Perceptions of the United States sanctions

Perceptions of the United States sanctions refers to the United States numerous unilateral sanctions imposed worldwide on different countries and the way the sanctions are perceived in every case. Two-thirds of the 104 sanctions imposed worldwide from 1945 to 1990, were unilateral US action without the participation of other countries. Since 1990 the sanctions has been increased significantly and since 1998 the United States has imposed economic sanctions on more than 20 countries. According to Joy Gordon, while it is wrong to think of the Security Council as merely an instrument of US hegemony, the United States has led many of the Security Council's recent efforts to impose sanctions. US has disproportionate influence, because of its veto power, and because of its global economic power. And its influence has been increased in recent years, as Russia's willingness to exercise its veto has diminished due to its dependence on the West.

sanctions have failed to change the behavior of sanctioned countries; but they have barred American companies from economic opportunities, and harmed the poorest people in the countries under sanctions. Secondary sanctions that prohibit any trading in US dollars, often separate the United States and Europe because they reflect US interference in the affairs and interests of the European Union. Since Trump became the president of the United States, sanctions have been seen not only as an expression of Washington's preferences and whims, but also as a tool for US economic warfare that has angered historical allies such as the European Union.

Effectiveness

According to Rawi Abdelal, "sanctions are useful when diplomacy is not sufficient but force is too costly. "Sanctions have become the dominant tool of statecraft of the United States and other Western countries in the post-Cold War era. This increase in the use of economic leverage as a US foreign policy tool has sparked a debate about its usefulness and effectiveness.

According to Daniel T. Griswold, the use of trade as a foreign policy weapon has harmed US interests in the world without greatly enhancing national security. sanctions have failed to change the behavior of sanctioned countries; but they have barred American companies from economic opportunities, and harmed the poorest people in the countries under sanctions. According to the president's Export Council, since 1993, the United States has imposed more than 40 economic sanctions on three-dozen countries. The sanctions are estimated to cost US exporters $ 15 billion to $ 19 billion a year in yearly sales abroad, and have damaged their reliability. In addition to economic damage, trade sanctions have been a foreign policy failure, according to a study by the Institute for International Economics. This study showed that sanctions have achieved their goals in less than 20% of cases. For example, the "Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act of 1994" could not stop Pakistan and India from testing nuclear weapons.

Proponents of the sanctions cite South Africa as a successful example, however, according to Griswold, sanctions were not the only reason for the collapse of apartheid. The collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the reform climate. In addition, sanctions against South Africa was different in two key aspects from most American sanctions today. First, South African sanctions have been multilateral, while the vast majority of US sanctions since 1993 have been unilateral. Second, the apartheid state in South Africa was responsive to a limited but still significant number of voters of 5 million white people, which made the state more permeable to external pressures.

Isolation of the United States

Although the United States and Europe largely agree on the "substance " of sanctions, they disagree on their implementation. The main issue is secondary US sanctions, also known as extraterritorial sanctions. Secondary US sanctions prohibit any trading in US dollars and prevent trade with a country, individuals or organizations under the US sanctions regime. Primary sanctions restrict US companies, institutions, and citizens from doing business with the country or entities under sanctions. Secondary sanctions often separate the United States and Europe because they reflect US interference in the affairs and interests of the European Union. The more secondary sanctions are applied, the more they are seen in the EU as a violation of national and EU sovereignty - as an unacceptable interference in the EU's independent decision-making. The secondary sanctions imposed on Iran and Russia are at the core of these tensions. These secondary sanctions have become the primary tool for signaling and even implementing secession from US and European political goals.

Policymakers often have high expectations of what sanctions can do. This is especially true in the United States today. According to him, there is at most one weak correlation between economic deprivation and political inclination to change. US sanctions on the US economy cost almost nothing, however, overuse of them can be costly in the long run. The biggest threat is the gradual isolation of the United States and the continuing decline of American influence in the context of an emerging multipolar world with differing financial and economic powers.

Double standards

Libya

Muammar Gaddafi had taken significant steps to normalize relations with the West after years of diplomatic isolation due to his support for anti-colonial armed movements such as the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as severe sanctions over his perceived role in the Pan Am flight 103 terrorist bombing. He had formally abandoned his nuclear program, which was hardly in its infancy. He also handed over Libya's stockpile of chemical weapons, which is at the heart of its strategy of deterrence against foreign aggression. But Gaddafi, despite all his advantages, remained committed to his ambitions to lead in an independent way. Political anthropologist Maximilian Forte, in his thorough study of the Libyan catastrophe, Slouching Towards Sirte, showed that Gaddafi could never be obedient enough to satisfy Washington. Gaddafi, for example, angered the administration of George W. Bush when he rejected a deal with Bechtel, an oil service company that had made many US government officials, especially Vice President Cheney, rich. Gaddafi also browbeated the CEO of Konoko ConocoPhillips and asked him to pressure Washington to stop its exploitative actions against Libya. Most importantly, Gaddafi embraced pan-African foreign policy, which put him in direct conflict with AFRICOM, the pro-Western coalition that was a key player in US financial and military interests on the African continent.

