Can economic sanctions succeed as foreign policy?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1997 by James A. Nathan

The hotly debated trade and human rights discussion regarding China is but a symptom of a more worrisome tendency in U.S. foreign policy: i.e., the rising proclivity to resort to unilateral economic sanctions. These have become an issue at a time when international trade accounts for 33% of the nation's business expansion and even more of large American companies' profits.

The National Association of Manufacturers notes that, between 1993 and 1996, the U.S. adopted 61 unilateral sanctions. The latter year was a record, with 23 new Congressional acts enjoining commerce of some kind with 35 countries. These measures left the U.S. in a peculiar self-selected isolation, for none of these plethora of sanctions, in the end, were embraced by the rest of the international community.

The purposes for which sanctions are employed are hardly trivial. After all, it is an American interest to live in a world with reduced brutality and fewer war-like potentates. Nevertheless, unilateral sanctions exact a serious price. The Institute for International Economics has released a study indicating that they cost American exporters at least $19,000,000,000 worth of trade a year and nearly 200,000 jobs. Moreover, commerce with about 42% of the world's population is left, perhaps irretrievably, to allies and competitors.

If free trade is as beneficial as claimed by more than several generations of policymakers, economists, political scientists, and business leaders, what accounts for the rising use of a singular economic cudgel in the policy arsenal? There are four elements that help explain the response to use sanctions to express diplomatic displeasure:

Sanctions are historically familiar. Since Thomas Jefferson, Americans have been certain that, in a "contest of self-denial," the U.S. would prevail. Sanctions, the Republican faction of the Founding Fathers argued (against the Federalists), were a form of "peaceable coercion." Governments, especially the British, would be compelled to yield to American pressures, for, in the logic of James Madison and Jefferson, the British need for American goods and services was essential to England's well-being. In contrast, Americans would have to give up little of value-mere "geegaws" in Jefferson's words.

The end of the Cold War supports the notion of sanctions. Even the impeccably liberal New, York Times columnist Tom Wicker explained that it was U.S. economic pressure (albeit made more insupportable by an arms race the Soviets could not bear) that caused the U.S.S.R. to crumble. Notwithstanding the fact that the communist system long was teetering on the grumbling edge of ecological, moral, and economic ruin before the Reagan Administration attempted to "spend the Soviets into the ground" and before Mikhail Gorbachev ever assumed real power in the U.S.S.R., the accelerated pressure of the Reagan buildup, embargoes, and other forms of economic jujitsu pushed the Soviets over the cliff. In fact, Soviet military spending levels neither declined nor expanded in the Gorbachev years. Spending levels (from 23 to 70% of gross domestic product, depending on whom you believe) hardly varied from the mid 1960s until the U.S.S.R. imploded in December, 1991.

The Weinberger-Powell legacy abets sanctions and other means than war. In the early 1980s, defense policymakers such as Casper Weinberger and Colin Powell made four assertions, still largely unchallenged: The U.S. could not withstand many casualties for anything save critical national interests; armed actions, in any case, would have to be short to be sustained by the public and Congress; all other means short of war need to be exhausted for Americans to believe that war is a valid recourse; and new conditions in international trade and weapons give the U.S. access to measures that do not require the shedding of American blood.

Sanctions have become a habit. Notwithstanding whether they "work" or not, once sanctions are in place, they create their own constituency. Despite some loud grumbling, it is rare that American sanctions are actively opposed by U.S. trading partners. While they may irritate Europeans, Mexicans, and Canadians, the issues are small and symbolic and, hence, unlikely to precipitate dramatic retribution. Indeed, U.S. unilateral measures frequently present competitors with easier access to markets they otherwise would struggle to enter such as military materiel, civilian airplanes, oil services, and banking. For American lawmakers, sanctions frequently are easy means of dealing with powerful single-issue lobbies. Sanctions on Cuba placate a well-organized domestic contingency of Cuban-Americans. Similarly, sanctions against Libya, Iran, and Iraq are supported widely by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

What is needed, of course, is a policy routine that helps support global order and U.S. interests. Perhaps, a few simple guidelines would help.

Sanctions work when they are enacted in league with other nations; set in motion as an "expressive" function to show displeasure, although the question remains whether there are policy instruments such as diplomatic pressure that are more useful; or employed to avoid military action, though, as the case with Haiti illustrates, they also can make the use of force all but inevitable.