to identifying high-value targets already designated by partners but absent from the SDN List, and to packaging U.S. designations for rapid partner uptake. Because the event-study data show alignment decaying in the years after a triggering event, this should be a sustained function rather than a surge capacity activated only around major crises.

Build a Standing Mechanism: In its strongest moments of coordination, the United States has organized large-scale rollouts alongside its G7+ allies—but these have presented a unified front on an ad-hoc basis, with few standing resources behind them. Recent precedents show what a dedicated structure can do: The Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force and the G7 Price Cap Coalition both sustained joint targeting and information sharing, yet each was built around a single contingency rather than as enduring infrastructure. A permanent mechanism—housed within the coalition or as a dedicated coordination cell—could maintain shared data, deconflict the timing of designations, and preserve the analytic relationships that now dissipate once a crisis recedes.

Harmonize Criteria and Thresholds: Where the barrier to coordination is not the absence of political will but the absence of legal viability, harmonization efforts should work along two tracks. Where coalition criteria are genuinely a matter of policy design, the G7 should map divergences and converge them where possible. Where constraints stem from legal systems, the United States should meet partner requirements where possible and increase information sharing to enable partner action. The aim is not identical statutes across jurisdictions, but a system in which a shared policy judgment translates into parallel designations under each partner's own authorities, rather than stalling on an authority mismatch.

Conclusion

The effectiveness of sanctions depends on far more than coordination alone. But coordination is the one factor most observers agree is associated with better strategic outcomes, and unlike the underlying geopolitics, it is squarely within a coalition’s control. Resourcing alignment as a standing priority, sustaining it beyond an immediate crisis, and harmonizing the criteria that let partners act on the same targets will not make any single program decisive, but together they raise the ceiling on what plurilateral pressure can achieve. As the G7 turns increasingly to sanctions for the problems on which the Security Council is deadlocked, narrowing the gap between shared intent and aligned action is among the most tractable ways to make that pressure count.

Brad Spicher is an intern in the Economics Program and Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.