16 September 1997
The Port St.Lucie News
Editorial

Our one-sided sanctions

First, this basic fact about unilateral trade sanctions: Overwhelmingly, they do not work. Also they tend to be counterproductive: Our long-standing sanctions against Cuba, Libya and Iran seem to have helped to perpetuate the regimes they were designed to topple.

That's why the well-intended Freedom From Religious Persecution Act of 1997 now being debated in Congress is bad policy.

The act would automatically trigger an array of sanctions against nations deemed to be engaged in religious persecution. The sanctions range from denial of loans, guarantees and insurance essential to trade, as well as bans on the sale of specific goods.

The United States has become over-eager to use unilateral sanctions, by one analysis imposing 61 sanctions against 35 countries over the past four years. Rather than convey moral force, these sanctions make us appear capricious and inconsistent.

The law, should it pass, would be a nightmare to administer. It would create within the White House a powerful, autonomous enforcement agency with the Orwellian name of Office of Religious Persecution Monitoring. The office would have the almost theological fuction of defining degrees of religious persecution and fine-tuning the U.S. response.

Inevitably that office would be put in the untenable position of establishing what religions are important or politically powerful enough for the United States to defend.

The immediate thrust of the legislation is to get at China for its odious mistreatment of Christians and Tibetan Buddhists. But its sponsors say the legislation could trigger sanctions against a dozen other countries, and opponents say it could affect another dozen more.

Religious persecution tends to be a function of insular societies. North Korea is militantly, oppressively atheist. In isolated Afghanistan, the fanatical ruling Taliban oppress even their fellow Muslims. China's record on religious persecution is not good, but may be better than it was when China was a closed society.

Religious tolerance is a function of an open society, and trade is a way of fostering open societies.

None of this means we should turn a blind eye to religious persecution, which is especially repugnant to America's founding ideals. Where we find persecution, we should loudly and unremittingy denounce it. We should overtly and covertly support persecuted religious minorities. We should continue to be a haven for the truly oppressed.

And if we encounter sufficiently heinous persecution, we should seek, in conjunction with the many nations who share our values, multilateral sanctions in the international forums we so often spurn in favor of going it alone.

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