June 2000 Fraser Forum: Sanctions and How They Don't Work: 5 Case Studies
Click here for the abridged versionThis paper presents the findings from five country case studies of recent U.S. experience in applying or seriously considering unilateral economic sanctions to achieve foreign policy objectives, including the promotion of human rights. The case studies are contained in my book, Feeling Good or Doing Good With Sanctions: Unilateral Economic Sanctions and the U.S. National Interest (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1999), and the text here is a slightly revised and updated version of the general conclusions contained in Chapter 7 of that study.
The five countries are:
1. Cuba.—U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba, now an almost total embargo on economic relations and travel to Cuba, began in 1960. During the Cold War, the sanctions were primarily related to U.S. national security interests, but since 1990 they have been directed to promoting democratization and respect for human rights in Cuba.
2. Iran.—Partial U.S. unilateral sanctions date back to the 1980s, but the full embargo on trade and investment, plus a secondary boycott on third country investment in the Iranian oil and gas sector, were imposed in 1995. The U.S. objectives in this case are principally related to national security—to curtail Iranian support for terrorism and arms capability, including weapons of mass destruction—but democratization has more recently become relevant to U.S. sanctions policy.
3. Vietnam.—U.S. policy since 1991 has been a phasing down of sanctions imposed at the close of the Vietnam War. The initial steps to end sanctions on U.S. exports to and investment in Vietnam were linked exclusively to Vietnamese cooperation in accounting for missing-in-action (MIA) during the war. The most important sanction in trade terms, however, denial of most-favored-nation (MFN) treatment, more recently renamed normal trade relations (NTR), for Vietnamese exports to the United States, is still in place, and is principally related to a pending bilateral trade agreement, but human rights interests play a significant role in U.S. political consideration of this issue.
4. Myanmar (formerly Burma).—The 1997 sanction on new U.S. investment in Myanmar is linked solely to democratization and improved respect for human rights in that country.
5. China.—The threat of removal of MFN treatment, from the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, has been related mostly to abuse of human rights in China, although national security interests are also an important factor. More targeted economic sanctions actually imposed against China have related principally to U.S. national security interests.
The five country case studies together constitute a disturbing and almost entirely unsuccessful experience in U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s. This paper summarizes the experience in four parts. First, specific conclusions are drawn from the economic analysis in the case studies, which provides input to the following part, a net assessment of the effectiveness—or more precisely the general lack of effectiveness—of unilateral sanctions in achieving their intended objectives. The third part then examines weaknesses in the U.S. policy process as observed in the case studies and related to the 1997 legislative proposal, "The Sanctions Policy Reform Act," while the final part addresses policy alternatives to the use of unilateral economic sanctions.
1. Economic Impact
The most striking conclusion from the five case studies about assessments of the economic impact of proposed unilateral sanctions is how little of it took place during U.S. government deliberations. There was no comprehensive assessment of the impact on the target country economy in any of the five cases, and the assessment of adverse impact on U.S. commercial interests was uneven, tending toward estimates of maximum possible impact—that is, the entire U.S. export and investment position in a target country—often presented by business groups who had an interest in highlighting the maximum possible negative effects. Although the assessments of economic impact undertaken in the case studies are admittedly limited by resources available and inherent analytic problems, they were developed to provide an order of magnitude of likely economic effects and significant qualitative characteristics of what has happened or would happen from the unilateral sanction in question. With these caveats, the following specific conclusions are drawn about the impact on the target country as well as on U.S. commercial interests and the systemic effects of U.S. private sector engagement in the target countries.
Impact on the Target Country Economy
The degree and nature of the "economic pain" inflicted on the target country is by far the most important economic assessment. It determines the leverage brought to bear on the target country government to change its behavior in accordance with the U.S. foreign policy objective involved. This fundamental point only highlights the extraordinary observation above that no attempt was ever made in any of the five country cases to make such a detailed assessment before the sanctions were threatened or imposed. Based on the analysis in the case studies, five specific conclusions from the analysis of economic impact on the target country economy are as follows:
1. The adverse impact from U.S. unilateral sanctions is relatively small. This finding should cause little surprise because all other nations continue normal commerce with the target country and are eager to have their companies substitute for U.S. exporters and investors. In terms of foreign exchange loss relative to total imports or GDP, Myanmar and Iran show the smallest adverse impact, Vietnam (still without MFN) and China (if MFN were withdrawn) somewhat more, and Cuba the greatest relative impact in view of its location at the center of the Caribbean Basin regional economy where the U.S. economic relationship is dominant and its absence therefore of greater relative impact.
2. The adverse impact is much greater for unilateral sanctions on U.S. imports than sanctions on exports to and investment in the target country. This conclusion also follows logically from the fact that whereas third-country companies can substitute for U.S. exporters and investors, a closing of the U.S. market to target country exports is often not replaceable elsewhere, especially for manufactured products, services, and nontraditional agricultural exports. In the case studies, Cuba is the outstanding example where the exclusion of American tourists (the preeminent Cuban export service industry) and exports to the United States of citrus fruit and labor-intensive manufactures deprive the Cuban economy of roughly $2 billion per year (or half the level of total existing exports), whereas the prohibition on U.S. exports to and investment in Cuba, as well as the extended sanctions to U.S. subsidiaries in the 1992 Cuba Democracy Act, are having relatively small to insignificant impact on the Cuban economy.
A related striking contrast is between Myanmar and Vietnam, where the Myanmar investment sanction has had no significant effect on the Myanmar economy, while the continuing withholding of MFN status for Vietnam (which effectively excludes Vietnamese manufactured exports to the U.S. market) has substantial adverse consequences for the Vietnamese economy. Likewise, the debate over MFN withdrawal from China was of relatively greater importance because the initial impact would be on the closing of the U.S. market and the potential loss of about half of Chinese exports to the United States. Even in the case of Iran, where the 1995 embargo on U.S. investment in and exports to the Iranian petroleum sector, in particular, had significant initial disruptive effects on the Iranian economy, now that Iran has made the transition to non-American suppliers the more important adverse impact on the Iranian economy from the U.S. embargo has been on potential Iranian exports of carpets, pistachio nuts, and other nonpetroleum exports to the U.S. market, and this sanction was lifted in early 2000.
