2 October 1997
The Indianapolis News
Editorial

Trading Haste For Deliberation

When the United States gets into any halfway serious disagreement with another country, U.S. leaders tend immediately to impose trade sanctions to express their disapproval of the offending nation.

Currently, the United States is imposing some form of trade sanctions on more than 20 countries, with others pending.

Some thinkers say such extensive use of unilateral trade sanctions as punitive devices is a bad idea.

Unilateral trade sanctions are those imposed by one country acting on its own, as opposed to multilateral trade sanctions, which are imposed by a group of nations working collectively.

Multilateral trade sanctions, of course, exert much more pressure on a country, rendering them more effective as persuasive tools.

The critics of unilateral trade sanctions argue that they rarely accomplish what they are intended to do (namely, make some other country change its ways) and generally hurt American businesses more than anyone else.

Some 631 U.S. companies have coalesced to form USA Engage, a lobbying group whose sole purpose is to argue against the proliferation of ineffective, self-defeating trade sanctions.

Two U.S. lawmakers from Indiana have sided with the coalition.

This week, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, will introduce measures intended to make Congress pause and consider the issues anytime it might be inclined hurriedly to slap trade sanctions on another country.

The bill would require that Congress take the following steps whenever trade sanctions are proposed:

• determine whether a new unilateral sanction is likely to have its desired effect;
  
• determine whether a sanction's benefit exceeds the cost it will impose on innocent parties;
  
• conduct an annual review of new sanctions to ensure that they are effective policies; and
  
• establish that sanctions shall expire after two years unless Congress acts to extend them.

As long as the proposed legislation asks only that Congress consider the important issues related to sanctions before enacting them, it certainly deserves consideration.

There are some potential drawbacks to this legislation, however. Passing a law setting up new procedures Congress must follow means making lawmakers cut through additional bureaucratic red tape to get things done at a time when there already is too much of it clogging the process of government.

In addition, Congress ought to be careful not to surrender any of its prerogatives, such as the authority to impose trade sanctions.

Citizens will wait to see how the Hamilton-Lugar bill looks when it emerges from its various states of debate and alteration.

Only then can they determine whether to support it.

If it simply establishes the modest principle that Congress should exercise restraint whenever putting Americans' economic resources on the line, however, it will serve a worthwhile pupose.

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