NEWS ANALYSIS : Sanctions Likely to Remain as U.S. Policy of Choice

The debate on the Senate floor was filled with passionate arguments, dramatic appeals and angry condemnations of what was characterized as U.S. policy paralysis in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“The honor of the Senate is at issue,” declared Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), urging his colleagues to back a non-binding resolution calling for an end to the Western arms embargo on Bosnia and a willingness to extend “appropriate” military aid if requested by Sarajevo. From the other side of the aisle, a former advocate of sanctions, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), chimed in: “Even I can say ‘no’ no more.”

The resolution passed by an overwhelming 87-9 vote. Yet any change in the status quo remains highly unlikely, despite Saturday’s slaughter of civilians in a Sarajevo market struck by a mortar shell. Even if the allies end the impasse among themselves and agree to Western air strikes, the military offensive will almost certainly be tightly restricted in scope and time frame, U.S. officials say.

For better or worse, the centerpiece of both U.S. and international strategy for halting the world’s most frustrating war is likely to remain steadfast--economic sanctions.

Indeed, the foreign policy of choice in the post-Cold War world relies on one of the oldest options around, one that dates back to the ancient Greeks. Sanctions are the primary element of U.S. policy toward Haiti, Iraq and Libya, as well as a handful of standoffs left over from the Cold War.

If anything, the use of sanctions is likely to increase.

“Because most Americans don’t have their heart in police actions and because press and public criticism is fierce, U.S. policy-makers keep coming back to sanctions, mainly because they want to be seen to be doing something,” said Gary Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics and co-author of the book “Economic Sanctions Reconsidered.” “It’s tough to do anything these days besides sanctions.”

To tighten the squeeze against Haiti’s military regime for usurping rule from democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States once again will turn to sanctions when it asks the U.N. Security Council this week to impose a tougher economic embargo on the beleaguered island. Previous sanctions limited to fuel and arms would be increased to include all but medicine and food.

In response to reports that Croatia has sent regular troops into Bosnia, the United Nations has given Zagreb until next week to pull out its forces or face the threat of economic sanctions.

Since the onset of sweeping global change in 1989, the United States and its allies have deployed massive numbers of troops with a mandate that included the use of force only in Panama, the Persian Gulf and Somalia.

If Iraq had moved west into Syria rather than south against Kuwait, the outside world might have limited its response to economic sanctions, many Mideast analysts believe. Invading oil-rich Kuwait provided an incentive to do more.

And the Somalia experience has elicited such heat at home that Washington will withdraw its troops by the end of March.

As a result, Operation Desert Storm is the exception and Bosnia the rule in responding to aggression in the post-Cold War world.

“We’ll find ourselves increasingly in situations where we turn to sanctions because of messier conflicts, because of limited goals and because of political and public constraints,” Hufbauer predicted.

The Clinton Administration publicly defends the use of sanctions as a weapon. “They’re working better in Serbia than they have anyplace else,” one senior official said recently. “Sanctions are really now hurting the Serbs. They don’t want to let this go on forever. If (President Slobodan) Milosevic could do what he wants, there would be a settlement by now, mainly because of sanctions.”

Belgrade’s economy is indeed imploding under the pressure. Hyper-inflation was running at 1,000,000% in December, and two currency devaluations in late 1993 removed 15 zeros from the dinar.

Production is reported to have dropped to a third of its 1990 levels, returning it to about the same rate as in 1960. More than 65% of Yugoslavs are estimated to be living below the poverty line.

Discontent in Yugoslavia--reduced from six republics to only Serbia and Montenegro--has been evident in recent strikes and work stoppages among coal miners, health workers, even gravediggers.

Yet the effectiveness of sanctions is highly debatable, international economists say.

Within days of U.S. boasts about sanctions, for example, Serbian regular forces were reported to have joined their ethnic brethren in Bosnia.

Sanctions have seesawed in Haiti too. A broad embargo imposed by the Organization of American States after the September, 1991, coup ousting Aristide had little impact.

Sanctions began to bite the military regime of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras after the United Nations adopted the OAS embargo last June. In less than a month, Cedras agreed to retire from the army and to let Aristide regain office by Oct. 30. The accord called for sanctions to be lifted as soon as Aristide appointed a new prime minister, in advance of his return.