3. The "economic pain" of sanctions falls more heavily on the people than on the target country government. This broadly recognized conclusion has much greater absolute significance for multilateral sanctions—as applied during the 1990s against Iraq and Haiti—where the sanctions indeed caused serious pain to the target country economy. Even in the case of unilateral sanctions, however, where the overall economic pain is much less, an authoritarian government can easily transfer to the people whatever economic pain is inflicted, through immediate reductions in the availability of consumer goods or postponement of infrastructure and social sector investment. In the case studies, the Vietnamese and Myanmar armies are by far the two largest among ASEAN members, while the economic deprivation of the peoples, although caused far more by internal economic mismanagement and corruption than by U.S. sanctions, is clearly evident. A more mixed picture prevails in Iran, where earlier planned purchases of conventional weapons have been scaled back in parallel with economic hardship throughout the domestic economy, but again U.S. unilateral sanctions played only a small role in these developments. Finally, for Cuba, where the U.S. embargo is having the most substantial impact, the Castro government has reduced the size of its military, but domestically oriented police and other resources devoted to maintaining tight political control over the country take clear priority over the needs of the people.
4. The multilateral action of withholding economic aid, particularly through the multilateral development banks, can have a greater effect than U.S. unilateral trade and investment sanctions. This has clearly been borne out in Iran, Myanmar, and Vietnam. For China, the withholding of aid would be of relatively less importance compared with the withholding of MFN status because the Chinese export sector is far more developed while economic aid is declining in relative importance. Cuba, again, is distinct because of its Caribbean basin location. The withholding of economic aid has substantial adverse consequences for Cuba, but the U.S. embargo, especially on tourism, has at least comparable economic effects.
5. An unholy alliance can develop between the target country government and proponents of unilateral sanctions in the United States to greatly exaggerate the adverse economic impact on the target country. The target country government wants to blame the United States for its own economic problems while sanction proponents want to convince doubters that the sanction will, in fact, force change on the behavior of the target country government. This unholy alliance thrives when there is no available assessment of the relatively small economic impact of unilateral sanctions, as was the case in all five country studies. Cuba was by far the outstanding example of such an unholy alliance whereby Fidel Castro and the Cuban-American and other U.S. proponents of an ever-tighter embargo provided mutually supportive statements that exaggerated the actual or potential impact of the embargo. The China MFN debate elicited a similar mutual reinforcement, continuing on beyond the debate itself as in the highly misleading Chinese claim, "American companies are fully capable of winning over a bigger slice of the emerging China market as long as the Clinton administration withdraws its meddling hand."1 The Iranian government has also tended to blame the U.S. embargo for effects far in excess of the actual adverse impact. The Vietnamese government, in contrast, has been relatively quiescent about the very real negative effects from non-MFN access to the U.S. market, while the Myanmar generals have made the only basically correct assessment in stating that the U.S. unilateral investment sanction has had no significant effect on Myanmar because third-country investors quickly move in, as was the case of the Chinese investor in the Yangon port project and the UK company, Premier, that replaced Texaco.
Impact on U.S. Commercial Interests
The economic impact of unilateral sanctions on U.S. commercial interests is inherently negative for U.S. exports and investment because of the third-country substitution effect, which is clearly demonstrated throughout the five case studies. There is also some cost to American consumers, through higher prices and reduced choice of imported products. But this effect has been very small because the substitution effect works in reverse for unilateral import restrictions, with third countries replacing target country exports, and the cost is spread widely among American consumers. Four specific conclusions about the more important adverse impact on U.S. exports and investment are as follows:
1.The adverse impact of sanctions on U.S. exports and investment is substantial, and larger than that on the target country economy. This logical implication from the nature of a unilateral sanction was the observed experience for Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar, where such sanctions were imposed during the 1990s. The absolute magnitude of the estimated losses of U.S. exports, moreover, were substantially higher than those contained in the widely cited global estimate of U.S. export loss from all sanctions of $15 billion to $25 billion per year, prepared by the Institute for International Economics. One reason is that the institute limited its study to exports of merchandise, while U.S. service exports, including for the petroleum sector in Iran, tourism in Cuba, and financial, telecommunications, transportation, and other services more broadly, account for more than a quarter of total U.S. exports.2 The estimated losses to U.S. investment, of course, are additional to the loss in exports.
2.The adverse impact on U.S. exports is more lasting for capital and advanced technology goods and services than for agricultural commodities and consumer goods. Grains and other basic agricultural commodities, like petroleum and industrial raw materials, are sold on a global market, and unilateral sanctions against one country can lead, to a large extent, to offsetting changes in market shares elsewhere. This probably would have happened, for example, if MFN status had been withdrawn from China and China retaliated by cutting its grain imports from the United States. For U.S. consumer goods, trans-shipment through third countries to the sanctioned market takes place with relative ease although at a higher cost and without the benefit of sales promotion in the sanctioned market. Thus, for example, some U.S. consumer goods are available in Cuba and Iran. However, when the unilateral sanction leads to a substitution of Airbus for Boeing commercial aircraft, Komatsu for Caterpillar tractors, and to third-country sales of electric power generators, telecommunications switching gear, and petroleum drilling equipment, there is likely to be little or no offsetting market adjustment elsewhere short term. Even more threatening, the establishment of third-country technologies in target country markets can preclude future U.S. exports after the sanctions are lifted. Examples of this effect were commercial nuclear power reactors in China, telecommunications equipment in Vietnam, and, most important of all, the whole range of petroleum sector plant and equipment and their embedded technologies in Iran.
3.The adverse impact on U.S. investment is relatively more important than on exports. As noted in the previous paragraph, some U.S. exporters circumvent unilateral sanctions by shipping through third countries and, once sanctions are lifted, many can resume marketing relatively quickly. The situation for U.S. investors is more constrained, both during and after the sanctions. In Cuba, the European contract to rebuild the domestic telephone system could preclude U.S. telecommunications investors over a long term, as could Spanish, Mexican, and other non-U.S. hotel chains that have secured and built on prime Varadero Beach and central Havana properties. Again, the threat to U.S. investors in the Iranian petroleum sector is greatest of all if the Iranian government, as a practical as well as political matter, pursues the path of limiting the number of engaged major company investors to a relatively small number.
4.The indirect adverse impact in third-country markets, including questions about the reliability of American companies as suppliers, or joint-venture partners, cannot be measured, but it is real and almost certainly substantial. The case of Caspian Sea oil development was examined in some detail in the Iran case study, and episodic accounts of other third-country impact are cited, such as the worldwide inability of American companies to compete for sole source airport services where they might have to service a Cuban aircraft. Other reports relate to American companies spreading their R&D, production, and supplier sources to European and other foreign locations so as to avoid actual or potential U.S. sanctions.
