Last November, Nicholas Mulder sparked a debate about the place of sanctions in the toolbox for progressive foreign policy, writing in The Nation that progressives must “move beyond the dominant consensus on how to deal with foreign policy problems as framed by the establishment, in which there are only two flavors: the mild option of sanctions and the radical option of war, neither of which works particularly well.” The piece drew responses, notably from Neil Bhatiya on this blog and from Daniel Drezner in the Washington Post, both of whom made the case for sanctions as a flavor of policy worth preserving. The conversation continues here, with Mulder taking on the question of how we think about success in sanctions policy.
By Nicholas Mulder
If progressivism aims to create a better world, it should start by abandoning the tools of collective punishment. As I argued in The Nation, a whole suite of tools exist for directly going after specific individuals and companies who break or evade domestic and international laws. It is in this domain–by imposing sanctions on tax evaders, for example–that progressive foreign policy can regain some of the legitimacy that has been weakened by decades of excessive US interventionism and the Trump Administration’s antics.
Earlier this month Neil Bhatiya made a counter-case for economic sanctions as a tool of progressive foreign policy, arguing that “any measure that widens the distance between peace and war should be in the foreign policy toolbox.” If sanctions can effectively accomplish the same goals as military force, then they could be seen as a tool that forestalls war. Bhatiya and Drezner both argue that sanctions, if properly applied, can do just that: deter some state actions and compel others. Recent sanctions successes, they claim, justify keeping broad-based sanctions in the progressive foreign policy toolbox. The historical record, however, is not nearly that clear.
There are several reasons why the dominant discourse about sanctions is in need of serious revision. First, sanctions advocates usually fail to make a plausible case that war is really the only alternative to sanctions. Their reasoning often depends on mere assertion or unsupported counterfactuals. Second, many claims of policy successes through sanctions are empirically uncompelling–the process by which sanctions purportedly cause policy changes is murky at best. We need history and qualitative regional and area expertise, as well as a truly international viewpoint, to assess the record of sanctions. Last, given the moral risk of collateral damage that punitive economic measures entail, a high burden of proof that sanctions will achieve their stated aims is the least we can demand from policymakers.
Counterfactuals: What, exactly, did Iran sanctions deter?
If the Iraq sanctions from 1990 to 2003 failed because they were followed by war, then the threshold for the success of the Iran sanctions of the 2010s is presumably that they avoided war. Bhatiya claims that “war with Iran would have made the catastrophe of Iraq look humdrum by comparison.” He implies that in the absence of sanctions, a war between Iran and one of its neighbors or the United States was likely. What is the evidence for this? It is difficult to find any based on what we know or could observe about Iranian behavior. When the Obama Administration began its economic pressure campaign against Iran in 2009-2010, it narrowly wanted to counter Iran’s nuclear program. Economic pressure was a means to achieve an objective that the US had set for itself—preventing any Iranian nuclear capacity—rather than a way to stave off a likely hot war.
There is concrete evidence that Iran was prepared to talk even before sanctions were ramped up. Iran twice offered to seriously cooperate with the United States, first in the early 1990s when it invited US hydrocarbon firms back into the country; and then in 2003, when it offered ending support for Hezbollah and Hamas and helping Washington stabilize Iraq. Both times no sanctions were needed to produce an open door to negotiations and cooperation, and both times the United States rejected the offers.