Sanctions: Are they an alternative to war?

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): The sound of sanctions being poured can be heard almost everywhere. It is today's drink that apparently reaches the parts cruise missiles don't. Tomorrow it could be Myanmar's turn. Yesterday it was Serbia's and China's. It goes on being Iraq's. It is Cuba's, Libya's and Iran's -- but whether it remains so depends on last week's decision of the European Union to challenge U.S. trade sanctions at the World Trade Organization and enact legislation to protect European companies from the reach of American law.

American foreign policy these days is one-half part sanctions. It is all very Wilsonian. As the World War I American president said, "A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force."

But sanctions in their own way are as blunt an instrument as most weapons of war. As Franklin Lavin, director of the Asia Pacific Policy Center, observes in the current issue of Foreign Policy, "Trade sanctions can function like a neutron bomb, destroying the economy, wracking misery on the general population but leaving the political establishment intact." That's what seems to have happened in Saddam Hussein's Iraq (although clearly it pushed him to open his doors to the very successful UN weapons inspectors and disarmers) and it was what was certainly happening in Haiti until the generals capitulated to an American-led occupation.

There is also a Newtonian dynamic to sanctions: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction that can make it less cost- effective than a military attack. A cruise missile costing US$1 million can knock out a communications network center and cause $100 million worth of damage. But to impose an oil boycott depriving a country of $1 million worth of petroleum may cost the implementing country $1 million of foregone profits--as Turkey keeps telling Washington over its boycott of Iraq. Moreover, a long drawn-out embargo, again as with Iraq, may cause more innocent deaths and suffering than a short sharp war aimed principally at the military establishment.

My own supposition until recently was that sanctions eschewing violence were a more acceptable weapon for compelling political change. But the more sanctions are being used the more their limitations are being thrown into relief.

They seem to have had a marked impact on white Rhodesia and white South Africa and Sandinista Nicaragua. But would they have worked on their own if more violent forces hadn't been in play too? There is, too, a great deal of evidence that the U.S. refusal until relatively recently to grant China Most Favored Nation trading status was a spur to improving human rights practices. But now that the Clinton Administration has thrown that card away any discussion of trade penalties over human rights performance seems only to make Beijing dig in its heels all the harder.

U.S. sanctions against Cuba, never observed by most of the rest of the world, have clearly not unseated Fidel Castro. Neither have they upturned the apple-card in Libya or Iran, although in all three cases they've caused the regime serious economic difficulties and increased internal opposition. Would they have brought about the demise of the regime if Europe had joined in with America's sanctions whole-heartedly? The judgment on this side of the Atlantic is that they wouldn't--that it would, a la Iraq, have just brought more popular misery whilst the regime stayed intact. Economic engagement, argue the Europeans, is more likely to loosen things up, the same argument that the Clinton Administration now uses with China and was used for years in Washington during the dark days of dictatorship in Latin America.

Would sanctions work any better against Nigeria or Myanmar? They might, if all and everyone agreed and there was a patrolling armada of ships and observers to make the blockade work. This was done with Serbia and it obviously took its economic toll -- an inflation rate of 2000 percent a month. But did it help stop the war? Not until the Serbs had completed most of the ethnic cleansing on their agenda. Perhaps it helped spare Kosovo from Bosnia's fate. Perhaps the threat of renewed sanctions and the present continuance of those involving the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank will help keep President Slobodan Milosevic on the straight and narrow. But even if they now do, it cannot be overlooked that at the beginning of the war they probably strengthened his position, since they worked to concentrate economic power.

An arms sales embargo is arguably always positive. At the very least it sends a useful political message across.