Systemic Effects of U.S. Private Sector Engagement
The issue of U.S. private sector engagement as a force for positive political as well as economic change was raised in each of the case studies. In terms of overall impact, such engagement, based on the case study observations, is assessed as playing, or potentially playing, an important positive role in support of the transition under way in each of the five countries from an authoritarian government with a state-dominated economy to a more productive, market-oriented economy based on the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and democratization. This does not mean that the engagement of American companies, or of all foreign private companies, will alone ensure such a transition, but rather that they constitute an important positive influence on the process and that, in their absence, which by definition economic sanctions dictates, the transition will be greatly inhibited.
The five countries examined all currently have authoritarian or totalitarian governments—three communist, one military, and one clerical—and dominant state influence and control over the economy. At the same time, however, each is moving in the direction of a more open economy, with explicit priority on attracting foreign direct investment as a means of modernizing the economy based on market incentives. This economic change, in turn, is moving forward in a mutually supportive way with political change of a largely generational and educational character. Younger, more educated men and women are calling for greater respect for the rule of law, increased personal freedom, and a more democratic process for selecting at least parts of the leadership structure. The overall process is stimulated by what is referred to as an information age revolution in communications, ranging from books to films to faxes to e-mail to especially potent foreign travel and education that, ironically, is often most accessible to the children of the authoritarian elite.
The catalytic impact of foreign private sector engagement on this process of political/economic change is observed in the case studies to be substantial, and American companies are qualitatively the most influential in communicating, through day-to-day demonstration effect, how job creating, productive enterprise can function, with emphasis on employee training and remuneration based on merit, within an overall business relationship oriented toward efficiency and the rule of law rather than political influence and corruption. Such ongoing experience was recounted in some detail in the two country cases where American companies are fully engaged, Vietnam and China. The process of change in Cuba and Iran is moving forward without the participation of American companies, but the same demonstration effects are evident there as well from non-American companies. Working for a foreign firm in Cuba has clear advantages compared with work in a state enterprise despite the Cuban government's 95 percent tax rate on wages through exchange rate manipulation. Educated Iranians from all levels of society who have observed the devastating mismanagement of state enterprises in recent years are mostly eager for more efficient and rewarding international engagement. And Myanmar, the country most threatened by economic collapse and political violence, is also the least engaged with independent foreign private companies, owing to Western government political disengagement—and U.S. economic sanctions—as well as to the oppressive behavior of the military regime.
The vexing observation about current U.S. policy toward this important issue—and the associated use of comprehensive unilateral economic sanctions that precludes American private sector engagement—is that it is irredeemably inconsistent. The policy of "different strokes for different folks" is a statement of convenient opportunism driven largely by domestic politics. There is no rational explanation for the contradiction in current U.S. policy between highly praising U.S. private sector engagement in communist Vietnam and blindly condemning it in communist Cuba; yes for private sector engagement in China but no in Iran; and for Myanmar, an internally inconsistent if not incoherent strategy of a ban on new but not old U.S. investment and "a U.S. government policy of neither promoting nor prohibiting trade."
U.S. private sector engagement is, or should be, a force for positive political and economic change in all five countries. A U.S. policy of comprehensive economic sanctions thus has important negative consequences that need to be fully considered in judging the overall effectiveness of a unilateral sanctions policy.
2. Effectiveness of Unilateral Sanctions in Achieving Their Intended Foreign Policy Objectives
This is the central policy question addressed in this study, and the answer, derived from the five detailed case studies and other recent experience, is that during the 1990s unilateral economic sanctions, with rare exceptions, have failed to achieve their intended foreign policy objectives, while in the process causing substantial adverse effects on various other U.S. interests. Moreover, the rare exceptions occurred in such unique circumstances as only to prove the rule. The previous section that assessed the economic impact of the sanctions, especially on the target country, provides much of the analytic and empirical support for this conclusion. This section elaborates the assessment in broader foreign policy terms, with target country experience grouped on the basis of whether the foreign policy objectives were primarily related to human rights/democratization, national security, or "other."
Human Rights/Democratization Objectives
U.S. unilateral economic sanctions in the 1990s have shown a nearly total lack of success in achieving stated human rights and democratization objectives while consistently producing various adverse consequences. The people, for the most part, have suffered the economic pain caused by the sanctions, the positive influence of U.S. private sector engagement has been diminished or lost, and target country governments have made exaggerated claims, to good propaganda effect, that U.S. sanctions were the cause of what were really internal economic policy failures. This is also the policy area where the United States is almost entirely alone if not at odds with friends and allies—not to mention the Catholic Church—which further reduces the prospects for positive concrete achievement.
The basic reason why these unilateral economic sanctions are ineffective is that the foreign policy objective is to change the oppressive behavior of an authoritarian or totalitarian government, which constitutes a direct threat to its control if not survival. Such governments are consequently not prepared to make this kind of fundamental concession in response to the relatively small economic impact of unilateral economic sanctions. Even in the one case during the 1990s when far more devastating multilateral trade sanctions were applied in the cause of democratization—the three-year embargo against Haiti—the rag-tag Haitian military still held out, becoming more oppressive while the people suffered greatly and the economic infrastructure of the country was destroyed. In the end a U.S. military intervention was still needed to restore Jean Bertrand Aristide to the Presidential Palace.3
All of the case studies bear out this assessment. Even with the abrupt cutoff of Soviet aid in 1991, the Castro regime has maintained power and almost all experts agree that Fidel Castro will retain control as long as he is physically able and willing to do so. In the process, he has adroitly used the U.S. embargo to split the United States from its allies. The MFN/human rights linkage failed to achieve significant improvement in basic human rights in China during both the Bush and Clinton administrations, and President Clinton's decision to reverse course and jettison the linkage in May 1994 negatively affected broader U.S. credibility in dealing with the Chinese communist leadership. The unilateral sanction on new U.S. investment in Myanmar had no significant adverse effect on the Myanmar economy and has only tended to push the generals further into isolation from the rest of the world, except China, and into near total disengagement from the United States. A similar absence of any positive result is evident for the U.S. unilateral trade embargo against the Sudan in 1996. As for other embargo proposals linked to democratization/human rights objectives in recent years, those against Indonesia and Nigeria had the most important potential consequences, but in both cases they were not pursued for largely the same reasons observed in the case studies—limited economic impact if pursued unilaterally with little prospect of the authoritarian/military governments reacting in a significantly positive way.
