Why sanctions should cease
The bottom line of government-1
If the answer is no, the activity should cease. Government activities cost money, some more than others. Spending money on something that doesn't work is wasteful.
Two activities by the U.S. government, one of them long but increasingly in effect and the other only proposed, are or would be especially costly and should be tested against this standard. The oil and gas industry feels the weight of both activities but is hardly the sole bearer of the burden.
The activities are the use of economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy and moves to comply with an international protocol signed last year in Kyoto, Japan, on global warming. Both activities require extraordinary economic sacrifice by Americans, who deserve reasonable assurance that they do or would work.
What sanctions do
Sanctions do not work. To the extent they curtail economic activity, sanctions can create general hardship in target countries but only inconvenience for target governments. They seldom fulfill U.S. foreign policy objectives-unless those objectives include deprivation of people already oppressed by their governments.U.S. Sec. of State Madeleine Albright recently ordered a study of the effectiveness and use of sanctions. While the scrutiny is welcome, conclusions should be clear: Sanctions are ineffective and overused.
And they cost much. At the James A. Baker Institute for Foreign Policy in Houston this month, the State Department's Stuart E. Eizenstat said economic sanctions in 1995 directly cost the U.S. economy $15-19 billion in lost export sales and as many as 250,000 jobs.
To what purpose did the U.S. incur these costs? Target regimes remain firmly in power in Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and elsewhere. In the case of Iran, where a complex power balance is shifting but for other reasons, third-party sanctions have further cost the U.S. credibility with allies holding different views about the Islamic government.
Despite the costs and negligible payoff, sanctions are increasingly common. In his Houston speech, Eizenstat, the State Department's under secretary for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, regretted the proliferation of sanctions imposed or proposed by Congress and local governments. He nevertheless asserted that the end of the Cold War, worldwide ethnic conflict, and U.S. leadership in global affairs raise the value of sanctions as a policy option. Sanctions give the U.S. a way to act when diplomacy fails without going to war.
The U.S., Eizenstat said, should: 1) use sanctions only after other diplomatic options have failed; 2) seek international support before imposing sanctions; 3) act unilaterally if necessary "when important national interests or core values are at issue"; 4) design sanctions to inflict pain on the target but prevent "unnecessary hardships to the innocent"; and 5) "analyze before we penalize," to assess the purpose, enforceability, cost, and likely effect of sanctions.
Such systematic thought would indeed represent something new to U.S. decision-making in this area. It might even ease some of the uncertainty with which the looming threat of sanctions now curses international investment.
But Eizenstat's principles evade the bottom line of government activity. Sanctions cost too much and achieve too little. They subordinate U.S. economic interests of private Americans to the expediency of government policy-makers. That's backwards.
National purposes
U.S. companies and individuals must always stand ready to yield individual interests to broad national purposes. But when called upon to make such sacrifice, they should demand and receive assurance that some hope exists for success. Sanctions don't meet the test. They don't work.The same judgment awaits the Kyoto protocol on global warming, about which this editorial series will have more to say next week.
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