Op-Ed
The False Promise of Sanctions
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Between the Lines
September 7, 2006 - 12:00amThere are a number of regimes in the world today that commit appalling human rights abuses. These abuses are commonly condemned, but international condemnation, alas, seldom accomplishes anything other than relieving the guilt of those issuing the condemnations. The sort of government that would commit serious abuses will seldom be inhibited by foreigners tut-tutting. After diplomatic efforts fail, well-meaning types in the West frequently propose economic sanctions. Economic sanctions, however, are much less effective, and much more questionable morally, than most people realize. Indeed, sometimes they are so ineffective, and so unjust, that military action is not merely more effective, but more humane.
The phrase “economic sanctions” applies to a wide range of measures designed to damage the economy, or portions of the economy, of the target nation. However, economic damage is hardly a precision weapon. It inflicts pain on society generally, rather than especially on the elites or on the government. Governments, indeed, can adapt to sanctions in many ways. Many nations have natural resources such as oil or gems that can be smuggled out despite sanctions. Burma and North Korea have both turned to selling opium in order to sustain their tyrannical regimes.
Sanctions have been imposed on many regimes, but only few have responded positively. Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Sudan have all been under U.S. sanctions for many years. None have altered their behavior for the better. (And it is doubtful that Cornell’s recent divestment from companies doing business in Sudan will have more impact than years of fruitless U.S. sanctions.) The end of apartheid in South Africa is nearly the only example of major positive national change being brought about in response to foreign pressure. Crucially, the South African government was not a tyranny, but rather an imperfect democracy with a substantial middle class who were susceptible to economic pressure and yet simultaneously powerful enough to effect political change. In true tyrannies, the government can simply ignore the suffering of the people and continue the objectionable policies.
If economic sanctions were harmless, they would be worth attempting even if the odds of success were low. In fact, however, they frequently do very great injury to the population of the target nation. The chief effect of economic sanctions is to isolate and impoverish. Trade brings travel, and thus contact with the wider world. Economic sanctions, by limiting trade, reduce the contact that dissidents and potential dissidents have with outsiders who could otherwise supply aid and moral support. For instance, many critics of the U.S.’s sanctions on Cuba claim that they serve more to isolate moderates there from the outside world than to weaken and restrain Castro’s regime. The sanctions have achieved very little visible good to set against this significant downside.
In America, poverty is unpleasant; in the third world it can be catastrophic. Iraq was subject to the largest and most determined use of economic sanctions in recent years, and the results of those sanctions are sobering. Poverty and poor health care resulted in horrible injury to the Iraqi population. While estimates vary widely, the U.N. claims that half a million Iraqi children died of hunger and disease caused by the sanctions. As the United States is now discovering, Iraq’s infrastructure was ruined, meaning that Iraqis will be suffering from the sanctions for many years to come, even though they were formally ended in May 2003. This appalling death-toll might conceivably have been justified if the sanctions succeeded in either improving or eliminating Saddam’s regime. In fact, Saddam’s reign of horror was only brought to an end by U.S. military action. Meanwhile, billions had been looted from the U.N.’s oil-for-food program and diverted into building palaces for Saddam and funding Palestinian terror groups.
Economic sanctions do sometimes work; the ultimate enforcement mechanism for free trade agreements, after all, is the threat to cut off trade. Even quite ghastly humanitarian consequences might be better than allowing rogue states to arm themselves and invade their neighbors. Saddam was at least somewhat weakened by the sanctions, after all. If we are willing to cause suffering and death to large numbers of innocent civilians, but not willing to fight a war, economic sanctions may be worth attempting. (This is hardly a noble position, but it is by no means absurd.) We should not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that they are either highly effective or particularly humane. They are a blunt instrument, when sometimes foreign policy requires a scalpel.
Economic sanctions can seldom be aimed very precisely, whereas military action often can. It is true that air strikes frequently miss their targets and that they can kill bystanders even if the target is “hit.” Even so, this might well be the better option, causing less collateral damage to civilians than targeting the entire economy of a rogue regime would. Madeleine Albright (then America’s ambassador to the U.N.) claimed on 60 Minutes in May 1996 that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it” to contain Saddam. Even the more pessimistic studies suggest that deaths from the war have been a small fraction, perhaps a quarter, of deaths from the sanctions. The only option, it seems, less humane than the Iraq war was the pre-war policy of sanctions pursued by the Clinton administration.
Economic sanctions are essentially condemning a whole nation to an indefinite period of isolation, poverty, hunger and inferior health care. To quote Gilbert and Sullivan, sanctions condemn a nation “to sit in sullen silence in a dull dark dock; a pestilential prison with a life-long lock.” At some point, it is not only more effective, but more humane, to attempt to resolve the situation with the “short sharp shock” of targeted military action.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.