Narrowly targeted economic sanctions, as distinct from the broadly based trade and investment sanctions addressed in the previous paragraph, must be examined on a case-by-case basis, but again there are no clear success stories during the 1990s. The problem here is that targeted sanctions are extremely difficult and complicated to administer, as, for example, would be a targeted sanction against Chinese companies owned by the military, while having very small to insignificant economic impact. Freezing overseas bank accounts of members of a communist politburo or a military command can be circumvented with relative ease in a world of instant electronic banking and numerous banking safe havens. The 1998 Religious Persecution Act remains to be tested through implementation, but it is doubtful that it, by itself, will result in much greater tolerance and less repression of religious beliefs in countries such as China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
A final relevant indicator of whether U.S. unilateral economic sanctions help or hinder the process of democratization and respect for basic human rights is the judgment of prodemocracy and human rights dissidents within the target countries, because they are in the front lines of the struggle, often at great personal risk. Attitudes are not monolithic, but the large majority of them are clearly on the side of U.S. private sector engagement rather than unilateral sanctions. The antiembargo statement of Elizardo Sanchez, quoted at length in the case study, represents the dominant dissident view within Cuba and should take precedence over anti-Castro Cuban-Americans living in Florida and New Jersey. The predominant view of prodemocracy activists in China, including Hong Kong, and Vietnam is also strongly supportive of U.S. private sector engagement.
Only in Myanmar is there a clear split among prodemocracy dissidents, including within the National League for Democracy (NLD), and the outspoken view of Aung San Suu Kyi against private sector engagement or even engagement by most humanitarian-oriented nongovernmental organizations and aid agencies has received broad international recognition and official support. Indeed, the actual imposition of the U.S. unilateral investment sanction in May 1997 by the second Clinton administration foreign policy team was triggered less by the "substantial increase in oppression" criterion contained in the Cohen/Feinstein legislation, than by Aung San Suu Kyi's call for the sanction shortly before. The judgment here, with all due respect for her courageous, democratic struggle, is that she is wrong in advocating foreign private sector and international agency disengagement from her country, with all the inherent short- and longer-term adverse impact this has on the people of Myanmar, as the means for changing the oppressive behavior of the military regime.
National Security Objectives
The unilateral sanctions experience related to national security objectives is more complicated than for human rights/democratization objectives, and, by definition, concerns issues more directly threatening to the United States. The national security issues involved—proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the ballistic missile capability to deliver them, international terrorism, and modernization of the Chinese military—also include a more elaborate and evolving set of multilateral arrangements and policies that need to be related to economic sanctions policy, multilateral and bilateral. The unilateral sanctions policy assessment here is thus less conclusive than for human rights/democratization objectives, although it still points in the direction of relatively small positive results with significant downsides.
The Iranian case study was predominantly about U.S. national security interests as were parallel sanctions against Libya contained in the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). Much of the China case study pertaining to targeted sanctions falls within the national security domain, and the 1998 sanctions against India and Pakistan in response to nuclear weapons tests, while not addressed as a full case study, are included in this summary assessment. Yet another national security threat with a sanctions dimension is North Korea, although in this case the "carrot" approach of economic aid to deter nuclear weapons development takes precedence over the largely meaningless trade sanctions, and this relationship is thus left for the later section on alternatives to sanctions.
With respect to Iran, the 1995 unilateral sanctions on U.S. investment and exports imposed by President Clinton through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the 1996 secondary boycott against third-country investors in the Iranian petroleum sector contained in ILSA legislation have had relatively little lasting adverse impact on the Iranian economy, especially after the June 1998 South Pars waiver. The sanctions may have restrained Iranian purchases of conventional weapons to some extent, but even this restraint was driven principally by Iranian economic mismanagement and the drop in world oil prices. No discernable progress in other U.S. security interests in Iran can be attributed to the unilateral sanctions policy. The related experience with Libya has been devoid of significant results one way or the other because the ILSA technical provisions, primarily related to the Pan Am 107 shootdown, have not produced any significant sanction threats against third-country investors in Libya, while negotiations to extricate the alleged terrorists from Libya for trial in The Netherlands have taken place within a multilateral context linked to the multilateral sanction on commercial flights to and from Libya.
The Chinese case study shows mixed results from the targeted unilateral sanctions for U.S. national security interests. The sanction on U.S. exports to China related to commercial nuclear reactors as leverage to obtain stronger Chinese nuclear nonproliferation commitments is a rare example where a unilateral sanction appears to have had a positive effect, although in the unique circumstances of a timely Chinese interest in U.S. civilian nuclear technology. In contrast, the three instances of suspension of export licenses for commercial satellites and related equipment, twice by President Bush and once by President Clinton, to pressure China to cease exports of ballistic missile equipment and technology to third countries and to join the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), achieved little if any positive result. Finally, restrictions on exports to China of armaments and dual-use goods and technology, intended to restrain Chinese military modernization, are generally imposed within multilateral arrangements, although with the conspicuous nonparticipation of Russia. The unilateral dimension, whereby U.S. restrictions are broader and more costly than those of others, was relatively small as of 1998, but this could change in the direction of tighter U.S. controls, with uncertain impact on Chinese military modernization.
The automatic imposition of unilateral U.S. sanctions against India and Pakistan in mid-1998, based on the 1995 Glenn Amendment, was quickly protested by U.S. agricultural and industrial interests because third-country suppliers were ready and very willing to replace U.S. exporters. Legislation was promptly adopted to exclude U.S. agricultural exports from the sanctions, and further legislation gave the president flexibility to ease the remaining sanctions, such as a ban on Exim Bank credits, which President Clinton exercised to a large degree in November. Further sanctions in November 1998 against 205 Indian and 93 Pakistani entities, utilizing IEEPA, have become an administrative nightmare, while India has lodged a complaint in the WTO. As to any positive foreign policy impact from this brief experience with unilateral sanctions, the sanctions clearly did not deter the initial testing. India and Pakistan have long considered nuclear weapons development a vital national interest, and the limited impact of U.S. threatened unilateral economic sanctions was not a decisive deterrent.4 As for ongoing multilateral and bilateral negotiations to obtain Indian and Pakistani adhesion to the nuclear test ban treaty and other commitments, which is linked to more important development assistance programs, it is extremely doubtful that the quick and somewhat confused imposition of U.S. unilateral trade sanctions and their equally hasty withdrawal under pressure from U.S. export interests had any significant positive impact.
The principal conclusion—and warning—in the national security area is that unilateral economic sanctions, however applied, can only play a small role in the overall strategy to confront what are clearly growing threats to U.S. national security in the specified areas addressed here. The far more important components of a successful strategy are enhanced multilateral arrangements, which could include more effective multilateral economic sanctions, and a fully responsive U.S. national defense capability.
