Sanctions Have Gotten a Bum Rap
Pundits Despise Them, but They Can Be Effective in Myanmar and Elsewhere
By David Baldwin*
Los Angeles Times
August 18, 2004
Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar's pro-democracy movement, has spent
at least nine of the last 13 years under house arrest. When the Bush administration
recently renewed economic sanctions against Myanmar, aimed at pressuring that
nation's military regime to pursue democratic reforms and at winning Suu Kyi's
release, it triggered the usual negative response from pundits everywhere.
Ever since the League of Nations' economic sanctions against Italy failed
to stop the invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, the consensus among pundits has
been that applying such pressure doesn't work. It is rarely noted that the
league's 1936 action might well have worked if oil had been included on the
embargo list and if the United States had supported the sanctions.
Despite the belief that sanctions don't work, every U.S. president since 1936
has used them. Why? Because they can be useful foreign policy tools. Along
with military force, propaganda and diplomacy, they constitute the basic instruments
of statecraft. In order to evaluate the worth of sanctions, then, one must
understand the basic rules of statecraft.
The first basic rule is that nothing works perfectly. A study by the Institute
for International Economics of 116 cases found the success rate of sanctions
to be about 33%. Some see this as evidence that such measures do not work
and should be abandoned. Not necessarily. A baseball player who gets a hit
only 33% of the time is a star, not a bum. It may well be that in statecraft
as in baseball, .333 is a pretty good "batting average."
The second rule is that nothing will work alone. None of the tools of statecraft
works well by itself; each is best used in conjunction with the others. Military
force alone is insufficient to win wars — as the situation in Iraq amply
demonstrates. That economic sanctions alone are unlikely to bring democracy
to Myanmar does not mean that they cannot make a useful contribution toward
that end.
Third, costs matter as much as benefits. Military force may well be more effective
in achieving some foreign policy goals, but it is likely to be more costly
than economic sanctions.
Still, one of the arguments made in favor of invading Iraq was to rid the
U.S. of the costs of maintaining sanctions against Hussein's regime —
for example, the oil embargo. With more than $150 billion appropriated thus
far for the military effort in Iraq and billions more expected, the idea of
invading Iraq in order to save money seems ludicrous. And that does not include
such nonmonetary costs as the loss of lives and international respect.
Policymakers understand that the low costs of economic sanctions sometimes
make them preferable to more effective tools, such as military force. No one
has seriously suggested, for example, that military force be used to bring
democracy to Myanmar.
The fourth rule of statecraft is that alternatives matter. It is not enough
to tell policymakers that sanctions won't work in Myanmar or elsewhere; one
must tell them what would work better. As the octogenarian said when asked
whether he was enjoying old age, "Compared with the alternative, I am
enjoying it very much." Likewise, in evaluating economic sanctions, one
must ask, "Compared with what?"
Do economic sanctions work? One interesting thing about this question is that
it is almost never asked about military force, propaganda or diplomacy —
the main alternatives to economic sanctions. Yet the answer is the same for
each type of statecraft. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
The fact is, there is no all-purpose instrument that works better in all situations.
It is good to remind ourselves that the alleged accumulation of weapons of
mass destruction by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s was often cited as evidence
that economic sanctions weren't working. In retrospect, it appears that they
may have been working better than anyone suspected.
In the end, the question "Do sanctions work?" grossly oversimplifies
the issue by implying a yes or no answer. It would be better to ask, "How
successful are sanctions likely to be, with respect to which goals, at what
costs, and compared with which alternative tools of statecraft?"
No matter how useful or useless sanctions eventually turn out to be in Myanmar,
one thing is sure: Putting economic pressure on governments we hope to influence
or change will remain a potentially useful addition to the diplomatic tool
kit. Presidents understand this even if pundits do not.
About the Author: David Baldwin, a political science professor at Columbia
University, is the author of "Economic Statecraft" (Princeton University,
1985).