Editorial Another sanctions quagmire

Put yourself in Fidel Castro's place. The military that you have commanded for 35 years as dictator of Cuba shoots down two civilian aircraft from the U.S. and kills four people. The U.S. responds by bullying its allies. The allies become angry and threaten to impose restrictions on U.S. companies. If you are Castro, don't you feel like celebrating?

July 22, 1996

4 min read

If you are Castro, don't you feel like celebrating?

This is how the U.S. "punishes" rogue political regimes. A government acts up, and the U.S. cuts off business ties, then antagonizes its friends by pressing them to join in the snub. The powerful few in places such as Tripoli, Tehran, and Lagos must be wondering how they came to deserve such good fortune.

Clinton squeezed

President Bill Clinton last week fell victim to the strategy, in which his own administration so often has indulged, of responding economically to essentially military offenses. The so-called Helms-Burton Act of last March forced him to decide, in an election year, whether to waive a provision of the act that is strongly supported by Cuban Americans but loathed by important international friends. The provision entitles U.S. owners of property confiscated during Cuba's 1959 revolution to sue non-U.S. interests now making use of the assets.

Clinton, who signed the Helms-Burton Act, characteristically finessed the dilemma. He agreed not to waive the provision at issue but to suspend the right to sue for 6 months-well after the November general election. This followed by days the State Department's refusal to allow entry into the U.S. of seven top executives of the Canadian mining company Sherritt International Corp., which does business in Cuba. And it came in the face of retaliation threats from the European Union.

For oil and gas companies and service firms, the effects are indirect but serious. Cuba is no great target for industry capital, upstream or downstream. But retaliation against U.S. companies by European countries and Canada would confound relationships and operations in many more-important regions.

Worse than that is the resentment building rapidly among countries that don't feel obliged to submit to U.S. laws and regulations outside the U.S. Helms-Burton is just part of a troubling pattern. It includes legislation for third party sanctions against countries that don't support U.S. trade embargoes against Iran and Libya. It also includes the swift resort to the threat of economic sanctions against disfavored governments such as those of Nigeria and Colombia.

If the pattern continues, companies based in the U.S. will find it increasingly difficult to conduct business outside U.S. borders. And the U.S., endlessly scrapping for sanction partners, will find itself short of friends in the world.

What does such sacrifice accomplish for foreign policy? Little or nothing. Castro has survived 35 years of sanctions by the U.S. and will suffer nothing worse than fits of laughter over Helms-Burton. Economic sanctions didn't rout him and won't. They haven't routed Saddam Hussein-and won't. They won't make Muammar Qadhafi turn over suspected airline bombers. And they won't change behavior of the mullahs ruling Iran.

Sanctions accomplish one thing. They enable a squeamish government to look tougher to the home crowd than it is willing to be. Tough response to military infractions-such as support of terrorism or the downing of defenseless aircraft-means the threat and, if necessary, deployment of destructive force. To people who rule by force, anything less amounts to assurance of impunity.

Pointless bluster

EU members and Canada obviously recognize sanctions for the pointless bluster that they usually are. And they very properly construe U.S. legal pressures to join sanctions as intrusions on their sovereignty.

In a world that has its share of dangerous people and places, the economic snub is a perverse weapon. An effective world leader would brandish it sparingly, if ever.