16 October 1997
Washington Post
Jim Hoagland, Opinion

Squandered Power

In the conduct of foreign policy, the United States today resembles an eccentric, wealthy geezer who has amassed a fortune but forgotten why, who is rapidly losing the will and ability to get out of the mansion and spend his treasure usefully.

The fortune in this case is global power -- military, political and diplomatic power, supported by the country's uncontested economic vitality. The Republican-led Congress and the Clinton administration have joined in unwitting conspiracy to spread confusion abroad about America's purpose and potency in the post-Cold War world.

This confusion is most vividly illustrated by the tangle of good intentions and bad outcomes that surround the use of economic sanctions to punish nations or foreign firms that displease America's lawmakers. The useful scalpel of sanctions has been blunted and tarnished by being used too often as an ax.

The Clinton administration and Congress have made sanctions the foreign policy tool of first resort in a world in which American military and other coercive power has lost much of its credibility -- in part because that power is so overwhelming and thus difficult to wield with precision.

This syndrome of weakness through strength is a result of individual political judgments and larger historical forces. As his critics are quick to note, President Clinton has shown a distinct unease with the risks and responsibilities of committing U.S. forces abroad or using covert action effectively against America's enemies. Iraq, Central Africa and Bosnia are cases in point.

But Congress as a body has been even more squeamish and unpredictable in supporting the use of coercive power, second-guessing Clinton shamelessly in the Balkans and elsewhere. The result of such second-guessing is to fragment the consensus that is needed if U.S. power is to be used to topple or forcefully restrain Third World regimes that threaten or work against U.S. interests.

Instead of contributing to a coherent, effective package of restraints and punishment for such regimes, Republican senators such as Jesse Helms and Alfonse D'Amato play to the grandstands: They legislate secondary economic boycotts to register disgust with Fidel Castro (Helms's target), the ayatollahs of Iran (D'Amato's) or other targets of influential U.S. lobbies that contribute to campaign coffers.

Helms & Co. leave to Clinton the messy and ultimately unworkable details of their flawed unilateral sanctions laws, which are not accepted by America's allies as valid or wise. Worse, these senators ignore the undercutting effect of their handiwork on the international acceptance of sanctions as a legitimate foreign policy tool.

Sanctions work when enough countries join together to make them credible and effective. Here the cases in point are Iraq and Libya.

The sanctions the United Nations imposed on Iraq before the gulf war weakened Saddam Hussein's war machine. Sanctions imposed since the war have limited Saddam's efforts to rebuild that machine. In the other case of U.S.-led sanctions supported by the United Nations, Moammar Gadhafi chafes visibly under the restrictions put on him by the international community for Libya's role in the terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.

But sanctions fatigue and the resentment that the Helms-D'Amato approach has sparked abroad are now undermining U.S. efforts to toughen the existing sanctions to deter new misbehavior by Saddam or Gadhafi, or to seek new sanctions in Nigeria, the Congo and elsewhere.

Privately, U.S. officials acknowledge they face growing opposition to keeping the present sanctions in place on Iraq and Libya during scheduled reviews this autumn in the U.N. Security Council.

"We are stumbling over ourselves as we run around, reacting to the challenges to sanctions by the bad guys and their friends, and dealing with an unilateralist Congress," admits one senior administration official. "It would be farcical if it were not such serious business."

The administration, to its credit, recognizes the immediate problem and plans a "bottom-up review" of existing U.S. sanctions, hoping to sort out the worst and most self-defeating parts of this jumbled mix of policy and law. It is an exercise that needs congressional support and understanding to succeed.

But both the administration and Congress need to recognize as well the longer-term problem: Sanctions are a malleable, eventually unreliable substitute for the effective use of power to confront regimes that openly threaten American interests and lives. Unlike diamonds, sanctions are not forever.

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