Sanctions only bite with global tee

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'"Without sanctions, Mandela would be dead now," said Massachusetts Rep.
Byron Rushing, who wrote a state law against purchasing from companies that
did business under the apartheid regime. "Absolutely, it absolutely
worked," he said.'

Sanctions only bite with global teeth
Acting without the backing of many nations just means billions in lost
export sales

Part 2 of 3
BY MICHAEL S. LELYVELD 
JOURNAL OF COMMERCE June 23, 1998

Three years after Washington imposed sanctions, South Africa freed Nelson
Mandela. It has been 37 years since the United States embargoed Cuba, but
Fidel Castro is still in power.

The difference is multilateral support. In simplest terms, the success of
sanctions depends on whether other nations join in. Business advocates
argues that the only real damage from unilateral sanctions is to U.S.
exporters, which, according to some estimates, lost between $15 and $19
billion in 1995 alone because of such bans.

Analysts agree that solo sanctions just don't work.

But sanctions are rarely simple and the results are hard to gauge. Time and
the circumstances surrounding sanctions may be the biggest factors in
whether they succeed or fail.

The steps taken against South Africa in the 1980s are cited most often as a
resounding success. But results were slow in coming and U.S. trade curbs
played only a supporting role.

Sanctions backers say it's not a question of whether Mr. Mandela would have
proceeded to become president if the United States had not clamped down on
trade.

"Without sanctions, Mandela would be dead now," said Massachusetts Rep.
Byron Rushing, who wrote a state law against purchasing from companies that
did business under the apartheid regime. "Absolutely, it absolutely
worked," he said.

Mr. Rushing recently became a target for trade interests again after he
authored a similar statute aimed at military-ruled Myanmar. Few state
measures have sparked such an outcry as his 1996 selective purchasing law
against the former Burma. The National Foreign Trade Council issuing
Massachusetts, while the European Union and Japan have threatened action in
the World Trade Organization.

But Mr. Rushing is also one of the first to say that sanctions don't win
battles by themselves.

"It takes a long time, and it wasn't the only thing that made it happen.
It's what made it happen faster," he said, referring to apartheid's
collapse. Domestic pressure, European trade measures, divestment by pension
funds and U.S. companies all helped to make sanctions a success.

Big irony raised

But the South Africa example also raises one of the great ironies in recent
sanctions lore.

In 1986, it was Sen. Richard Lugar who led the fight to override President
Reagan's veto of the congressional penalties against South Africa. Twelve
years later, the Indiana Republican is the Senate sponsor of the Sanctions
Policy Reform Act, which is trying to halt the spread of costly unilateral
curbs.

Mr. Lugar's press secretary, Andy Fisher, cited the multilateral nature of
the South Africa sanctions to explain the difference between then and now.
But a review of events shows that sanctions became multilateral largely
because the Senate took a strong leadership stand. Britain and other
nations joined the sanctions movement largely because the United States
acted first.

That history lesson is not lost on supporters of new unilateral sanctions,
who hope others will follow when Washington leads but who are committed to
their causes whether multilateralism comes or not.

"You don't make policy on the basis of whether others are participating,"
said Jess Hordes, Washington director of the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith, which backs the controversial Wolf-Specter bill against
countries engaged in religious persecution. "If the measure is who else is
doing it, we'll wind up doing nothing."

Basis for legislations

Such sanctions are precisely the ones that raise the greatest concerns
among foreign policy experts, forming the basis of the reform legislation,
sponsored in the House by Reps. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., and Philip Crane, R-Ill.

In a forthcoming book on the sanctions problem, Richard Haass, director of
foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, writes that
"multilateral support for economic sanctions normally should constitute a
prerequisite for their introduction by the United States."

Unilateral sanctions should be avoided unless the United States is "in a
unique situation to derive leverage based on the economic relationship with
the target," Mr. Haass says in "Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy,"
to be published by the Council on Foreign Relations Press. Otherwise, the
United States will incur higher costs than the intended victim.

Bottom line: The sanctions won't work.

