Sanctions
“The West has Picked a Fight With Iran that it Cannot Win” http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1688777,00.html
is not only an intriguing analysis of the current tangle over Iran's nuclear threat and the referral of the issue to the Security Council, but a spur to historical reflection. In the face of the Iran crisis—and also the trial of Saddam Hussein--the question is “Do economic sanctions ever work as an instrument of international action?”
Beginning at least as early as the turn of the 20th century, internationally-minded statesmen developed the theory of collective security on the basis of economic action. Since aggressive states required loans and other support to pursue their goals, ran the argument, cutting off their supplies would force them to withdraw. The theory became an essential element of international policy at Versailles. The League of Nations was formed to maintain world peace. Unlike in the case of the United Nations a generation later, There was no provision in the League’s covenant for an international army or police force. Rather, the League’s founders decided, on both principled and pragmatic grounds, that the League’s chief instrument of coercion would be the use of economic sanctions and embargoes. The failure of the League to impose such effective sanctions after the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931 and the Italian invasion of Italy have traditionally been seen not as an illustration of the weakness of sanctions, but their force—if the League had acted, according to this view, the aggressors would have been forced to withdraw. Similarly, the efforts of the Roosevelt Administration to use economic warfare to halt Japanese expansionism in 1940-1941, notably through an intensifying embargo of oil, not only did not force Japan to withdraw from Southeast Asia, but ended ignominiously with Japan’s retaliation at Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. Again, historians and popular chroniclers have not generally interpreted this failure as a problematic case of the use of economic sanctions, and have instead have seized on Japan’s surpise attack as an example of unprovoked Japanese treachery.
In the years since World War II, the use by the United States government of economic sanctions and embargoes seems to have resulted in more harm than good. In the case of Castro’s Cuba, the nearly 50 year economic boycott has become a symbol of futility and--with the collapse of any world Communist threat to American security--domestic politics gone awry. (Conversely, the OPEC oil embargos of the West did not result in a fundamental shift in Middle East policy). The international sanctions against Saddam Hussein is an even more fraught question. I supported the sanctions against Iraq after the invasion of Kuweit, thinking that here was a real chance to deter international aggression, and I believed that George H.W. Bush’s declaration of war was unwise and unnecessary. However, the maintenance of the sanctions during the decade that followed did not dislodge Saddam Hussein from power. Rather, it led to famine and misery among poor Iraqis. While I opposed the Current Administration’s war in Iraq, and I consider the current situation even worse than before the war, and likely to remain so, I am forced to wonder at the lessons of the previous policy: When, and under what circumstances, do economic weapons work, and how can governments avoid such moves becoming a face-saving substitute for effective action?