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27 July 1998
Elliott Abrams,
President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center
The Weekly Standard
WORDS
OR WAR;
Why Sanctions Are Necessary
In rhetoric not ordinarily heard from the business community,
the new lobby known as USA*Engage warns that "two-thirds of the world's
population" is now "threatened" by a novel form of "proliferation." The
threat that alarms USA*Engage is not the proliferation of, say, ballistic
missiles, but the spread of trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. government.
Indeed, the explicit goal of the several hundred businesses
and trade associations that make up USA*Engage is to end the use of sanctions
as a tool of U.S. foreign and security policy. In an extraordinary media
and advertising campaign in recent months, USA*Engage, the Chamber of
Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, the National Association
of Manufacturers, and other business lobbies have worked to discredit
sanctions as a blunt, overused instrument that only does harm. Last week,
responding in part to this pressure, the Senate moved to lift sanctions
on India and Pakistan and to weaken the force of existing and future sanctions
by exempting agricultural and medical goods. A bill sponsored by Sen.
Richard Lugar that would have largely gutted all future sanctions -- the
favored legislation of the anti-sanctions crusaders -- was only narrowly
turned back. Lugar's bill may well resurface this fall after a Senate
task force issues its report on the issue.
As this burgeoning campaign to abolish them makes clear,
sanctions are a great annoyance to the constituents of America's business
lobbies. While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily
bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in
a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain
commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.
But the elimination of economic sanctions as a foreign-policy tool would
be an extraordinarily radical action, for it would leave our government
facing its adversaries with just two alternatives: words or war.
The history of U.S. human-rights policy shows that "mere"
words can sometimes be effective tools. This is especially so when the
regime under attack is pledged to respect common values, whether because
it sees itself as part of the West and seeks American approval, as was
the case with Latin American dictatorships over the past two decades,
or because it has signed international agreements, as did the Soviet Union
(which was pledged to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to
the Helsinki Agreement). But words appear to have little impact on the
most savage regimes, those we now call "pariah states," such as Libya
and Iraq. Nor did words have much impact in past decades on the likes
of Mussolini and Hitler. Confronted with hard cases, the United States
may wish to reinforce its words with economic pressure.
Think of the policymaker's options. Country A is engaged
in very grave human-rights abuses: a government-organized mob has killed
some opposition leaders and burned down a church, and the government has
jailed several honest judges and shot five journalists. Country B has
been caught trying to send weapons-grade plutonium and missile-guidance
systems to Iraq. Country C has just invaded an island belonging to its
neighbor. We could simply denounce these acts from the podium in the State
Department's press-briefing room. We could send troops to fight, as we
did when Kuwait was overrun and when Grenada's government was hijacked.
However, in situations where words are likely to be ignored but soldiers
are unlikely to be sent, without economic sanctions the policymaker's
quiver would be empty.
To escape the choice between words and war, governments
for centuries have used economic pressure. Even when sanctions are mostly
symbolic, they are still important, for they show that we take seriously
what the regime in question is doing. More commonly, economic sanctions
do have an economic effect on the targeted regime. And the proof is the
fierce struggle by so many target governments to have the sanctions removed.
They pay fortunes to lobbyists in Washington, and they denounce and revile
the sanctions and the members of Congress who promote them -- all the
while insisting that the sanctions do not affect them in the least or
that sanctions only starve children and do not hurt the regime. But with
rare exceptions, American economic sanctions have a moral and an economic
impact -- and the target regimes deeply resent and are hurt by both.
Opponents of U.S. sanctions have made "unilateral sanctions"
their special target. They argue that sanctions observed by many nations
would be much more effective. True enough. Far better for trade with an
outlaw regime to be restricted by many nations than by just one. But the
argument against unilateral sanctions has two great flaws.
The first is purely pragmatic. Like all forms of collective
security, multilateral sanctions require a unanimity rarely achieved in
international politics. Fifty years ago Hans Morgenthau described the
problem in his classic work Politics Among Nations:
The logic of collective security is flawless, provided
it can be made to work under the conditions prevailing on the international
scene. . . . The odds, however, are strongly against such a possibility.
There is nothing in past experience and in the general nature of international
politics to suggest that such a situation is likely to occur.
. . . Collective security, then, can succeed only on
the further assumption that all or virtually all nations will come to
the defense of the status quo . . . regardless of whether they could
justify such a policy in view of their own individual interests.
. . . What collective security demands of the individual
nations is to forsake national egotisms and the national policies serving
them. Collective security expects the policies of the individual nations
to be inspired by the ideal of mutual assistance and a spirit of self-sacrifice.
. . .