Iraq

The sanctions regime imposed by the United States and Britain pushed Iraq to a level of bare survival. As an example, UNICEF's "2003 Report on the State of the World's Children" states that Iraq's decline is the most severe in the last decade. Of the 193 countries surveyed, child mortality rates are the "the best single indicator of child welfare," rising from 50 to 133 per 1,000 live births. According to Chomsky, as a result of sanctions that had killed hundreds of thousands of people, Iraq had the weakest economy and the weakest military force in the region.

As Halliday, von Sponeck, and others had pointed out for years, the sanctions devastated the people while strengthening Saddam Hussein and his group, as well as increasing the Iraqi people's dependence on the oppressor for their survival. Von Sponeck, who resigned in 2000, reported that the United States and Britain "systematically tried to prevent [him and Halliday] from briefing the Security Council...because they didn't want to hear what we had to say" about the savagery of the sanctions.

Noam Chomsky writes:

After Hussein's atrocities against the Kurds, against Iran, against Iraqis—which we now denounce—the United States continued to support Saddam Hussein. After the 1991 Gulf War, when a Shiite rebellion broke out, Bush I allowed Saddam Hussein to crush it. So when Thomas Friedman of the New York Times now writes columns about how, gosh, he discovered these mass graves in Iraq and feels terrible, he should acknowledge that he knew all about the graves at the time and that the U.S. government was complicit.15 And then came more than ten years of sanctions, which killed more people than Saddam Hussein ever did, and devastated the society.16 And then came the invasion, which has led to the deaths of maybe a hundred thousand people."

Defenders of the sanctions regime argued that the appalling situation was Saddam's fault, because of his refusal to comply fully with UN resolutions and his construction of palaces and monuments to himself, and so on (funded by money diverted from smuggling and other illegal operations, according to the testimony of UN humanitarian coordinators and the World Food Program). The argument, then, according to Chomsky, was that we had to punish Saddam for his crimes by crushing his victims and strengthening their torturer. By similar logic, Chomsky continues, if a criminal hijacks a school bus, we should blow it up and murder the passengers, but rescue and reward the hijacker, justifying the actions on grounds that it was his fault. According to Chomsky, the uprising would have left the country in the hands of Iraqis who might have been independent of Washington. The sanctions of the following years, then, undercut the possibility of a popular uprising that had overthrown other monsters who were also heavily supported by the current governments. The United States, Chomsky writes, sought to instigate the coup by groups it controlled, but a popular rebellion would not have left the US in charge. At the Azores Summit in March 2003, Bush reiterated his position that the United States would attack even if Saddam and his allies left the country. While the sanctions' death toll remains hotly disputed, one 1995 study by the medical journal Lancet and sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization found that 576,000 children under the age of five had died. Grilled by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes,the secretary of state Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the containment policy was “worth it”—even if it triggered half a million infant deaths.

U.S. President Donald Trump asserted that sanctions will be imposed against Iraq if the United States' troops were forced to exit Iraq.

Protecting Israel

Bill Clinton once suggested that Syria be removed from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (U.S. list) if it agreed to the US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on retaking the land that Israel had occupied in 1967, it remained on the list of sponsors of terrorism despite United States' acknowledgment that Syria had not been involved in supporting terrorism for many years and has been instrumental in providing intelligence to the United States about al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. Chomsky writes:

As a reward for the Syria's cooperation in the 'war on the terror,' last December congress passed legislation calling for even stricter sanction against Syria, nearly unanimously (the Syria Accountability Act). The legislation was recently implemented by the president, thus depriving the US of a major source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israel demands.

Chomsky continues to write that congress law and news and commentary ignores the fact that United Nations Security Council Resolution 520, passed in 1982, was explicitly against Israel, not Syria, as well as the fact that Israel has been violated these and other Security Council resolutions on Lebanon for 22 years; still there was no call for any sanctions against Israel or even a call for a reduction in unconditional military and economic aid to Israel.

