Christopher R. Hill writes about the effectiveness of sanctions and also their real consequences. He asks whether US policy in the Mid-east has not been weakened by sanctions.
Sanctions regimes have attracted almost a cult following, defined by a tendency to exaggerate their success and potential. Many academic studies have shown that the success rate of sanctions is limited. Even the sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime may have impeded the transition to majority rule. Because divestment by multinational companies often resulted in fire sales of industrial facilities to regime allies, sanctions may have done more to empower and enrich reactionary elements than to catalyze social change. Many US officials believe that the election of a new Iranian government with a mandate to get out from under Western sanctions is evidence that the sanctions are working. (Never mind that a lack of such evidence would have elicited calls for more sanctions.)
In fact, the dynamics of sanctions are more nuanced. As the Balkan wars of the 1990s showed, sanctions often result in a shift from legal to illegal trade. In the Balkans, this empowered mafia elements, and sometimes fused them to political parties and institutions. In Iran, a similar pattern has emerged: Western sanctions have cast the Revolutionary Guard, with all of its seedy economic activities, in the role of organized crime.
The Iranians who most want an end to the sanctions tend to be those who suffer from them, not those enriched by them. But those who suffer from sanctions suffer not just from economic hardship; the isolation that sanctions impose favors the country’s least enlightened elements. The Revolutionary Guard is not worried about whether it is in the international community’s good graces.
Iran has also fueled sectarianism in the region. By supporting Shia forces beyond its borders – particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite regime, as well as some of the worst of the Shia militias in Iraq – Iran has aroused the Arab world against it and empowered Sunni Arab extremists. There is no question that the Iranians have both Sunni and American blood on their hands. Just as recklessly, Iran has competed with the Sunni Arab states in the anti-Israel sweepstakes.
The US has recognized the centrality of these issues and has sought to manage them through other sets of negotiations. But a strategy of compartmentalization requires focus and fortitude on the part of policymakers. Their task will not be easy. Perhaps Obama’s successful swing through East Asia will be a source of inspiration.
