29 September 1997
The Dallas Morning News
Editorial

Economic Sanctions

Washington should use them more selectively

Is the United States too free and easy with the use of economic sanctions?

That is what many business leaders think. They see most sanctions as hurting business without doing much to achieve their stated foreign policy goals.

Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, both of Indiana, agree. They plan to introduce bills that would force a more judicious use of economic sanctions.

The bills deserve a good hearing. It does sometimes seem as if the United States applies sanctions without regard for whether they will work or hurt innocent parties or be supported by U.S. allies.

Take Iran. In 1995, the United States embargoed that Middle Eastern country to prevent it from obtaining weapons of mass destruction and to punish it for supporting terrorist groups. Last year, the United States enacted legislation to discourage foreign firms from investing in Iran.

Make no mistake: Iran is a rogue state. The United States should try to alter Iran's behavior. But the embargo is a leaky sieve. no U.S. ally has joined in. Its greatest impact has been to deny lucrative oil contracts to U.S. companies.

The Iran problem exposes a flaw in U.S. policy: the overuse of unilateral sanctions. Multilateral sanctions by many countries often succeed. Witness the experience of the late white supremacist regime in South Africa. But unilateral sanctions by the United States alone almost always fail.

Two recent studies bear this out. The American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, found that fewer than 20 percent of the sanctions imposed by the United States during the 1970s and 1980s had positive foreign policy outcomes.

The Heritage Foundation, a think tank also located in the nation's capital, found that of all the sanctions imposed worldwide from 1914 to 1990, two-thirds failed to achieve thir stated objectives.

The bills would require the president to certify that unilateral sanctions would likely have their desired effect and cause more harm to the intended victims than to innocent parties. And they would cause sanctions to expire after two years unless Congress acts to extend them.

The bills would not prevent the United States from imposing unilateral sanctions on such deserving targets as Myanmar, where sanctions have weakened that South Asian country's dictatorship, or Libya, which bombed a US. commercial airliner in 1988. They would simply require the United States to measure the costs and the likely impact.

Instead of carrying out a policy of "don't stand there, do something," the United States would adopt on of "do something if it makes sense." That's not asking too much.

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