War by other means: criteria for the use of economic sanctions.

The end of the cold war has presented American foreign policy with a paradoxical situation: As the remaining superpower, the United States can consider military intervention without great risk, yet in the absence of a clear threat to the nation most Americans are increasingly unwilling to support military intervention. Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, each in its own way, illustrates the general uneasiness most U.S. citizens feel about sending troops abroad. Add to this sense of caution the desire of many people to support alternatives to armed conflict, among which is economic sanctions.

Economic sanctions are essentially efforts to influence a country's behavior by imposing economic penalties. They can take a variety of forms: imposing embargoes, barring financial transactions, freezing economic assets held abroad, and curtailing trade and foreign aid. Sanctions of one or other of these types have been imposed over the last several years on Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Libya, Haiti, and Cambodia, with mixed results, politically and morally. Compared to just-war criteria, however, economic sanctions have received little attention from moral analysts.

Pope John Paul II, for example, raised questions about the use of economic sanctions in an annual address to the diplomatic corps (Origins, January 19, 1995). He said that the embargo "is an instrument which needs to be used with great discernment, and it must be subjected to strict legal and ethical criteria." From the Vatican's perspective, sanctions often punish innocent people and therefore ought to be used sparingly and only as a temporary measure. The pope's remarks remind us that sanctions are subject to moral criteria, and that discernment is needed to apply them appropriately.

As a practical instrument for the conduct of international relations, sanctions have to be used selectively. They can be overused or ineffectively put forward as a way to resolve crises that are beyond the scope of what economic pressures can achieve. Thus, a 1992 General Accounting Office study done for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examining the goals, process, and impact of economic sanctions found that, while sanctions can serve a variety of purposes, too little thought is given to specific goals and the means of accomplishing them ("Economic Sanctions: Effectiveness as Tools for Foreign Policy," GAO Document Distribution Center, NSIAD-92-106).

The GAO findings indicate that some goals are achievable (reaffirming international norms by punishment of violators or deterring potential violations by the threat of subsequent penalties), while others are not (bending the target nation's policies to suit the sanctioner's wishes). For example, in response to domestic pressures, leaders of the nation(s) imposing sanctions may overstate the goals of the sanctions in order to create an image that they are taking decisive action. But these inflated expectations can lead to the conclusion that sanctions in general are ineffective. When the embattled Carter administration imposed economic sanctions against the Soviet Union following the invasion of Afghanistan, it claimed that the sanctions would induce Soviet withdrawal. President Jimmy Carter wanted to appear bold in his public response, but no one in the administration seriously believed sanctions could end Soviet military action. Furthermore, unless the goals of the sanctions are clear, it may be difficult for the targeted nation to know what it must do to modify or remove them, or for the sanctioning nation to ascertain that the conditions have been met.

Sanctions take time. Their effects generally have to "trickle up." The poor and the powerless, rather than leaders and decision makers, usually feel the impact first. Thus a basic moral question is whether the sanctions will impose greater hardship than the conditions they seek to remedy. The more ruthless and authoritarian the rulers in the targeted country, the more time will be needed for sanctions to have an impact on the elite. As in South Africa and Haiti, sanctions work better if there is a substantial domestic opposition to the government and if there are powerful classes or groups involved in international business who will feel the impact quickly.

Sanctions, therefore, should be calibrated. Imposing harsh and comprehensive sanctions from the outset can be a mistake since part of the force of sanctions is the threat of more to come; anticipated rather than actual damage to an economy can mobilize domestic critics to pressure a government to meet the sanction conditions.

Multilateral sanctions generally have more legitimacy and effectiveness than those unilaterally imposed. Consider the lack of influence of U.S. economic policies toward Cuba over three decades. For sanctions to be effective it is particularly critical that neighboring nation-states support them and that countries that share a common culture with the targeted nation join in the embargo; the sense of political isolation is then more sharply felt by the targeted nation, which increases the effectiveness of the economic pressure.

