How Smart are Smart Sanctions?

Abstract

For over a decade, the comprehensive trade sanctions against Iraq have hung like amillstone around the practice of economic statecraft. Scholars and policymakersalike recognize that the sanctions have had a devastating humanitarian impact onthe Iraqi population. Yet the sanctions have failed to coerce the Iraqi regime intofull compliance with the requisite UN Security Council resolutions. At the sametime, the United Nations has relied heavily on this tool of statecraft over the pastdecade, imposing sanctions fourteen times since 1990. In his 2002 Nobel lecture,Jimmy Carter said that nations must ‘‘strive to correct the injustice of economicsanctions that seek to penalize abusive leaders but all too often inflict punishmenton those who are already suffering from the abuse.’’ This presents a challenge: isthere any way to accommodate the rising demand for multilateral sanctions whileminimizing the humanitarian costs such policies create?Enter David Cortright and George Lopez. Under the auspices of the Universityof Notre Dame’s Fourth Freedom Forum, Cortright and Lopez are responsible fora healthy fraction of the recent scholarly work on economic sanctions (Cortrightand Lopez 1995, 2000, 2002). Their latest effort, Smart Sanctions: Targeting EconomicStatecraft, examines the prospect of smart sanctions: measures that are tailored tomaximize the target regime’s costs of noncompliance while minimizing the targetpopulation’s suffering. In its eleven chapters, this edited volume reviews the varioustypes of smart sanctions and their implementation by the United Nations, theUnited States, and the European Union. It will likely serve as the definitiveresource on the subject for some time.The logic behind smart sanctions is that for economic coercion to work properly,it is necessary to understand the domestic political economy of the targeted state.Most of the sanctions literature argues that as the costs imposed on the targeteconomy increase, so will the likelihood of success. However, some scholars(Kaempfer and Lowenberg 1992; Kirshner 1997) argue that this formulation is toosimplistic. What matters is not the target’s gross economic damage, but whether thetarget government and its key domestic constituencies feel significant economicpain from noncompliance. Smart sanctions are designed to raise the target regime’scosts of noncompliance while avoiding the general suffering that comprehensivesanctions often create. Like precision-guided munitions, smart sanctions targetresponsible parties while minimizing collateral damage. Examples include assetfreezes, travel bans, and arms embargoesFmeasures that stand in stark contrast tothe comprehensive trade ban against Iraq.Are smart sanctions more efficient? At first glance, the answer seems to be ‘‘no.’’Cortright and Lopez’s introductory chapter reviews the fourteen UN sanctionsepisodes since 1990. They note ‘‘even with this small number of cases, the obviousconclusion is that comprehensive sanctions are more effective than targetedor selective measures. Where economic and social impact have been greatest,