Other Objectives
Almost all foreign policy-oriented unilateral sanctions have been directed toward human rights/democratization or national security objectives, but a few have addressed other issues. During the 1990s, three of these issues are noteworthy:
1.The MFN/MIA linkage with Vietnam. This is the only instance of a broadly based unilateral sanction serving to advance a foreign policy objective—namely, Vietnamese government cooperation for MIA accounting and the related issue of emigration of Vietnamese detainees, both carryover issues from the Vietnam War. The unique circumstances of this linkage, however, were the strong Vietnamese interest in normalization of relations with the United States and the fact that the U.S. objectives did not require any basic political or economic concessions on the part of the Vietnamese government.
2.Expropriation/third-country investment in Cuba. The 1996 Libertad Act was primarily designed to pressure the Cuban government to democratize, but the specific sanction provisions dealt mainly with third-country investors in Cuba on properties expropriated without compensation from American companies and citizens, and the subsequent U.S.-EU negotiations on this issue led to an agreement that could greatly restrain such investments. In this limited context, the Libertad Act did help achieve a positive agreement in a new and untested area of expropriations policy. There are two qualifications, however, to this policy experience. First, it would have been preferable for the United States to have launched a strong, high-level initiative with trading partners in 1993, when Cuba began to solicit foreign investment, requesting negotiation of an agreement not to permit new investment on properties with outstanding expropriation claims, and with sanctions reserved as a threat if negotiations failed. And second, the Libertad Act has had little impact on foreign investment in any event—the hotels are not on expropriated properties, European telecommunications companies settled privately with IT&T, and Canadian mining and Israeli citrus investments have gone forward in spite of the act. The issue of the effectiveness of U.S. unilateral sanctions against Cuba as a means of fostering democracy involves predominantly the ban on U.S. trade, investment, and travel, and not the marginal effects of attempted third-country extensions contained in the Cuban Democracy and Libertad Acts.
3.Swiss gold. Threatened sanctions by New York City against Swiss commercial interests provided a strong incentive for Swiss authorities to arrange belated compensation to World War II Holocaust survivors and their heirs for gold taken from concentration camp victims and placed by Nazi Germany in Swiss banks. The circumstances again were highly unique, and a future initiative in this manner may be precluded by the November 1998 Massachusetts district court decision that a Massachusetts sanction against Myanmar related to foreign policy objectives is unconstitutional. The district court decision was upheld by the appeals court, and the case is now under review by the Supreme Court.
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In conclusion, the overall assessment is that unilateral economic sanctions during the 1990s, with a few exceptions, have been ineffective in achieving their foreign policy objectives while having various adverse effects on other U.S. interests. The record for sanctions directed at human rights/democratization objectives is especially bleak, while targeted sanctions for national security objectives, in one case at least, produced a positive result. The rare exceptions of positive results from unilateral sanctions, however, only tend to prove the rule in view of the unique circumstances involved in each such instance.
With this essentially negative overall assessment, the presentation turns to steps that could be taken to improve the U.S. foreign policy process and thus avoid counterproductive economic sanctions. It also addresses the elusive subject of alternative policies to the use of unilateral sanctions.
3. The Policy Process
The case studies highlighted important problems of policy process, both for the imposition of unilateral sanctions and for lifting them. The imposition process is more complex technically while the decision process for lifting sanctions is primarily a matter of power sharing between the president and Congress. Each is considered in turn, first with respect to an assessment of recent experience drawn from the case studies and then in terms of proposed changes to improve the policy process, as contained in the 1997 legislative proposal, "The Sanctions Policy Reform Act," sponsored by Republican senator Richard Lugar and Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, both from Indiana.
The Process for Imposing Sanctions
The process of formulating and implementing unilateral sanctions, within the executive branch and Congress, is inherently skewed in favor of imposing the sanction, and often doing so quickly with little regard as to whether the sanction is likely to achieve its intended result. Sanction target governments operate against U.S. interests and values—developing weapons of mass destruction, harboring terrorists, suppressing religious and press freedom, and oppressing or killing their people. International diplomacy is slow-moving and only partially effective at best, which leads to public frustration to do something more forceful, but military intervention has little public support and other options can have large budgetary obligations. This leaves sanctions on trade and investment by American companies, and it is often politically unpopular for executive branch leaders and members of Congress to oppose sanctions on doing business as usual in countries with such oppressive or outlaw regimes. Moreover, these inherent pressures to support, or at least not to resist, sanctions increased during the 1990s when, in the absence of an overriding Soviet threat, the large majority of sanction target countries were no longer pawns on a global Cold War chessboard, nor were trade and effusive aid part of the strategy to keep "friends" from going over to the other side. Finally, the compelling pressure to impose a sanction is far greater for unilateral than for multilateral sanctions. The need to reach multilateral accord before imposing a multilateral sanction usually takes considerable time for detailed deliberations, thus reducing the likelihood of hasty or ill-considered actions.
These inherent weaknesses in the policy process for imposing unilateral sanctions were evident throughout the case studies. The lack of a clear definition of the intended objectives of a proposed sanction, of the likelihood of its being achieved, and of the impact on other U.S. interests, was the consistent pattern for congressional consideration of sanctions legislation and for presidential decisions. The legislative markup of the Libertad Act against Cuba was done in haste after the shootdown in March 1996 while deliberations over ILSA stretched out over a year but mostly occurred behind closed doors with little systematic attempt to assess what would actually happen if the sanctions were imposed. The initial proposal by Senator McConnell for sanctions against Myanmar received a super-quick hearing in the wrong committee, with no testimony from the executive branch or the U.S. private sector, and the final compromise Cohen/Feinstein amendment was enacted in such haste that authority for the president to impose the sanction was omitted.
The executive branch record of the Clinton administration was at least as bad. Candidate Clinton committed himself to the MFN/human rights linkage for China before he had a foreign policy team to advise him. The March 1995 decision to ban U.S. investment in Iran was preempted by Secretary of State Christopher's press comment in Tel Aviv while cabinet discussion in Washington was divided over whether the sanction would have positive results. The ban on exports to Iran, announced in the president's April speech before the annual World Jewish Congress dinner, was based on secretive internal review that was as much about domestic politics as about the sanction's ability to achieve a particular foreign policy objective. The president's decision in April 1997 to impose the investment sanction on Myanmar was taken hastily by the new foreign policy team, with no formal review and little regard for the substantive criteria in the Cohen/Feinstein legislation. The principal executive branch villain of sanctions policy is the ultra-flexible IEEPA, used in both decisions for Iran, the Myanmar decision, the 1996 decision for sanctions against Sudan, and the November 1998 decisions for the "entities list" of sanctions against India and Pakistani firms. This authority has been abused out of all recognition, as when President Clinton was obliged to declare the internal political struggle in faraway Myanmar "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States."
