On the Right - Powell Versus Bush? - Colin Powell; George W. Bush - Brief Article - Column

National Review, March 5, 2001 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2

The Lockerbie decision reminded everybody that Libya is one of what we used to call rogue states, a designation gone out of fashion. Diplomacy doesn't like provocative categories, inasmuch as it is diplomacy's business to weave in and out of such problems as are presented to the world by rogue states. For instance, any rogue state that acquires a nuclear bomb is promoted to world-class respect. President Bush has called for reaffirming the sanctions against Libya. These sanctions have been in place for 15 years. Our opposition to Libyan terrorism was nicely punctuated in 1986 by President Reagan, who sent an Air Force detachment to strike at Tripoli, downheartedly finding Qaddafi away from the house when the bombs homed in on his bedside.

But this call by President Bush, while not exactly colliding with a policy initiative of his secretary of state, calls into question the criteria by which we have been guided over the years in the matter of sanctions. There are nearly 200 nations in the world, and we have, since World War I, imposed sanctions on 125 of them. Some of these sanctions were paramilitary, as e.g., those against Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan. But most have been graduated acts of diplomacy. And what we heard from Secretary Powell, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was that he favored not exactly phasing out sanctions, but "get[ting] rid of most of [them]."

An outfit called USA Engage, which wants to increase trade everywhere, particularly in those areas in which we are inhibited from doing so by economic sanctions, is the target of an essay by Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy. USA Engage "would effectively eliminate the United States' ability to impose economic sanctions on a unilateral basis." The instrument of reform is some version or other of Sen. Lugar's 1998 Enhancement of Trade, Security and Human Rights Through Sanctions Reform Act. The objective, Mr. Gaffney persuasively speculates, is to end by yielding to the United Nations the authority to impose sanctions. Currently we impose sanctions on 75 countries, the U.N. on fewer than a dozen.

Gen. Powell hasn't disclosed which sanctions he'd seek to mitigate or to end. The ghostly presence in that room is, of course, Cuba. But that boycott is so freighted with political dynamite, Gen. Powell may, even though he is a decorated soldier of courage, funk any direct recommendation that the Cold War attitude towards Cuba should be revised as anachronistic. What will never be anachronized, or should never be, is the odium felt for Cuba's despotic and sadistic leader. But the whole idea of reform is to detach commerce from diplomatic policy. Our tradition has been to recognize de jure leaders, and often de facto leaders.

No doubt Gen. Powell is influenced by the marginalization of economic sanctions, which is a fruit of globalization. Multilateral sanctions can work, as we saw in the case of South Africa. But the situation there was unique. They had a racist government which, after some years, people stampeded to oppose, including students marching to enjoin divestitures by college trustees.

But what doesn't much work is unilateral sanctions, because some other country is going to augment its trade to make up for the trade lost by the one imposing the sanctions. The idea, ten years ago, was to bring Saddam Hussein to his knees by sanctions imposed by all the powers that participated in the Gulf War. But only the United States continues officially committed to sanctions, and we have got the irony of a theoretically abject Saddam Hussein who finds enough money to bestow $10,000 on the family of every Palestinian casualty, and to talk about raising the price of oil by fifty cents.

Mr. Gaffney is correct that in one respect the U.S. is unique, and that is the leverage we have in "carefully crafted financial sanctions- including limiting access of offending foreign government-controlled entities to the U.S. debt and equities markets."

So we will see how President Bush homes in on the question, confident that he will not preside over American disarmament, sanctions being a dimension of national power.