Foreign policy should pursue constructive objectives. It should offer hope for success. It certainly should not hurt the country that implements it.
By these simple standards, U.S. policy toward maverick oil producers of the Muslim world fails. And it soon will grow worse.
The Senate has approved a bill imposing secondary commercial sanctions against Iran and, in a last-minute addition, Libya. Sponsored by Alfonse DAmato (R-N.Y.), the measure authorizes penalties against non-U.S. companies that help these countries develop oil and gas reserves. The specified means include lending and investment constraints.
Pressure on companies
Supporters of the measure hope to pressure non-U.S. companies into compliance with U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Iran and Libya in retaliation for alleged support of terrorism and other international misbehavior. The European Union has objected to this attempt by the U.S. to internationalize its foreign policy.
The objection is sound. The U.S. wants its allies to join it in making commercial sacrifice to policies certain to fail.
The U.S. defines no constructive objective in its approach toward Iran and Libya. Punishing them serves no national or international interest.
Supporters of the secondary sanctions say that crimping oil revenues will limit the target nations abilities to support terrorism. Nonsense. Terrorism is cheap. Extremists can always find enough money to pay for their treachery. Heavy-handed behavior by wealthy nations only assures them of support from desperate and disaffected people, many of whom have no other option.
For this reason, commercial embargoes imposed to fight terrorism are self-defeating. They hurt not the powerful few in target countries but the struggling many. By fostering mass desperation, they inflame reactionary impulses.
As acts of economic warfare, furthermore, embargoes annul the abilities of participating countries to influence the countries they seek to change. The U.S. could, for example, exert great influence within Iran if it would only recognize the extreme and sometimes deadly internal tensions at work within the postrevolutionary republic. There are sizable factions within Iran that would welcome a warming of relations with the U.S.
But the U.S. ignores their necessarily subtle signals, stereotypes Iranians, and matches the anti-American sloganeering of extremists with its own empty bluster. It thus perpetuates alienation of a potentially important trade and investment partner in one of the worlds most strategically important locationsand hurts U.S. companies in the process.
Why? Its sad to say, but the U.S. snub of Iran amounts greatly to domestic grandstanding. President Bill Clinton announced a general embargo of Iran last April in a speech full of antiterrorist rhetoric to the World Jewish Congress. And DAmato has a large Jewish constituency. These leaders cannot dodge suspicions that they are trafficking in ancient cultural antagonisms for personal political gain.
This is no way for the U.S. to conduct foreign policy. And dragging allies into the mire is no way for the worlds sole surviving superpower to behave.
Influence and credibility
If official Iran is guilty of the disruptive activity with which it is charged then the U.S. is right to try to change it, just as it is right to demand that Libya submit suspected terrorists within its borders to international justice. But achieving these goals requires influence, and influence depends on credibility.
The U.S. loses credibility when it exploits stereotypes, hamstrings industries, and evangelizes its mistakes to allies. For a democratic champion of international trade, blind resort to economic warfareespecially when it seems ethnically motivatedis hypocritical. In a part of the world with which it and its allies must conduct business, the U.S. is rapidly maneuvering itself into a position from which it can only do harm.