The Sanctions Policy Reform Act, or SPRA, goes a long way in proposing necessary disciplines on both congressional and executive branch decisions to impose unilateral sanctions. Unilateral economic sanctions legislation would require the committee of primary jurisdiction to provide an opportunity for interested members of the public to submit comments on the proposed legislation prior to a committee vote. After the committee vote and before a floor vote, the president would be required to submit an assessment on various points, including whether the proposed sanction would achieve its stated objective, the impact on humanitarian conditions within the target country, and other affected national security and foreign policy interests. In addition, the secretary of agriculture would be required to assess the impact on U.S. agricultural exports. For executive branch actions, including those taken under IEEPA, the president would have to give 45 days notice of the intent to impose a sanction in order to permit public comments and to hold congressional consultations. The imposition of a sanction would also require a presidential assessment along the lines required for legislative proposals, including the finding by the secretary of agriculture. Finally, the U.S. International Trade Commission would be required to report on the impact of the sanction on the U.S. economy, including trade performance, employment, and the reputation of the United States as a reliable supplier. The president would have waiver authority to act faster, in the case of a real national emergency, but the various reports and assessments would then have to go forward promptly after the sanction is imposed.
All of these provisions are eminently sound and would have greatly improved the policy process in each of the five country cases examined here, while in none of the cases would the president have needed to utilize a national emergency waiver to speed up the process. There are additions, however, to the proposed legislation that should be considered, based on the country case experience:
1.Economic impact on the target country. This was the critical missing assessment in all five case studies, and such an assessment was not explicitly called for in the SPRA. A general statement by the president of likely effectiveness of a proposed sanction could well evade a hard economic assessment, and indeed it is not obvious where in the executive branch such an assessment could best be made. The State Department, as frequent sanctions advocate with limited economic analysis capability, would be suspect. The best procedure would probably be a CIA assessment, with a review panel of independent economists.
2.The secretary of commerce. Far more U.S. industrial exports and investment are at risk, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, than agricultural exports, as explained in the case studies, and thus a finding by the secretary of commerce for U.S. industrial interests, similar to that by the secretary of agriculture for agricultural interests, should be included.
3.U.S. Trade Representative. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative never submitted a public statement of the impact of a proposed sanction, including the Libertad Act and ILSA, on U.S. trade policy commitments, including in the World Trade Organization. In fact, U.S. trade policy officials generally try to avoid making any statement even hinting that there could be problems, in the knowledge that they could later have to defend the sanctions in a WTO dispute panel. This was certainly the case for the Libertad Act. The U.S. Trade Representative should therefore be required to make a finding similar to those of other cabinet members about WTO and other U.S. trade policy commitments.
4.IEEPA. An independent review of recent experience with IEEPA is in order in light of the repeated abuse of its provisions for the quick imposition of unilateral sanctions. This section of the 1977 War and National Defense Act requires the president to declare a national emergency to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States before exercising the sweeping authorities provided, which clearly was not warranted for invoking selective sanctions against Myanmar and the Sudan, or even Iran during the nonemergency circumstances of 1995 and India and Pakistan in 1998.
The Process for Lifting Sanctions
The issue here is whether the president should have complete flexibility in how and when to modify or lift the sanction, or whether Congress should impose limitations. When the president utilizes IEEPA, for example, he has total flexibility for terminating the sanction. At the other extreme, in the Libertad Act, the president's authority to lift the embargo against Cuba (Titles I and II) or permit travel to the United States for certain officials of foreign companies that invest in Cuba (Title IV) is zero. Other sanctions have waiver authority, such as ILSA and other parts of the Libertad Act, and then there is the annual review and possible voting process on MFN status for China and at some point for Vietnam. There is finally the question of whether sanction legislation continues indefinitely, as does the Libertad Act, or ends at a given date, such as ILSA with a five-year termination date in 2001.
The SPRA leans heavily in the direction of maximum flexibility for the president and automatic termination dates, or "sunset provisions." Unilateral economic sanction legislation should provide authority to waive the sanctions if the president determines it is in the national interest, and all legislation should have a two-year sunset provision. These provisions, however, are "guidelines" rather than "requirements." The executive branch, in contrast, is required to terminate a sanction after two years unless it is specifically extended with all the normal assessment provisions.
These proposals for flexible application and termination of sanctions are well justified based on the unilateral sanctions experience of the 1990s. One additional provision that should be considered would be to praise the success of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment a quarter century ago for helping Jews emigrate freely from the Soviet Union and then to terminate this piece of obsolete legislation.5 Such an action would not limit the ability to set tariffs at any level for China and Vietnam, but it would end the time-consuming and, if anything, counterproductive annual debates over a Jackson-Vanik waiver and MFN renewal.
Overall, the SPRA would therefore constitute a major improvement in how the U.S. government policy process deals with usually ill-advised unilateral sanction proposals. In 1998, the draft legislation had 39 Senate (25 Republican, 15 Democrat) and 92 House (53 Republican, 39 Democrat) cosponsors, and it was rejected in August by a close 52-47 vote in the Senate when proposed by Senator Lugar as an amendment to the agricultural appropriations bill. The Clinton administration remained conspicuously neutral, however, until near the end, and then, in a September 8, 1998 testimony by Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat before the Bipartisan Task Force on Sanctions, it largely supported the proposed disciplines on Congress and opposed almost all disciplines on the executive branch. This finished the chances for the SPRA in the 1997-98 Congress, and its resubmission in 1999 has led to a mixed response in the Congress and continued lack of support by the President.
4. Alternatives to Sanctions
If unilateral sanctions are usually ineffective, logic dictates a search for alternative policy approaches, but this is an elusive quest. By definition, alternative policies include all other foreign policy instruments, which, in turn, can be packaged in many ways on a country, regional, and global basis. Some basic policy alternatives were presented in each of the five case studies, and a particular alternative course was recommended, but extrapolating these recommendations on a broader geographic basis has limited practical relevance. The point of departure is that all sanction targets present difficult challenges for U.S. foreign policy, and there are no easy, cost-free solutions. The brief discussion here is consequently limited to comments on four foreign policy considerations that are often closely related to decisions on unilateral sanctions—the null hypothesis, multilateral versus unilateral sanctions, carrots versus sticks, and economic sanctions versus military intervention.