Conflicts between national and supranational interests
and morality are inevitable, at least for some nations [and] those nations
cannot help resolving such a conflict in favor of their own individual
interests and thus paralyzing the operations of the collective system.
The United States imposes economic sanctions when a large
body of its citizens, as represented in Congress or by the president,
conclude that some other nation's behavior is so egregious as to preclude
normal economic relations. It is a fact that this point is reached rather
sooner here than in most other countries, including other democracies.
The French and the Japanese, for example, take a less idealistic (they
would argue, less moralistic) view of their role in the world and do not
like to let ideology get mixed up with commerce. For reasons that have
spawned a thousand books, Americans have a different view of their nation
and its foreign policy. The view that foreign relations need not reflect
moral judgments is not popular here. While learned treatises and distinguished
diplomats have long argued that international financial institutions,
international commerce, and even our bilateral relations should not be
"held hostage" to moralizing over human rights, most Americans seem to
think that to carry on normal political and economic relations with oppressive
regimes is distasteful and demoralizing. Congress repeatedly votes to
stop such relations regardless of what our friends and allies are doing.
To argue against all unilateral sanctions, then, is to
argue for subordinating America's moral judgments to an international
lowest-common-denominator. It is to argue that we must wait for an international
consensus that is, for all the reasons Morgenthau noted, extremely rare.
Business lobbies, by the way, do understand the logic
of collective security; their united campaign to end U.S. economic sanctions
meets all of Morgenthau's tests. Companies are acting "regardless of whether
they could justify such a policy in view of their own individual interests"
to oppose trade sanctions that do not affect them directly. Unocal, which
wants the sanctions on Myanmar lifted because it is involved in a natural
gas pipeline there, opposes the Cuba embargo. Caterpillar wants to sell
tractors to China; it opposes sanctions on Myanmar. Mobil has petroleum
interests in Nigeria; it opposes sanctions against the Sudan. USA*Engage
itself consists of a large group of business lobbyists who set aside their
own particular projects in order to focus on the greater good of eliminating
all economic sanctions.
There is a second and deeper flaw in the argument against
unilateral sanctions. It overlooks the unique position in the world now
held by the United States, and underestimates the necessity of American
leadership to the peace and prosperity we currently enjoy. The argument
against sanctions would be far more powerful -- though still not irrefutable
-- if it were made in Belgium or Holland. In a speech in October 1997,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told students at Catholic University
that "for almost as many years as I have been alive, the United States
has played the leading role within the international system; not as sole
arbiter of right and wrong, for that is a responsibility widely shared,
but as pathfinder -- as the nation able to show the way when others cannot."
Is it possible that we must show the way with words and weapons, but refuse
a leadership role when commercial advantage may be lost?
The history of this century is largely a story of progress
when the United States led the international community -- or, perhaps
more accurately, through its leadership created an international community
-- and of disaster when we abandoned that role. This has been true of
major security successes ranging from the creation of the League of Nations
to the victory over Japan and Germany to the winning of the Cold War.
It was equally true of the formation of the international financial system
after World War II.
Consider an example of American leadership that is directly
relevant to the sanctions case. Bribery of foreign government officials
has been a common practice, especially in the Third World, when foreign
investors sought favors from poorly paid officials who were supervising
government contracting or privatization programs. From the viewpoint of
the honest American businessman, there were two logical solutions: All
foreign businessmen should stop using bribery or all should be permitted
to do so. What businessmen feared was a situation in which Americans were
forbidden to use bribery but their competitors were free to do so.
Yet that is precisely the system Congress imposed in 1977,
when it adopted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in response to the Water-gate
special prosecutor's discovery of bribery payments to foreign officials
by American corporations. Congress made the bribery of foreign officials
a federal crime, rejecting the notion that competitive business advantage
required -- and justified -- such conduct. Bribery was wrong, the law
said, regardless of whether the French and the Japanese and the Germans
did it. American businessmen complained, and no doubt lost some business.
But the American example was not without effect. There began a campaign
of official U.S. pressure on both "briber" and "bribee" governments: the
former to join us in making bribery of foreign officials a crime, and
the latter to police their officials better. This campaign was conducted
directly in foreign capitals, through private organizations like Transparency
International, and in multilateral organizations such as the Inter-American
Development Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD).
That campaign, fueled by American leadership, is having
results. In November 1997, the OECD's 29 member states -- virtually all
the world's developed economies -- plus Argentina, Brazil, and Chile adopted
the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International
Business Transactions. In the last several years, country after country
has criminalized bribery of foreign officials and ended the tax deductibility
of what had once been considered a normal business expense. International
conferences about corruption are frequent, and the issue is high on the
agenda of most multilateral institutions. Progress is visible. Calls for
repeal of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, once common, are now rare.
