Economic Sanctions And U S Policy Interests

What cannot be disputed is that economic sanctions are increasingly at the center of American foreign policy: to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promote human rights, discourage aggression, protect the environment, and thwart drug trafficking.

Powerful countries like the United States regularly employ economic sanctions as a tool for promoting their foreign policy interests. Yet this foreign policy tool has an uninspiring track record of success, with economic sanctions achieving their goals less than a third of the time they are imposed. The costs of these failed sanctions policies can be significant for the states that impose them, their targets, and the other countries they affect. Explaining economic sanctions' high failure rate therefore constitutes a vital endeavor for academics and policy-makers alike. Busted Sanctions seeks to provide this explanation, and reveals that the primary cause of this failure is third-party spoilers, or sanctions busters, who undercut sanctioning efforts by providing their targets with extensive foreign aid or sanctions-busting trade. In quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing over 60 years of U.S. economic sanctions, Bryan Early reveals that both types of third-party sanctions busters have played a major role in undermining U.S. economic sanctions. Surprisingly, his analysis also reveals that the United States' closest allies are often its sanctions' worst enemies. The book offers the first comprehensive explanation for why different types of sanctions busting occur and reveals the devastating effects it has on economic sanctions' chances of success.

On a broad front, from high-tech export controls to unilateral sanctions, the U.S. government is curbing the freedom of Americans to trade, invest, and communicate with the rest of the world-all in the name of questionable foreign policy goals. In this book, a number of distinguished experts examine the cost these controls impose on individual liberty and economin opportunity.

Dr. Zachary Selden provides a detailed examination of how sanctions can and cannot be used effectively to further U.S. foreign interests. In the post-Cold War era, sanctions are becoming a frequently used tool of foreign policy, but Selden offers an important cautionary note. Sanctions are often counterproductive, and they create interest groups within the target country who have a vested interest in seeing that sanctions and the policies that brought them to bear are maintained. While sanctions aimed at capital flows can be highly effective, those aimed at trade often become the functional equivalent of a protective tariff, stimulating Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and creating groups of producers or suppliers who take steps in the political arena to ensure that their economic windfall is maintained. After demonstrating the ISI effects in a large sample of cases, Selden goes on to demonstrate how sanctions fueled the rise of a powerful criminal elite in Yugoslavia who sponsored extreme nationalist political figures and how sanctions were twisted to Saddam Hussein's personal benefit in Iraq. More than simply of academic interest, this study serves as a guide for the more effective use of sanctions. It will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with American foreign and military policy.

Sanctions as War is the first critical analysis of economic sanctions from a global perspective. Featuring case studies from 11 sanctioned countries and theoretical essays, it will be of immediate interest to those interested in understanding how sanctions became the common sense of American foreign policy.