According to Albert Speer, a former high-level Nazi official, Hitler interpreted the dispute as showing that Britain and France were too irresolute to stop his further territorial ambitions. Sometimes the goals of sanctions will vary over time. When sanctions were first imposed against Iraq, they were ostensibly designed to compel Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait and impede the Iraqi army's readiness for war. Later, the sanctions were justified as an incentive to make Iraq comply with U.N. resolutions ending the Gulf War, which called for routine U.N. inspections of Iraqi weapons facilities and the destruction of Iraq's weapons-manufacturing capabilities. Later, the Bush administration added that sanctions would not be removed until Hussein was ousted from power, although the Clinton administration seemed to be backing away from this latter requirement.
Compliance is a difficult objective to achieve with sanctions, as the Iraqi case bears out.
Iraq endured the most universal, comprehensive sanctions in modern history, which were enforced by a tight naval blockade and had a severe effect on that country's economy. Yet the sanctions failed to achieve their goals. Rather than causing political disintegration in the target state, Galtung said, sanctions actually foster political cohesion. This is especially true if the target regime can blame all its economic problems on hostile foreign powers. Fidel Castro has apparently been able to rally Cubans in the wake of the tightened U.S. sanctions against Cuba called for in the recent Torricelli measures.