The Null Hypothesis
The simplest and most immediate alternative to a policy of unilateral sanctions against a given country is to maintain all other policies in existing form while lifting or not imposing the sanction. If this "null hypothesis" alternative produces a net improvement in terms of the pursuit of U.S. interests, even though it does not achieve the hoped for (but in any event not realized) objectives of the sanctions, it is still a preferable alternative and should logically be adopted. In operational terms, the unilateral sanction is lifted unilaterally or not imposed, and everything else remains the same.
This line of reasoning will not necessarily convince entrenched proponents of a particular sanction to change their position, but it is nevertheless the necessary first step in a systematic assessment of alternatives to a policy of unilateral sanctions. Moreover, if the null hypothesis assessment indicates a net improvement for the United States, the burden of proof for continuing or imposing the sanction shifts to sanctions proponents. In effect, the best defense becomes a good offense. In the case studies, the null hypothesis—that is, a unilateral lifting of current sanctions—was deemed to be preferable to continued unilateral sanctions for Cuba and Iran, and for Myanmar on a contingent basis. The Clinton administration and most members of Congress continue to support these sanctions, but they should at least be obliged to offer a counterassessment of how the continued unilateral sanctions are preferable to the null hypothesis, which they have not done. The 1998 recommendation by a number of Senators for a bipartisan presidential commission to review Cuba policy would force such an appraisal for the Cuba embargo and thus serve a useful purpose. Indeed the commission mandate could have been extended to include Iran and Myanmar as well. Unfortunately, in January 1999, President Clinton rejected the commission proposal, reportedly for domestic political reasons related to Vice President Al Gore's presidential election prospects.
Multilateral versus Unilateral Sanctions
The familiar statement that multilateral sanctions are preferable to unilateral sanctions is self-evident, but of limited content except where the United States is prepared to act forcefully with friends and allies. With respect to human rights/democratization objectives, the multilateral alternative is especially limited because almost all other countries favor "constructive engagement," including private sector engagement through trade and investment, to economic sanctions. Haiti was the exception during the 1990s,6 but there do not appear to be any similar target countries ahead. In the national security field, broader opportunities exist, but they each entail difficult commitments, such as broadened dual-use export restraints or sanctions against Chinese and Russian companies involved in ballistic missile and other exports or technical support to third countries. The point is that the frequent recourse to unilateral sanctions has not been out of ignorance of multilateral alternatives, but out of the unwillingness to take on major initiatives of likely negative outcome.
A more limited though more pertinent issue of multilateral versus unilateral policies is whether the United States could achieve strengthened multilateral collaboration in diplomatic and other areas of policy in the absence of the unilateral economic sanctions. Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar are all good examples, as related in the case studies, and the issue can cut both ways. The Libertad Act unilateral sanctions did help achieve the U.S.-EU agreement on expropriated properties, but it has also isolated the United States in the United Nations, the Western Hemisphere, and elsewhere, from a concerted campaign to press democratic reforms directly on the Cuban government. Indeed the act has enabled Fidel Castro to wage a successful propaganda campaign against the U.S. embargo so as to divert attention from human rights abuses within Cuba.
For Iran, the 1995 ban on U.S. exports to and investment in Iran may have initially helped restrain other countries from providing official export credits to Iran, but subsequent entrenched differences between the United States and its allies over unilateral sanctions versus constructive engagement have precluded strong U.S. leadership for concerted multilateral pressures on the Iranian leadership over international terrorism and other national security interests. For Myanmar, the relevant relationship is between the United States and ASEAN members, even more sharply divided over unilateral sanctions versus constructive engagement, including full Myanmar membership in ASEAN.
These multilateral versus unilateral questions need to be addressed carefully in each country situation. The conclusion from the Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar case studies is that significant opportunities for strengthened multilateral collaboration could be obtained by lifting the unilateral sanctions. Such collaboration would not likely achieve all of the objectives sought through the sanction policies, but neither have the sanctions.
Carrots versus Sticks
The dichotomy between positive incentives such as economic aid and economic pain through sanctions—carrots versus sticks—is not always a simple either-or choice, and the two categories of policy instruments are sometimes used in conjunction. In fact, there are often three distinct policy instruments in play: economic sanctions on commercial relations, the withholding of normal flows of economic assistance, both bilateral and multilateral, and the clearly positive incentive of additional economic assistance beyond what would normally be available to a target country.
The pattern in the five case studies and other recent sanctions experience is that the United States is usually alone or almost alone in going the trade/investment sanction route, while other aid-donor countries are more inclined to join the United States in holding back normal aid flows. This was the case in the post-Tiananmen Square China relationship and continues to be the relationship for Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar. It is relatively rare that both trade sanctions and additional aid incentives are used together, although this is current U.S. policy toward North Korea, as substantial financial support for petroleum imports is given as an incentive to curtail the North Korean nuclear weapons program while a unilateral economic embargo remains in place.
The preference for carrots over sticks or aid over trade sanctions, follows naturally from a strategy of private sector engagement to support a process of market-oriented economic reforms and democratization. In such circumstances, however, the composition of aid programs becomes important. Initial economic assistance should be directed to nongovernmental organizations, private sector projects, social sector infrastructure such as schools and health facilities, and technical assistance directly related to economic and political reforms, with financial support to the central government and public sector projects coming later if at all.
The use of aid rather than sanctions in relation to national security objectives is far more complicated and can only be judged on a case-by-case basis. The North Korea aid program noted above is highly controversial, and aid projects in Russia to keep highly trained nuclear and other strategic weapons personnel gainfully employed in the civilian sector at home rather than in weapons development abroad is a partial solution to the problem at best.
In terms of alternatives to unilateral economic sanctions, the carrot of economic aid is thus always one policy instrument to consider, but there are many ways to offer economic assistance, which, if nothing else, makes this a more flexible and thus at times a more effective policy instrument than broadly based commercial sanctions.
Economic Sanctions versus Military Intervention
This is a complex but important question about alternative policies to economic sanctions. Economic sanctions and military intervention can be pursued jointly, in a mutually supportive way, as was done in Bosnia. There can also be a sequential relationship, attempting to achieve a given objective first through economic sanctions, and then, if the sanctions fail to achieve their objective, resorting to military intervention, as occurred in Iraq and Haiti.7 The most troubling relationship is when economic sanctions are adopted as a convenient substitute for military intervention because the sanctions avoid putting American lives at risk and have no budget cost, while there is a felt political need to "do something." The potential problem in this case is that the sanctions can be oversold as a foreign policy instrument when in fact they are ineffective in achieving the intended objective while having adverse consequences for other U.S. interests.
