Sanctions: Don't Love Them or Hate Them, Make Them Work.

• Author: Weiss, Stanley A.

Few foreign policy issues excite such passionate and disparate feelings in the United States as proposals to impose economic sanctions in order to try to influence the behaviour of other countries. The business community hates sanctions which cost American firms in terms of lost sales and business relationships. Meanwhile, many politicians love sanctions; how else to take "tough" action against a foreign country without risking American blood or treasure?

The domestic debate, which concerns largely ineffective unilateral sanctions, is mirrored internationally by a similar intellectual trench warfare over multilateral sanctions. On one side, critics line up to deride the use of sanctions without admitting those instances in which these measures work. On the other side are those who view sanctions as the default option, with little regard to the type used or the manner in which it is employed. The end result is that sanctions are seen as primarily symbolic gestures. In fact, if done right, they can be useful, though limited, diplomatic tools.

The problem is that even multilateral economic sanctions, which have a much better chance of achieving diplomatic goals, are rarely done right.

As a result, sanctions are often worse than ineffective. In many cases, they have proven highly counterproductive, creating changes in the target country's economy, which make the offensive behaviour that brought sanctions to bear even more difficult to reverse. Yet, sanctions have met with success in more than a few instances. The key to their more effective use is understanding what they are, and how and why they can produce such divergent results. At the most basic level, there is a distinction between trade sanctions on commodities and financial sanctions aimed at impeding the flow of capital to a target country. Trade sanctions can be further divided into those which prevent the target country from being able to import goods (export sanctions) and those which block exports from a country (import sanctions).

Why are these distinctions important? Because, while financial sanctions tend to raise the cost of capital to an offending country, export sanctions tend to induce import substitution. Even if multilateral sanctions are effective in blocking the flow of goods to a particular country, the target State will respond, if possible, by producing substitutes. The 1977 UN-imposed arms embargo on South Africa, for example, prompted the creation of a vast military...