31 August 1997
The Tampa Tribune
EditorialStop Shooting from the Hip on Trade
When you're angry, count to 10 before you speak, Thomas Jefferson advised. When you're very angry, count to 100.
That classic advice is being ignored in Congress, in state capitals and even in city halls and school board meeting rooms, with costly results. Governments at every level, with minimal debate, have rushed to express moral indignation over foreign misbehavior by imposing a long list of sanctions and boycotts. There is no realistic objective beyond the venting of anger; others are left to deal with the consequences.
In the past few years, 49 unilateral economic penalties have been imposed or threatened by state and local governments. Many more have sprung forth at the federal level.
The result is a tangle of restrictions that penalize multinational companies, violate trade agreements and frustrate trading partners.
The Constitution wisely puts the federal government in charge of foreign policy and trade relations so the nation can speak with one voice; however, elected legislatures and councils rightly have broad discretion in how they spend taxpayers' money. The city of Berkeley, for example, won't buy gasoline from companies doing business with Burma - its way of protesting human rights violations there.
Because sanctions such as Berkeley's are becoming more and more popular, a group of 630 large and small businesses formed a coalition called USA-Engage to urge politicians to at least count to three before they take it upon themselves to try to change the behavior of distant states.
At the count of one, they should ask whether the proposed sanctions will foster the intended changes. In the 1970s and '80s, U.S. sanctions worked pretty much as intended in only one case out of five.
A major factor in effectiveness is whether other countries will join in. Usually they are happy to take advantage of the U.S. absence, so unilateral sanctions almost never work.
Yet they are growing in popularity because many groups promoting all sorts of noble causes - improving human rights, stopping drug trafficking, protecting the environment and fighting terrorism - see sanctions as an easy way to appear engaged. They now make their one sided pitch over computer networks.
This is not democracy at its best.
Second, the debate should consider how much the sanctions will cost. Last year Florida exported $1.3 billion worth of goods to countries now targeted for sanctions. Floridians may be willing to give up 21,000 jobs to try to send a message to Mexico, China, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but it is a price that ought to be carefully considered.
A related question is how much suffering the boycotts will cause civilians in other nations.
Tough sanctions applied a few years ago to punish the military government of tiny Haiti could not make the tyrants budge. It took the threat of invasion to force them out. Yet the oil embargo did make it impossible for poor Haitians to get crops to market. A team of American doctors reported in 1994: "The deliberate promotion of malnutrition and disease in Haiti is morally unacceptable."
Some impacts are harder to see. Sanctions make U.S. suppliers unreliable. It's easy to stop a project, such as the sale of an airplane fleet or the construction of a dam, but it's very hard to pick up the business again. An interrupted trade relationship, like a broken marriage, takes time to mend. And even time does no good if another competitor wins the business or if a company is so damaged it cannot recover.
Refuse to sell U.S. cars to Nicaragua and what happens? All its cars are now Japanese and Korean.
Former President Jimmy Carter thought he was smart to slap a grain embargo on the Soviet Union to force its troops out of Afghanistan. He didn't anticipate what actually happened in a world full of wheat. James E. Perrella, president of Ingersoll-Rand Co. and chairman of the National Foreign Trade Council, notes that the embargo made wheat farmers cheer in Canada, France and Australia. It cost U.S. farmers $2.3 billion in lost sales and drove some U.S. farmers into bankruptcy.
The third question that should be asked is whether the sanctions will undermine other important national policies. Often sanctions violate carefully negotiated trade agreements and cause an anti-American backlash.
A bill is being introduced soon that will have Congress ask those three questions before imposing sanctions.
It deserves bipartisan support, and a copy of it should be sent to the many states and localities meddling in foreign affairs. All politicians need to realize that a trade sanction is an important weapon in the diplomatic arsenal, but that it is an inaccurate cannon with a backfire at times more lethal than its shell.
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