Buchanan Now Says U.S. Should Lift Sanctions

Reform Party presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, in an admitted departure from his past views, said Thursday that U.S. sanctions against countries such as Iraq, Cuba, Iran and Libya should be lifted.

In a speech calling for a “more moral” foreign policy, Buchanan argued that sanctions the United States imposes on so-called rogue states harm innocent women and children without accomplishing the goal of toppling the regimes in those countries.

Sanctions, Buchanan said, “have become a way for the United States to vent its anger on the cheap. . . . They should be imposed only on regimes that engage in acts of war against the United States.”

Buchanan, who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, repeatedly advocated hawkish and combative foreign policies during the Cold War. In recent years, as he twice sought the Republican presidential nomination, he continued to defend the use of U.S. sanctions.

Now, as he pursues the Reform Party nomination, his new stance against economic sanctions represents his latest effort to appeal to independent, nontraditional voters.

“That a regime is autocratic, dictatorial or odious to us is not enough,” he said in his speech. “No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world.”

Buchanan’s new position also puts him in an unlikely alliance with corporate America on the issue of sanctions. Leading business groups have been urging the Clinton administration and Congress to stop relying on sanctions as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Buchanan insisted that his opposition to sanctions was not based upon the need to export American goods. He added, however, that “the economic arguments of U.S. businessmen . . . are persuasive.”

Some Republican critics said they thought Buchanan’s speech, while surprising, was consistent with the underlying philosophy of isolationism to which he has gravitated in recent years.

“[Buchanan] really means for the U.S. to stop exercising influence in the world, period,” said GOP activist Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is a logical conclusion of his isolationism.”

Sitting in the front row at Buchanan’s speech was Denis Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq who resigned in protest over the effect of sanctions and returned to Ireland last year.

Buchanan, who in 1991 opposed the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, cited Halliday’s estimates that 5,000 Iraqis die each month from the effect of U.N. sanctions on Iraq’s water supply, sanitation, diet and medical care.

As for Cuba, Buchanan maintained that the U.S. embargo on trade, now nearly four decades old, “continues to give Fidel Castro a scapegoat for his own socialist failures.”

Those words represented a striking turnabout from Buchanan’s position as a Republican candidate in 1996. “A trade embargo should be maintained [against Cuba] until Fidel Castro is out of power,” Buchanan said then.

Instead of sanctions, Buchanan in his speech Thursday advocated other ways to punish rogue regimes.

“We can seize the bank accounts and overseas assets of their rulers, deny visas to their diplomats and military, cut off [international lending], deny Export-Import Bank credits, put tariffs on the principal exports of hostile governments to deny them the hard currency to strengthen the state,” he explained.

He listed Myanmar, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan as other governments against which U.S. sanctions have been unwisely imposed.

Responding to Buchanan, David Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the Clinton administration has already made clear that food and medicine should not be included in sanctions in Iraq, Cuba or elsewhere. Nevertheless, he said, “on balance, the president believes that sanctions, when appropriately applied, are an effective tool to advance our national interest.”

Asked how he would deal with China, Buchanan said he would use trade as leverage to advance U.S. interests. He suggested telling Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji that continuation of China’s trade with the U.S. would be linked to Chinese promises of security for Taiwan, a reduction in its missiles and protection for Chinese Christians.

Meanwhile, Buchanan got a boost when the Federal Election Commission authorized $2.5 million in federal matching funds for his presidential campaign despite his recent switch from the Republican to the Reform Party. Buchanan had qualified for the money by raising funds as a Republican.

The ruling “means I won’t lie awake at night” worrying about money, Buchanan told reporters.