Do economic sanctions work?
Richard Haass Director of Foreign Policy Studies The Brookings InstitutionThe question we set for ourselves this morning was, Do economic sanctions work? Even though we set it and even though I am sitting here, it's actually the wrong question. And the reason is that economic sanctions either work or they don't depending upon the task you've set for them. If you tend to set ambitious tasks and if you tend to be impatient, economic sanctions tend not to work. However, if you set fairly modest tasks and you are willing to give it time, sanctions can often indeed do what they are designed to do. So the question of whether they work or not is often not terribly helpful. With that I will not say goodbye, I will just point that out.
A better question is, do sanctions have consequences and if so, what are they? In some cases, they can be positive consequences and several of us have done some historical work on sanctions and let me just suggest two cases recently where I would suggest that sanctions have done some useful lifting for the United States.
One is in the case of Iraq. Even though sanctions could not perform the ambitious task of liberating Kuwait after the August 1990 invasion, sanctions over the past six years or so have played a useful role in putting a ceiling on the ability of Saddam Hussain and Iraq to recover and they have created a useful backdrop where the weapons inspectors and others have performed a lot of useful tasks. So however troublesome Saddam Hussain's Iraq is today, it would be a far greater problem for us all in the absence of the sanctions that are currently in place.
Similarly, in the former Yugoslavia while sanctions alone could not bring about a peace agreement, sanctions in the context of clearly a Croatian military offensive and NATO bombing did appear to have some impact on the calculations of the Serbian side in bringing them to Dayton and having them sign on to an agreement and then pressure the Bosnian Serbs to sign on to an agreement. So again, sanctions seemed there to have participated in playing a useful role it's possible as well that somewhat farther back, sanctions played a role in South Africa and in the dismantling of Apartheid. Although exactly how much of a role is a question of some historical debate.
So I would simply say that for those who dislike sanctions intensely, one probably has to water that down. There are occasions where sanctions clearly have worked.
More often, though, I would suggest that sanctions are not desirable and not terribly effective. I see three principle criticisms. Three raps, if you will, against sanctions that me question their utility.
The first is that quite often they hurt those we seek to help or actually work against the goals we have set out for ourselves. Sanctions can be a fairly broad, blunt instrument, they can actually cause quite a lot of widespread humanitarian hardship and they can actually work against some of the goals we want. If our goal is to promote human rights, democracy and so forth as sanctions are often used to do, quite often they seem to reinforce authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, they tend to discourage the emergence of pluralism, of independent centers of political and economic decision-making. So in so many situations, I would question whether sanctions are actually a useful tool for doing what it is we want.
Secondly, sanctions can often distort American foreign policy. When we introduce sanctions because we don't like the behavior of a target country in one area, what often happens is that we then effect the relationship in every other area. A good example, until recently, say was China. When the U.S. disagreed with Chinese human rights practices and introduced sanctions because of it, but then we ultimately had to walk back from that because we realized that we had a host of other interests from maintaining stability on the Korean peninsula to engaging China in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to getting China more involved in the world economic system and so forth, and we realized that sanctions in one area distorted, and tended to get in the way of American foreign policy objectives in yet another.
Thirdly, and I won't speak a lot about this because I expect Mike Gadbaw will, sanctions are costly to the American economy. And when I say economy, I don't simply mean American business. But it's also expensive for the American consumer and for the American worker. So again, sanctions have a widespread impact not simply on the target they are aiming at, but they have quite a large impact on ourselves. And Kim and others have worked on it in terms measuring it, but it is significant into billions of dollars every year and it simply has to be weighed in.
So, what should we do about it. Let me just very quickly go through what I would think would be ten reforms in the way the United States goes about sanctions. I will essentially do little more than give an annotated list, and then I will pass it over to Peter and others.