The business community has come to realize that the proper way to level
the playing field is to raise the business practices of our competitors
to our level, not to descend to theirs.
But this lesson has not been applied to the sanctions
issue, where American companies pressure Congress for permission to emulate
the amoral policies of their competitors. This might be a reasonable policy
-- for Belgium, or Switzerland, or Portugal. It is not a reasonable policy
for the United States. The argument against unilateral sanctions is an
argument against American leadership and suggests that if we cannot get
some sort of majority vote from other traders and investors, we must set
our scruples aside. Now, it would be one thing to argue that in the context
of war unilateral American action is unwise because it might prove too
costly. Take the Persian Gulf conflict of 1991: One could have argued
-- many people did -- that if the United States were unable to assemble
a coalition, it should not try to force Iraq out of Kuwait, because American
casualties would be too high. In fact, a solo American effort would have
been feasible and would have cost few casualties. But such an argument
has moral weight because, in the context of war, the price we pay for
world leadership may be measured in blood.
In the sanctions context, the argument against unilateral
action is far less weighty because only money is at stake. On one side
of the equation are the profits of various corporations and their shareholders
and, no doubt, the jobs of some Americans. On the other side there are
important moral principles and sometimes vital security interests. Sanctions
against Myanmar reflect civilized outrage at the murderous activities
of its rulers. Sanctions against China, Iran, Iraq, and Libya reflect
not only moral disapproval but also a sensible estimate of how their actions
affect our national security.
In the case of China, it can be persuasively argued that
our refusal to apply sanctions when China sold missiles and nuclear technology
to Pakistan and other countries is what led India to conduct its nuclear
tests, which in turn led to the Pakistani tests and considerable heightening
of tension on the Subcontinent. The issue is whether foreign policy should
be driven by commercial objectives or only informed by them. With China,
the commercial stakes may be high, but the security stakes are higher
still.
The principle that American leadership must transcend
American commercial interests would be a great deal clearer if the current
administration behaved as if it were true, or more precisely, behaved
that way consistently. The secretary of state on occasion touts our role
as the "indispensable nation" that must lead the world. On other occasions,
the administration seems to share the "business first" perspective. Since
no administration will admit that it is simply ignoring human-rights issues
in order to promote trade, an ideology is concocted to defend this position.
Secretary Albright explained this as well at Catholic University:
It is in our interest, and it is essential to our own
identity, for America to promote religious freedom and human rights.
But if we are to be effective in defending the values we cherish, we
must also take into account the perspectives and values of others. We
must recognize that our relations with the world are not fully encompassed
by any single issue or set of issues. And we must do all we can to ensure
that the world's attention is focused on the principles we embrace,
not diverted by the methods we use.
This formulation is capacious enough to tolerate just
about anything. How should American foreign and human-rights policy "take
into account the perspectives and values" of China's Communist rulers,
or of Saddam Hussein, or of Muammar Qaddafi? And given that our friends
around the globe are almost always far more reluctant than we to use sanctions
against human-rights violators, to insist that we avoid squabbles over
methods and achieve unanimity of approach would seem to preclude effective
action.
The current campaign against economic sanctions does not
argue straightforwardly that the business of America is business, or that
moral concerns have no place in U.S. foreign policy. Presumably, the authors
of the campaign realize that these arguments simply would not sell; it
would be a risky business decision to assume, for instance, that American
Christians are indifferent to the treatment of their co-religionists overseas,
or that Americans cannot be moved by abuses they may see tomorrow on CNN.
So the product line the business lobbies are offering features human rights
as the true goal of trade and investment. Economic sanctions are usually
(and unilateral sanctions are always) ineffective in human-rights terms,
they now claim, and the true champions of human rights are out there selling
tractors and jets and telephones (and occasionally plans for missiles).
These claims have a more troubling aspect. Presumably
corporate spokesmen make the human-rights argument because they feel they
must. They know that Americans want to believe their foreign policy is
moral. By claiming that commerce is a form of human-rights activity, by
using the term "political engagement" to describe not political pressure
but trade and investment, they are stealing the language of the human-rights
movement. By demeaning the potential impact of unilateral American action,
they are undercutting American leadership and the American people's understanding
of why it is needed. This not only hurts U.S. human-rights policy but
creates a far greater danger for U.S. foreign policy as a whole.
