SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE HEARING ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

Tuesday, February 10, 1998

SENATOR RICHARD LUGAR: As perhaps you know, I and a good number of the co-sponsors, have offered legislation in the Senate, and Congressman Hamilton and Crane and others in the House, that would ask for more careful review of sanctions -- economic sanctions -- before the United States uses economic sanctions.

Our thought is that the rationale for why we are doing it, what the objections are, what benchmarks of success, all of this ought to be known. And in essence, our overall view is that the United States has been using economic sanctions too often. And this is debilitating not only to our trade, but our relations with others, and often nonproductive for reasons that scholars have discussed for a long time.

Do you have any views with regard to this legislation? It comes from USA Engage, an attempt by about some 600 American companies who have banded together at least to foster the slowing down on sanctions as an idea. And this is the legislative component of that.

SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Senator, let me kind of give a broader answer on this. When I was teaching, I used to talk about what tools American foreign policy had. And there basically are three -- diplomatic activity, military force and sanctions.

And we know the difficulty of using and the appropriateness of using military force, and diplomacy is there as a bread and butter issue all the time. And there is a temptation to use sanctions.

And I -- when I was ambassador in New York at the UN, there clearly -- that is one of the places the multilateral -- the most effective place for multilateral sanctions to be imposed. And then there are bilateral sanctions that we take on our own when we believe that we need to somehow influence the behavior of another government.

People ask what's foreign policy about. It is about trying to get another government to understand your national interests. However, as we have looked at sanctions and some of the issues that you have been talking about, we have seen some of the problems that you have described.

ALBRIGHT: And I have asked at the State Department that we really look at how effective sanctions are, how we go about using them generally doing kind of a review. I have asked Undersecretary Eizenstat to really take a look at that very carefully, and he is doing so. And he will, obviously, also look at your legislation.

LUGAR: Well, I would appreciate that. It's a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem - not to eliminate sanctions from your tool of responses, but to be more thoughtful and to understand the costs that are involved that may be substantial for our country.

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