Last week saw a much-needed victory for basic decency, when the Biden administration announced a six-month-long temporary exemption to US sanctions on Syria for earthquake relief aid. Announcing condolences to those suffering, a US Treasury official made clear the sanctions regime “will not stand in the way of life-saving efforts for the Syrian people.”

This was an obvious and urgent response to one of the more horrific natural disasters in recent memory, a massive earthquake across Turkey and Syria that has killed thirty-five thousand people and counting, and which has left five million needing shelter and who knows how many buried beneath the wreckage. The more-than-decade-long US and EU sanctions aren’t the only obstacle to humanitarian relief reaching civil war–torn Syria, which is also bedeviled by authoritarian president Bashar al-Assad’s government’s own blocking of aid into rebel-controlled territory, and by its work with ally Russia to close UN-opened border crossings from Turkey. The only one of those crossings left open is now too damaged to use.

But given that Syria’s civil war won’t be resolved anytime soon, and there’s little Americans can do to change the behavior of Syria’s or Russia’s governments, lifting the sanctions was a clear way the US government could make a positive and immediate impact on earthquake relief.