In a 2015 article in the journal International Affairs, Francesco Giumelli noted that the UNSC had largely abandoned comprehensive sanctions in favor of targeted sanctions since the mid-1990s, with the controversy over the efficacy and civilian harms attributed to the Iraq sanctions playing a significant role in the change: "The sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 covered all goods entering or leaving the entire country, whereas those imposed today are most often directed against individuals or non-state entities, and are more limited in scope. ... The widespread view ... that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of UN comprehensive sanctions itself rang the death knell for the perceived utility of comprehensive measures." In a similar vein, Albright herself told an interviewer in 2020 that "we learned in many ways that comprehensive sanctions often hurt the people of the country and don't really accomplish what is wanted in order to change the behavior of the country being sanctioned. So we began to look at something called 'smart sanctions' or 'targeted sanctions.'"