For the business of America at the close of this century
is not busin ess; it is leadership, in the search for security and peace
as well as for prosperity. Successful leadership requires prudence in
strategy and tactics and in the use of resources. Isolating China or any
other country that runs afoul of legislation regarding such matters as
human-rights abuses and arms sales is not a policy. It is at best a tool
of policy, and like most tools it will sometimes be useful and sometimes
not. The more basic issue is whether the United States will be able to
pursue its own foreign policies -- including its policies of promoting
human rights and democracy, and combating nuclear proliferation and missile
sales -- with all the available tools. If we must wait for the consent
of all other trading nations before employing economic sanctions as a
policy tool, or must refrain from using sanctions whenever the short-term
interest of an American exporter is harmed, that tool has in effect been
discarded. We are then left with only one choice, words or war.
The corporate campaign against economic sanctions marshals
many cogent arguments. But we must be clear: Leadership in the search
for peace and in support of human rights is not the same thing as engagement
through commerce. Leadership imposes costs, and Americans have reluctantly
but determinedly paid them throughout this century. Perhaps in the next
century we will refuse to do so; perhaps, with a century of wars behind
us, we now seek only profit. If so, if we now choose doing business over
leading the world, let us at least be honest about it. Let us not delude
ourselves with propaganda about a "political engagement" whose success
is measured in sales rather than in security or peace.
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14 September 1998
Frank D. Kittredge,
Vice-Chairman, USA*Engage
The Weekly Standard
EYES
ON SANCTIONS
Elliott Abrams misrepresents the position
of USA*Engage and the business community ("Words or War," July 27). When
he states that "the explicit goal of the several hundred business and
trade associations that make up USA*Engage is to end the use of sanctions
as a tool of U.S. foreign policy," he is simply incorrect.
If he wishes to criticize us for our official
position -- which is to encourage the United States to seek alternatives
to unilateral sanctions -- let's debate the issue. The truth is, we are
not aware of any written document, testimony, press release, advertisement,
or comment issued by USA*Engage or its representatives that states anything
about putting an end to the use of sanctions. We have gone to great lengths
to point out that, yes, sometimes sanctions are necessary -- and that
national security should always be the paramount concern. But we have
always stressed that there are other ways to achieve our foreign-policy
goals instead of relying so heavily on ineffective and counterproductive
unilateral sanctions.
Abrams's arguments are also unfortunate
in the cavalier manner in which he dismisses Sen. Richard Lugar and the
legislation he has cosponsored with Rep. Lee Hamilton. These are two of
the most thoughtful and highly regarded members of Congress, both of whom
are widely recognized as experts on foreign-policy issues. To imply that
these leaders are only doing the bidding of the business lobby -- to the
detriment of U.S. foreign policy -- is thoughtless and untrue, as well
as insulting to these two respected leaders. Moreover, casting off any
discussion of the Sanctions Reform Act with a flip comment about how future
sanctions would be "gutted" misses the point.
Far from a device to gut future sanctions,
the Sanctions Reform Act will provide for a more deliberative and disciplined
approach to U.S. sanctions policy. The legislation is an attempt to provide
a common-sense approach to a process that has all too often been driven
by short-term considerations and partisan politics. After all, shouldn't
policymakers want to know up-front if a proposed sanction is likely to
be effective in achieving U.S. objectives? What's wrong with knowing the
economic costs to American industry and agriculture, including any long-term
damage to America's reputation as a reliable supplier -- before we impose
a sanction? Shouldn't we at least ask ourselves whether a new sanction
will create a backlash against our national-security, foreign-policy,
and humanitarian goals? All these questions -- as well as consideration
of effective alternatives -- are too often overlooked.
The Lugar-Hamilton legislation is not intended
to prevent future use of unilateral or multilateral sanctions, nor will
it end present-day sanctions. Rather, it establishes a process to ensure
that policymakers implement any new sanctions with their eyes wide open.
Unfortunately, Abrams conveniently overlooks
these arguments and many others in his broad-brush defense of sanctions.
Even more troubling is the claim that "the elimination of economic sanctions
would leave our government facing its adversaries with just two alternatives:
words and war." This is a simplistic view that overlooks the array of
diplomatic, political, economic, cultural, and military tools that U.S.
policymakers have to implement foreign policy.
To disregard the benefits of engagement
in favor of attempts at isolation also ignores the realities of today's
global economy. Proponents of a sanctions-based foreign policy need to
face the fact that unilateral sanctions are usually ineffective because
there are multiple sources and markets to which a nation can turn to meet
its needs, History has shown that cutting America out of the equation
is usually not effective in influencing behavior. If, however, we go into
the situation having analyzed both the costs and potential gains of a
proposed sanction, and we decide that sanctions are the right thing to
do despite the costs -- so be it.
That's all we ask. Eyes open, informed decisions.
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