GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 2 ● Number 3 ● Summer 2000—Sanctions: Efficacy and Morality Editor's Note
Economic sanctions are today a favourite foreign-policy tool of governments, so much so that commentators speak of a “sanctions epidemic” and a “sanctions frenzy”. (In 1998, President Clinton declared that the United States had gone “sanctions happy”.) Not only has the number of cases of sanctions risen in recent decades, but the reasons for which sanctions are imposed have multiplied. Sanctions are used to punish military aggression, to fight terrorism and drug trafficking, to promote democracy and to defend human rights, as well as for other purposes.
This increased resort to sanctions, both unilaterally and multilaterally through the United Nations, has prompted extensive debate about the efficacy and morality of their use. Is it morally permissible to inflict hardship on civilian populations as a means of pressuring their leaders? Are sanctions a humane alternative to war? Are sanctions an effective means of producing political change? Can sanctions be focused to hit ruling elites while sparing civilians? Are sanctions economically worthwhile, given that they usually cause significant trade losses to the countries that impose them? All these questions and others are examined in the pages that follow.
Michael Malloy of the University of the Pacific, California, performs the essential preliminary task of definition: what precisely do we mean by “economic sanctions”, and how are they to be distinguished from normal trade regulations and penalties? Malloy delimits a technical meaning for the term to facilitate analysis of the issues raised by sanctions.
Before 1990, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions just twice (against Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977). During the 1990s, however, the council—freed by the end of the Cold War from the impediment of frequent superpower vetoes—authorised sanctions twelve times. David Cortright and George A. Lopez, both of the University of Notre Dame, survey the lessons that may be learned from “The Sanctions Decade”.
The discussion then moves to specific case studies of sanctions. Gary Sick of Columbia University reviews the course of US sanctions against Iran. He argues that the election in May 1997 of the reformist Mohammad Khatami as Iranian president has called into question the continuation of Washington’s sanctions policy. After more than twenty years of “utter hostility”, the time is ripe for both countries to reconsider their relations with each other.
The need for such reconsideration by the United States is denied by Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The United States must continue to “contain” Iran, he argues, because the latter is seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, opposes the Arab–Israeli peace process and supports terrorism. Unilateral sanctions against Iran serve vital US interests and should be maintained.
Hossein Alikhani, President of the Centre for World Dialogue, looks at the role of AIPAC, the chief pro-Israel lobby in the United States, in the imposition of comprehensive US sanctions against Iran. The extraterritorial measures implicit against third countries in the anti-Iran sanctions, he says, are reminiscent of the Arab boycott of Israel to which AIPAC and Washington objected so vociferously.
If today the morality of imposing economic sanctions is increasingly questioned, that is largely because of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, under a tight UN embargo since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In a wide-ranging review of the effects of the sanctions, author Geoff Simons says the chief blame for the crisis lies with the United States and Britain for upholding what amounts to a form of genocide against the Iraqi people.
In February this year, Hans von Sponeck resigned as UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq in protest at the suffering inflicted on the civilian population by the sanctions. He outlines a number of measures which both the international community and Iraq could take to break the stalemate and end the ordeal of ordinary Iraqis.
The US embargo against Cuba constitutes one of the longest sanctions regimes in history. Joaquín Roy of the University of Miami examines the background to the Helms–Burton Act of 1996, which reinforced the embargo and had major international repercussions. He advocates a gradual dismantling of the US blockade as the best means of producing democratic change in Cuba.
The United States is the world’s primary user of unilateral sanctions. Our next three articles look at the US experience. Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Barbara Oegg of the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., discuss how the adverse impact of US sanctions on US firms and workers can be reduced. They believe that sanctions are likely to endure as a much-used policy tool, whether or not they change the behaviour of foreign states.
Benjamin H. Flowe, Jr., and Ray Gold, both of Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, L.L.P., Washington, D.C., clarify the legal bases and implications of US multilateral and unilateral sanctions. They conclude with a plea for reform to put US sanctions “on a firmer footing within international law”.
The US resort to sanctions is not a recent phenomenon, but goes back to the birth of America as an independent nation. Daniel Fisk of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., shows that political debate over the use of sanctions, often involving contention between the president, Congress and the US business community, is an enduring theme of American history.
The raison d’être of the World Trade Organisation is to facilitate free trade. Economic sanctions restrict trade for essentially political purposes. WTO counsellor Maarten Smeets examines the relation between sanctions and WTO provisions, paying particular attention to the “security exceptions” which allow WTO members to impose sanctions.
Our survey concludes with two articles weighing the political and moral case against sanctions in general. Ramesh Thakur, vice-rector of the United Nations University, Tokyo, denounces sanctions as politically ineffective, counter-productive and morally questionable. His verdict is seconded by Terrence Duffy of the University of Ulster, who focuses more closely on the humanitarian dilemmas arising from the imposition of sanctions against entire populations.
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