World & Conflict · The Record
Additions to the U.S. Specially Designated Nationals list fell to 1,322 in 2025 from 3,135 in 2024
Chinese state media describe U.S. sanctions policy as overreach. The checkable record is narrower and stranger: two Government Accountability Office reports finding that the agencies never set measurable targets, alongside a designation count that went down.
The claim
On July 5, 2026, Xinhua published an item in its automated illustration series under the title AI Cartoon | USA: The paradox of "overreach". The caption carries the whole argument: "Dreams of reshaping the world, while the foundation crumbles at home." The item is credited to Xinhua Global Service. It does not mention sanctions, export controls or any agency by name.
The sanctions charge is explicit three weeks later. On July 27, 2026, Xinhua reported from Beijing that China had urged the United States to stop threatening sanctions against Chinese artificial intelligence firms, and carried the Ministry of Commerce position that such threats "lack factual and legal grounds and constitute a typical form of AI hegemony". Daily Pol has not seen the ministry's own transcript; the wording here is as published by Xinhua, a Chinese state outlet.
Two separable propositions sit inside that framing. One is that U.S. sanctions do not work as advertised. The other is that they are growing. The public record treats them very differently.
The record on whether they work
The Government Accountability Office has published the same structural finding in two different reports.
In GAO-20-145, the audit office found that Treasury, State and Commerce each undertake efforts to assess the impacts of specific sanctions on the targets of those sanctions - in Treasury's and State's case, including work on a target country's economy. On the larger question, whether sanctions move U.S. policy goals, the report is blunt: "their agencies have not conducted such assessments on their own". Officials told the auditors the assessment is genuinely hard, citing the difficulty of isolating sanctions from everything else happening at once and the fact that foreign policy goals shift.
In GAO-25-107079, titled Russia Sanctions and Export Controls: U.S. Agencies Should Establish Targets to Better Assess Effectiveness, the office reported that the agencies responsible for the Russia programs "have not established clearly defined objectives linked to measurable outcomes with targets for their activities". By then State and Treasury had designated over 6,000 entities and individuals under Russia-related authorities, and U.S. agencies had obligated about $164 million in Ukraine supplemental funding for sanctions and export control work as of September 30, 2024.
A note on dating: the snapshots reviewed for this piece do not carry publication dates for either report, so this article does not assert how many years separate them. What is on the record is that the finding appears twice, in a general sanctions review and again in a program-specific one.
The record on whether they are growing
They are not, in the most recent full year that has been counted. The Center for a New American Security reports that the Trump administration added 1,322 persons to the Specially Designated Nationals list and 143 to the Entity List in 2025, against 3,135 and 523 added by the Biden administration in 2024 - "a significant decrease from 2024", in the report's words. That is 1,813 fewer additions to the Specially Designated Nationals list.
Within that, the center reports that just 74 Russian persons were designated on that list in 2025 and none were added to the Entity List, which it calls "a dramatic decrease in the volume of economic pressure aimed at Russia". Most 2025 financial sanctions were issued under authorities aimed at Iran, and a considerable share targeted nonstate actors, particularly drug trafficking and cybercrime networks.
Analysis
Three things follow from the documents, and one does not.
First, the record supports a measurement critique, not a verdict of futility. GAO-25-107079 records concrete effects alongside the missing targets: export controls have "hindered but not completely prevented" Russian efforts to obtain U.S. military technologies; Russian economic growth ran about 6 percentage points below expectation in 2022; and an oil price cap likely kept production and exports relatively stable while Russian countermeasures limited its efficacy. It also records decay. GAO found no statistically different growth outcome in 2023 and 2024. A sanctions regime that bit once and then stopped biting is a different problem from one that never bit.
Second, the strongest argument on the record against acting alone is the auditors' own, and neither Xinhua item makes it. GAO-20-145 found evidence that sanctions worked better when imposed through an international organization such as the United Nations, or where the target already depended on the United States through trade or military ties. That finding is absent from both Xinhua snapshots; the July 27 item argues legitimacy rather than channel. GAO also noted that sanctions can carry unintended consequences for human rights and public health in targeted countries.
Third, the volume premise fails on the count, and the count comes with its own framing. The center attributes the 2025 figures to the Trump administration and the 2024 figures to the Biden administration - a change of administration recorded alongside the change in volume, which is why the drop reads as a policy choice rather than as a counting artifact. But the record has a hard limit here, and it should be stated rather than papered over: no document reviewed for this piece gives a Russia-specific 2024 figure. The 6,000-plus in GAO-25-107079 is cumulative and undated. So the 1,813-person decline cannot be broken into components, and no one can say from these sources which program shrank most. What can be said is what the center said: economic pressure aimed at Russia fell dramatically.
A fourth point cuts against reading the overuse critique as an import. A 2021 Treasury sanctions review, quoted on the TurboFAC research site, has the department warning that "We must guard against the impulse to reach for sanctions too lightly or in situations where they have negligible impact." Daily Pol was not able to retrieve the Treasury document itself; that quotation rests on a third-party mirror and should be treated as provisional.
A checkable prediction
When a comparable full-year count for 2026 is published, additions to the Specially Designated Nationals list will come in below the 2024 figure of 3,135. Checkable by March 31, 2027.
Method and gaps
An earlier framing of this story attached a different title to the July 5 item; that title could not be verified against Xinhua and is not used here. Daily Pol did not seek comment from Xinhua, from China's Ministry of Commerce, or from the U.S. departments named in the GAO reports. This piece rests entirely on the published documents cited above, and where a document could not be retrieved directly, it says so.