When asked to cite an example of a "good" sanction, Mr. Haass tops his list
with Iraq. The Iraq embargo in 1990 was multilateral and virtually
airtight, yet even that effort did not oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait
without military force. Over time, it has succeeded in defanging Iraq's
nuclear capability, said Mr. Haass, who advised President Bush during the
Gulf War.

Rep. Hamilton said the problem is the piling on of U.S. sanctions,
particularly in cases where there is little chance of multilateral backing.

'Arise from frustration'

"I think sanctions arise from frustration," said Mr. Hamilton in an
interview. They are seen as an easy answer to calls for action in cases
when "we don't send in the Marines and rhetoric isn't enough." But the cost
of not saying no to the growing list of sanctions causes has begun to reach
prohibitive levels.

"We're doing these things without a careful assessment of all the aspects
of the American national interest," Mr. Hamilton said.

Mr. Lugar is not the only member of Congress who has struggled with the
sanctions question. Two years ago, Mr. Hamilton supported the Iran-Libya
Sanctions Act.

"I think that was a mistake," he says. "Frankly, I would not vote for ILSA
today."

Mr. Crane was also the sponsor of the compromise version of ILSA, which was
ultimately signed into law. The bill was initially authored in the House by
Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y. The Senate version was written by Sen. Alfonse
D'Amato, R-N.Y., with Libya sanctions added by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

The most problematic current example of sanctions is the Nuclear
Proliferation Prevention Act of 1994 by Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio. Critics
see the curbs, which have been applied to India and Pakistan, as the worst
of all possible worlds.

The sanctions not only failed to deter the two countries from nuclear
testing but they included no presidential waivers, conditions for removal
or sunset provisions. The situation plunged the administration into a
series of problems after President Clinton declared sanctions against India
on May 13.

Struggled with penalties

Having failed for four years to interpret the law through regulations,
officials struggled for weeks with how severe the penalties should be.
Concerns about the fragility of Pakistan's economy led to further delay. In
an extraordinary move, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also urged
other nuclear powers meeting in Geneva earlier this month not to make the
sanctions multilateral.

The administration then partially reversed that position in securing an
agreement with the Group of 8 industrialized nations to back a hold on
funding for India and Pakistan by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank.

Meanwhile, the administration apparently split on the question of whether
U.S. credits should be allowed for grain sales to both nations. Although
Ms. Albright reportedly told farm supporters in Congress that the Justice
Department had decided that the credits would be barred, National Security
Adviser Samuel Berger wrote in support of legislation to exempt the
guaranteed sales.

Last Thursday Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott announced a series
of moderate measures to implement the sanctions against India and Pakistan,
noting that past sanctions "have sometimes been more of a sledgehammer than
a scalpel."

Clinton supports exemption

After heavy criticism in Congress, Mr. Clinton weighed with a radio
statement that supported an amendment by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., to
exempt wheat sales from curbs, stressing the importance of the U.S. supply
to Pakistan.

"We have long believed that food should not be used as a weapon to
influence other nations," said the president. "Cutting off that supply
would only hurt the citizens of Pakistan and American farmers, without
furthering our goals of nonproliferation of atomic weapons."

The policy tangle appears to have opened whole new worlds for the debate
over the effectiveness and deterrent value of sanctions.

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control,
said the United States should be striving to make the nuclear sanctions
multilateral, but ultimately, it should press the law to its limits whether
or not other nations support it.

"The United States, like it or not, is the leader of the world. It has to
lead in this area as in many others," Mr. Milhollin said. "This is a moral
question. You can't figure this out on a calculator."

It is also hard to dismiss unilateral sanctions on Cuba as totally
ineffective, even though Mr. Castro remains president.

Susan Kaufman Purcell, vice president of the Americas Society and Council
of the Americas in New York, suggests in a chapter of the Haass study that
Helms-Burton sanctions in 1996 and curbs sponsored in 1992 by then-Rep.
Robert Torricelli, D- N.J., may have had some impact on Cuban behavior and
attempts at economic reforms.

Although other factors were at work, Ms. Purcell notes that the timing of
the bills "coincides almost perfectly" with Cuba's limited reform steps.
But measured against the goal of ousting Mr. Castro, "the sanctions have
clearly failed."