These important relationships between economic sanctions and military intervention, however, are far more likely to arise in circumstances involving multilateral rather than unilateral sanctions. When the United States is alone and without support from friends and allies in the application of economic sanctions, it would certainly have to act alone militarily, probably in the face of condemnation from the UN and other nations. Such U.S. military actions, therefore, except for quick punitive strikes, as taken against Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998, would rarely if ever be an attractive alternative to unilateral sanctions in the post-Cold War circumstances of the 1990s. The only instance of a tradeoff between tightened unilateral sanctions and a U.S. military intervention in the case studies was for Cuba, after the shootdown of the unarmed planes over international waters in February 1996, and even in this case the punitive military strike was rejected.
* * *
These are some of the specific policy issues that almost always arise when assessing alternatives to unilateral economic sanctions. There remain, however, more fundamental questions about maintaining normal commercial—that is, sanctions-free—relations with oppressive and rogue regimes, which require more fundamental thinking about the appropriate answer in the very changed post-Cold War international realities. It concerns basic American values and the perceived need for the United States to take tangible actions against the leaders of such regimes as a statement of principle. But if the action of economic sanctions has no positive results, is this not feeling good without doing good? The answer to this architectonic question is the subject of the concluding chapter of my book.8
Notes
1. The quote is from Zhou Shijian, a vice president of the China Chamber of Commerce, in theChina Daily Business Weekly, August 2, 1998.
2. Gary Clyde Hufbauer et al., "U.S. Economic Sanctions: Their Impact on Trade, Jobs, and Wages," Working Paper (Washington, D.C. Institute for International Economics, June 1996). The estimated annual loss of U.S. exports by country cannot be compared precisely because of methodological differences, in addition to the exclusion of service exports in the IIE report, but the estimates produced for three case study countries that overlap the IIE listing are Cuba (IIE $1.1 billion; EHP $3.0 billion), Iran (IIE $0.8 billion-$2.5 billion; EHP $0.5 billion-$2.0 billion), and Vietnam (IIE $69 million; EHP $1.3 billion-$2.6 billion), with a cumulative total of IIE $2.0 billion-$3.7 billion and EHP $4.8 billion-$7.6 billion.
.3. For a detailed, authoritative account of the tragic consequences of the embargo on the Haitian people, see Elizabeth D. Gibbons,Sanctions in Haiti: Human Rights and Democracy under Assault (Westport, Conn.: Praeger/CSIS, 1999). Her summary statement of the impact of the multilateral trade embargo is as follows: "Because the embargo could not differentiate between villains and victims and its effects reached far into the urban slums and rural hilltops, it proved to be the main cause of the sanctions' devastating impact on Haiti's people, triggering or accelerating a horrifying descent into absolute poverty for the vast majority of Haitians. Unemployment increased by half (from 50 percent in 1990 to 75 percent in 1994), agricultural output declined 20 percent, prices for basic foodstuffs increased more than 100 percent while annual per capita income declined 30 percent, bottoming out at $250. Child malnutrition doubled, and thousands of children perished in a measles epidemic; maternal mortality increased 29 percent; school enrollments dropped by a third; the number of street children doubled, and some 100,000 children were placed in domestic service to live as little more than slaves. Consistent humanitarian exemptions and a massive humanitarian relief program could not prevent Haiti's devastation and demonstrated their essential inadequacy in the face of economic and social collapse" (pp. 94-95). For a broader assessment of U.S. interests and the Haitian embargo, see Ernest H. Preeg,The Haitian Dilemma: A Case Study in Demographics, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: CSIS, 1996).
4. For an account of how the development of a nuclear weapons capability has been an overriding national security objective for Pakistan, see Dennis Kux, "Pakistan," contained in Haass, ed.,Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy, 157-176.
5. A related measure that might also be considered by the congressional trade committees is to eliminate the column two Smoot-Hawley tariff rates from U.S. tariff schedules. No purpose is served by continuing to pay homage to these highest tariffs in U.S. history through their inclusion on thousands of lines of tariff headings. Such simplification of the U.S. tariff schedule does not preclude members of Congress from raising any or all tariffs as high as they wish, but there is nothing sacrosanct about this particular set of extremely high tariffs that contributed significantly to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
6. South Africa is often cited as a successful example of how multilateral sanctions achieved positive results for human rights and democratization by ending apartheid. This was again a case of unique circumstances, however, including the critical fact that the South African government was democratically elected, however limited its participation, and operated under the rule of law. Circumstances are very different for the authoritarian governments targeted for unilateral sanctions during the 1990s.
7. The sequential relationship raises further questions beyond the scope of this study. For Iraq, the Bush administration began with economic sanctions knowing full well that they would not induce an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, but they were considered necessary as a step to gain American public support for the later military intervention. In the case of Haiti, the Bush administration in 1991-1992 was adamantly opposed to a U.S. military intervention, as was President Clinton's first Haiti policy envoy, Lawrence Pezzullo, in 1993 and early 1994. Only when the killing and repression in Haiti greatly intensified during the final months of the embargo, in large part caused by the devastating economic impact of the prolonged sanctions on the isolated and threatened military regime, was a policy of U.S. military intervention adopted as the least bad alternative. In effect, the economic sanctions created the circumstances for an unintended military intervention.
8. For information about the book, contact Heidi Shinn, CSIS, at telephone (202) 775-3119, fax (202) 775-3199, or e-mailbooks@csis.org.
.Ernest H. Preeg
Ernest H. Preeg is Senior Fellow in Trade and Productivity at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI in Arlington, Virginia. He undertook this study while holding the William M. Scholl Chair in International Business at CSIS. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and was U.S. Ambassador to Haiti in 1981-83, well before the devastating economic sanctions against that country in 1991-94 which caused enormous suffering to the Haitian people and destruction of the nation's economic infrastructure. Ambassador Preeg's earlier country case study work includesThe Evolution of a Revolution: Peru and Its Relations with the United States, 1968-1980 (1981),Haiti and the CBI: A Time of Change and Opportunity (1985),Neither Fish nor Fowl: U.S. Economic Aid to the Philippines for Noneconomic Objectives (1991),Cuba and the New Caribbean Economic Order (1993), andThe Haitian Dilemma: A Case Study in Demographics, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy (1996). His earlier work in the trade policy field includesTraders and Diplomats: A History and Analysis of the Kennedy Round of Negotiations Under the GATT (1970),Economic Blocs and U.S. Foreign Policy (1974),The American Challenge in World Trade: U.S. Interests in the GATT Multilateral Trading System (1989),Trade Policy Ahead: Three Tracks and One Question (1995),Traders in a Brave New World: The Uruguay Round and the Future of the International Trading System (1995), andFrom Here to Free Trade: Essays in Post-Uruguay Round Trade Strategy (1998).
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