Sanctions as wars against oppositions

Cuba

The US economic war against Cuba has been strongly condemned in almost all relevant international forums, even outlawed by the Judiciary Commission of the Organization of American States, which usually complies. The European Union (EU) has called on the World Trade Organization to condemn the sanctions. The Clinton administration's response was that "Europe is challenging 'three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,' and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana."

The continuation of US sanctions against Cuba shows the break of the sanctions. When the US imposed its the first comprehensive commercial embargo on the country in 1961, Cuba did most of its commerce with the U.S. Ever since, the sanctions have not had any effect on Fidel Castro's government, which used sanctions to justify the failure of policies and to attract international compassion. Although the sanctions formerly had international backing, nowadays no other country supports it. 40 years after it was imposed, Griswold comments, the sanctions has only damaged United States firms and the Cuban people, while not much change in Castro's government seems likely. The failure of US policy toward Cuba aroused Pope John Paul II to state that embargoes "are always deplorable because they harm the needy."

Iran

In May 2016, Washington announced its withdrawal from Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and launched a maximum pressure campaign against Iran, which resulted in public reproach from European political and business elites as well as public outcry. Excessive use of US financial sanctions has not only worried companies, but also many EU member states and institutions to take measures to limit the exposure of their economies to the US-based clearing system, which creates such extreme vulnerability for all countries in the world other than the United States. EU leaders are increasingly recognizing that EU security depends on political stability in the Middle East, and argue that US policies directly undermine this agenda by using destabilizing tactics in the region - particularly Washington's strategy of maximum pressure on Iran. The refugee crisis has already caused deep divisions in the European Union. An unstable Iran, most likely built by a US militant, runs counter to European interests. The Trump administration easily reintroduced sanctions against Iran with an executive order against the wishes of many politicians. Given the fact that the consequences of these divisions could threaten European trade and security in the long run, Europeans are not prepared to bear the consequences of US internal strife.

Syria

The Syrian Centre for Policy and Research found that sanctions had “affected the importation of lifesaving medicines used in the treatment of hepatitis, cancer, and [a] variety of inoculations not produced in Syria.” sanctions also caused the Syrian manufacturing sector to shrink by a staggering 70 percent, while its mining and tourism industries have collapsed. Meanwhile, air travel had become increasingly dangerous, thanks to US restrictions on the import of civilian aircraft parts. In short, the United States and the European Union had waged a full-scale economic war against Syria and its civilians, all because their government refused to back down in the face of an armed insurgency.

Economic engagement as an alternative to sanctions

Griswold names China as a good example of how economic interaction can help a country change slowly but steadily for the better. Over the past two decades, China has become the fourth largest US trading partner and the second largest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world after the United States. China's domestic market reform and increasing openness have led to rapid growth, leading to higher living standards and greater independence for citizens. The share of government-controlled industry has fallen from almost 100 percent two decades ago to less than 50 percent today. Private ownership of homes and businesses is rising dramatically. Continued economic engagement has also helped open the door to China for a growing number of organizations whose mission is to promote religious and political freedom. More than a decade after the outrage in Tiananmen Square, the communist government has begun releasing political prisoners and allowing little internal criticism. As in Taiwan and South Korea, Chinese economic liberalization lays the foundation for a stronger civil society independent of government control.

In the case of Iraq, observers like Hans von Sponeck conclude that a "constructive solution" to regime change in Iraq "would be to lift the economic sanctions that have impoverished society, decimated the Iraqi middle class and eliminated any possibility for the emergence of alternative leadership," while "twelve years of sanctions have only strengthened the current regime". In addition, sanctions forced the people to depend on the ruling dictatorship for their survival and further reduced the likelihood of a constructive solution. Denis Halliday says:"We have saved [the regime] and missed opportunities for change,[...] if the Iraqis had their economy, had their lives back, and had their way of life restored, they would take care of the form of governance that they want, that they believe is suitable to their country."

See also

• United States sanctions
• United States and state terrorism
• Criticism of United States foreign policy

References

• Abdelal, Rawi; Bros, Aurélie (2020). "The End of Transatlanticism?: How Sanctions Are Dividing the West". Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development. Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development. 16: 114–135.
• Lenway, Stefanie Ann (1988). "Between war and Commerce: economic sanctions as a tool of statecraft". 42. Cambridge University Press: 397–426. doi:10.1017/ S0020818300032860 .
• Blumenthal, Max (2019). The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump. Search this book on
• Chomsky, Noam (2003). Hegemony or survival : America's quest for global dominance (1st ed.). New York. ISBN 0-8050-7400-7. Search this book on
• Chomsky, Noam; Barsamian, David (2005). Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World. Penguin Group. ISBN 978-0805079678. Search this book on

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