First and probably most important, it's time to take sanctions seriously. Think of them as another form of intervention. Think of them, if you will, as important as military intervention. We would not simply send in the 82nd Airborne into another country because someone on the floor of the Congress introduced an amendment to do so, without any prior consideration of the ramifications. Yet that is how we sometimes introduce sanctions. Sanctions are serious business. They can actually sometimes cause more damage than military force. They ought to be taken seriously. They ought to be the subject of rigorous, sober analysis and quite often they are not. Quite often they are simply introduced quite cavalierly, more as a form of expression than as a serious policy instrument.
Secondly, sanctions ought to be used multilaterally. In the global economy, there are virtually not instances where American sanctions alone can have a positive or effective impact on the target. It's just simply too easy to substitute for American technology, American financial power, what have you, it's too easy to go around us. So, sanctions that are unilateral tend to really penalize us much more than they do the target.
Thirdly, if sanctions are used they ought to be narrow cast. They ought to aim at what the problem is. So if we have a problem with one area of the target's behavior, that's where the sanction ought to be aimed. If we have a problem with one company in the target country, that's where they ought to be aimed rather than being a broad brush, we ought to think of them as a narrow brush.
Fourthly, very consistent with that, we should not use sanctions in a way that would keep an entire relationship hostage when we principally have a disagreement in one area. So if, for example, in the case of Pakistan, we have disagreements with them in the area of nuclear weapons policy, we ought not penalize them across the board and deny them everything from investment insurance, to the training of their military, to education for their military, to all military arms that they would need. We ought to focus the sanction on the area of behavior that is problematic for us.
Fifthly, we almost always indeed, I would say always ought to introduce in sanctions, humanitarian exceptions. The United States ought not to be in the business of embargoing food and medicine. It's both a moral or normative judgment, but it's also a quite practical one. Our ability to get multilateral support for sanctions tends to go up if there are humanitarian sanctions built into the sanction itself.
Sixthly, we ought to avoid secondary sanctions. By secondary sanctions I mean we ought not be in the business of introducing sanctions against those who will not join us in the original sanctioning effort. And I point this out only because it has increasingly become the habit of American foreign policy to do just the opposite. Right now the United States has on the books secondary sanctions against those entities and countries that won't join us in primary sanctions against Cuba, Libya, and Iran. And, what we are doing as a result is changing the focus of the struggle from the target to the friction we are now bringing about in our relationship with our principal allies and economic partners. So if we can't get them to join us in the basic sanctioning, we ought to perhaps think about revisiting the policy itself rather than compounding the problem.
Seventh, there always ought to be executive waivers. When Congress introduces sanctions, the executive branch, the President, ought to have the ability to waive them in the interests of American national security. Sanctions should not deny the President the necessary latitude and discretion he needs to manipulate them in order to bring about desired behavior.
Eighth, foreign policy is a lot of fun. I understand that. I do that for a living. But, it's not a game that anyone should be able to play. And the last time I checked the Constitution limited foreign policy to the executive branch. So as much as I respect the views of the state of Massachusetts or down the road in the town of Tacoma Park. It's bad enough having several hundred Secretaries of State in the Congress, but to have several thousand Secretaries of State across the United States seems to me a bit much. States and local municipalities ought not be in the sanctioning business and we ought to take this issue to the Courts and essentially make that point overall. The United States cannot conduct foreign policy if the states and municipalities are going to be making it impossible for American firms to do business in many countries over foreign policy issues.
Ninth, next to last, when sanctions are introduced it only ought to be after hearings if it is a congressionally introduced sanction or carefully studied option by the executive branch. By that I mean that any sanction ought to be accompanied by a statement as to the likely cost, the likely results, why the Administration or the Congress thinks the sanction is on balance, in the interest of the United States.
Tenth and last, that initial report ought not be a one time only process. At least once a year, sanctions ought to be reviewed. There ought to be, if you will, an annual impact statement so after every year we would look at what are not simply what were the projected costs and benefits of the sanctions but the actual results. Because every year we will have evidence what the sanction is accomplishing and what it is costing and that ought to be the occasion to revisit the initial decision.
If we do these ten things that I am suggesting, I think the reality is not that we will never use sanctions but that we will probably use them less frequently and more narrowly and I would think if that is the case, that would be a very desirable impact.
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