But as soon as the embargo was relaxed, Cedras reneged. He refused to retire, and military-backed thugs prevented a U.S. naval vessel from docking with a contingent of American and Canadian troops to retrain Haiti’s army. When Washington withdrew the ship, Cedras tore up the peace pact and prevented Aristide from returning.

The United Nations then slapped partial sanctions back on Haiti. The United States, Canada, France and Venezuela served notice that they would recommend a mandatory global embargo if Cedras did not step down by Jan. 15. But the date has come and gone with no action.

Iraq has also suffered during 3 1/2 years of international sanctions.

The economy of Iraq, which has lost as much as $60 billion in oil revenue since the sanctions were imposed, last year stood at less than 40% of its level in 1989, according to a new report by the Middle East Policy Council. For large numbers of Iraqis, food consumption is lower than in disaster-stricken African countries, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Even so, sanctions have not ended the regime of President Saddam Hussein.

Similarly, an economic embargo imposed against Libya for its role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 has failed to nudge the government of Col. Moammar Kadafi to hand over for trial the two intelligence officials indicted in the West.

“We’re faced with all these conflicts, and we’re addressing them with the wet noodle of sanctions, which don’t have much impact on the ground,” Hufbauer said. “Policy-makers don’t have any illusions about the utility of sanctions. What they’re trained to do is to say that we are doing something. So they’re trying to answer a domestic need.”

Historically, the effectiveness of sanctions has been slight. In 118 cases during this century, sanctions had a major impact only about one time out of three, according to a study by Hufbauer.

Since 1973, the success rate has dropped dramatically. In about 40 cases over the last 20 years, the rate is less than 20%.

The limitations of sanctions have been evident through the ages. In 432 BC, Pericles, the Athenian leader who built the Parthenon, banned all trade with the city-state of Megara for seizing three women from a state allied with Athens. The tensions eventually contributed to the Peloponnesian War, in which Pericles prevailed. But sanctions alone did not cause the Megarians to move toward peace, Hufbauer said. Force was required to get results.

The United States had some early success with sanctions. In 1765, American colonials boycotted British goods after London imposed the Stamp Act. Britain repealed it the next year.

But among the most noted of about 60 U.S. cases over the past half a century, many have provided more publicity than pressure.

In 1962, Washington cut off trade with Cuba and seized its assets in the United States after Havana nationalized U.S. properties. But since the American assets were worth at least 10 times as much as those seized by the John F. Kennedy Administration, “the U.S. blocking was regarded with amusement by Castro,” Robert Carswell, a former deputy Treasury secretary, wrote in a recent article for Foreign Affairs.

Similar results were observed in North Korea and China after the United States cut off trade and blocked assets of both countries during the Korean War in 1950.

“Since the blocked assets under U.S. control had only a fraction of the value of the U.S. assets seized by China, the blocking was classically ineffective, while in time the trade sanctions served only to reinforce the 25-year isolation of the United States from China,” Carswell wrote.

Sanctions were lifted after a claims settlement with China in 1979. Although North Korea still faces sanctions, it has managed to develop one of the Third World’s most sophisticated arms export industries and may be on the verge of nuclear capability.

During international sanctions imposed between 1965 and 1979, the illegal white minority government of Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) steered the economy from being 95% dependent on imports to being 95% self-sufficient.

And 15 years of sanctions against Iran have neither brought down the Islamic regime nor tempered its support of extremist groups, U.S. officials concede.

An even longer period of sanctions against Vietnam ended last week, largely because of economic realities. The embargo hurt U.S. businesses that wanted access to a dynamic new market as much as it hurt the Vietnamese government.

For these and other reasons, sanctions alone are unlikely to work against the Serbs, analysts and economists argue.

For instance, Bosnian Serbs are faring better than Serbian Serbs because, like Bosnian Muslims, they qualify for U.N. humanitarian aid, including food supplies.

In addition, the Serbian government is entrenched, and its border is porous. And it has received sympathetic treatment from neighboring Russia dating back to the 19th Century.

Finally, the United States is not a major trading partner with Yugoslavia, Hufbauer noted. And the Europeans find it difficult to coordinate their policy on sanctions. Their aversion to immigration exacerbates the situation.