If anyone still believed that the United States’ sanctions campaign against Iran was still working, a drone attack on an Israeli-linked merchant ship in the Indian Ocean in late July should refute that assumption. Iranian officials are charged with carrying out the attack.
A sanction-loving American foreign policy repeats the same pattern over and over again, imposing sanctions on a country we believe is wasteful and in return impoverishing its people. Still, we expect the same people to overthrow their obnoxious regime and thank us for our actions. Then we are surprised when it doesn’t happen. As the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, I had a place on the ring for this type of behavior.
Iran is the youngest in this long, dreary line. The “maximum pressure” sanctions have not resulted in regime change or any apparent reluctance on the part of Iran to pursue any of its other crimes, including its missile program or its interventions in the region. The sanctions have given the regime a handy scapegoat for its economic failures.
Before the ayatollahs took power in 1979, and long after, Iranians (especially younger ones) were perhaps the most pro-American people in the greater Middle East. Not anymore: Now even young Iranians who are not friends of their country’s theocratic regime are blaming US sanctions for at least part of the country’s economic plight.
Cuba provides another example that has been going on for decades. Who knows how the current unrest will play out, but for more than half a century, the US sanctions were the best the Castro regime had on it. As in Iran, they could – and have been – blamed for everything bad that happened in the country.
More than once in my career a member of the Cuban community in exile in Miami has taken me aside and said one version of it: “Our Cuban policy has failed. Instead, we should have done what we did to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, seducing them with contacts and trade. “The conversation invariably ended with:” Please don’t tell anyone in Miami that I said that. “
If the US has succeeded in promoting regime or behavioral change by abusive states, those successes have been based on policies that are far different from sanctions. One example is the seduction of Eastern Europe mentioned earlier. The focus of this initiative was the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was established in 1973. What the Soviet Union accepted in the hope of maintaining its control over Eastern Europe, Western Europe used as a means of easing tensions in the region, increasing economic exchanges and improving the humanitarian conditions of the communist countries.
It took a generation for the seduction of regime change in Eastern Europe to end in the 1990s, but in retrospect it hardly seems to be doubted that a policy of increasing contact played an important role.
For example, West Germany tried to ensure that East Germans had access to West German television, but two regions in East Germany remained inaccessible. In the mid-1980s, the GDR solved the access problem by laying a cable from the Federal Republic to the Dresden area in the east “with the wish that the East Germans, if they could watch West German television at home, would feel no need to emigrate”. “Wrote the historian Tony Judt.
In the long, gray history of efforts to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, unique success – the agreed framework of 1994 that froze the country’s nuclear effort – depended on carrots or positive incentives, not sticks in the form of sanctions. The United States has agreed to supply oil and build “light water” power reactors that run on uranium and are water-cooled in exchange for North Korea to freeze and later dismantle reactors that are better suited to producing weapons-grade fuel including one in operation and others under construction.
The implementation of the framework has been changeable almost from the start, not least because party politics made it difficult for the US to keep its promises, but the episode produced what did nothing before or after – a slowdown in North Korea’s nuclear program . It lasted from 1994 to around 2002.
Before we forego sanctions, which often reflect our own tantrums, we should consider whether they would lead to a different outcome this time – in Iran, Cuba, North Korea or elsewhere. Nevertheless, sanctions can work.
Her most notable achievement could be the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. They worked because the international sanctions and boycotts were both political and economic, and they targeted what was dear to white South Africans, not just money, but participation in international sports. On the other hand, when the United States attacks individual Russians, Chinese or Iranians, it is almost always a symbolic gesture, like indicting foreigners who are never extradited. Icons are important, but concrete results are better.
Albert Einstein is often credited with observing that “madness consists in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. He could have talked about US sanctions policy. As the US imposes new sanctions on Cuba, we need to go beyond what we want them to do and ask: What do we expect from them?
Gregory F. Treverton, Chairman of the US National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, is Professor of International Relations at USC.
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