Sanctions can prove to be counterproductive. First, a nation whose citizenry sees itself as culturally threatened may interpret sanctions as further evidence of malicious international forces at work. When the sanctions fall harshly on the general populace, a "victim" culture can dig in to resist the sanctions rather than put pressure on the political leaders for change. Second, when a culture gives great weight to "saving face," the populace can become firmly united in opposition to the sanctioner rather than its own government. In both these situations, skillful political leaders can exploit the burdens imposed by sanctions to rally a people, particularly if there is a prior history of injustice or bad relations between the target nation and the imposing nation. Sanctions are then seen as one more instance of bullying behavior. Certainly this is part of the dynamic at work in Iraq.

Finally, the side-effects of sanctions can be seriously detrimental to the long-term economy of the targeted nation, leading to the destruction of resources, the flight of capital, the erosion of working families, the loss of small businesses, and the rise of a black market and corruption. The targeting nation or group of nations has an obligation to consider such consequences before applying sanctions. Particularly if the sanctions are imposed for human-rights violations, damage to the economic life and structures of a targeted nation must be considered carefully, for they could prove more harmful in the long run than the conditions that precipitated imposition of the sanctions.

The history and experience summed up in the GAO report make it clear that developing criteria for imposing sanctions is a moral and geopolitical necessity. For some, the temptation will be to see effectiveness as the only guideline, which means asking fairly narrow questions: Will sanctions be capably enforced, and will there be sufficient cooperation among the sanctioning states to ensure adequate compliance? And if there is compliance, will the impact on the target nation be sufficient to achieve the goal desired by those imposing the sanction?

Effectiveness is certainly an important criterion. But the legitimacy of sanctions cannot be reduced to this dimension alone, for sanctions implicitly express commitment to certain norms of international conduct, human rights, and nonaggression. Sanctions reinforce such norms by symbolically "punishing" those who violate them. During the 1980s, arguments for sanctions against Libya did not presume that they would end Colonel Khadaffi's support of terrorism. Rather, the sanctions were seen as an expression of revulsion. Thus, in some cases, sanctions may be imposed primarily to avoid complicity in an evil situation. This is the argument of those who want to ban trade with China because Chinese goods for export are produced under inhuman conditions. Sanctions can also have deterrent value since, even if they do not reverse the situation that occasioned them, their imposition may persuade other countries from joining in wrongful behavior or dissuade the wrongdoer from further harmful actions. These kinds of goals for sanctions are not easily measured by the single criterion of effectiveness.

The ethical component is an additional but essential factor in the debate over sanctions. This is the concern raised by the pope. Sanctions may be effective, but at what price to a population? Is a particular conflict sufficiently deadly and intractable to justify targeting an entire people? What responsibility, if any, do they share with the leaders of their government? If none, then must not sanctions be selective so as to minimize harm to innocent segments of a target nation? For policy makers as well as military planners and moralists there is an analogue here with the requirement to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants in war. As John Paul said in his address, sanctions are "an act of force," and current experience demonstrates that a policy of sanctions "inflicts grave hardships upon the people of the countries at which it is aimed." Indeed, after a March 1995 meeting with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, said that sanctions "must not be used as a means of war or to punish a population." For all of these reasons, the criterion for sanctions cannot be reduced to the one of effectiveness.

What criteria then would help assess the moral legitimacy of imposing economic sanctions? I would like to propose seven. They are rooted in the moral criteria associated with the just-war theory.

1. Because sanctions can impose hardship and great suffering on innocent people, they ought not be employed without good reason, viz., clear and systematic acts of aggression or repression on the part of the offending nation. Debate about the continued use of sanctions by the United States against Cuba centers on this issue. Though Cuba may not be an exemplar of civil and political liberty, it is not an aggressor nation, nor is its human-rights record significantly worse than that of many other nations.

2. Less harmful ways of resolving the problem ought to be employed first, and the imposition of sanctions should not be seen as the end of diplomatic negotiations but as leverage in the negotiating process. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said after the Aziz visit that sanctions "must always be accompanied by dialogue." From the Vatican's perspective, the UN-Iraq dialogue following UN sanctions on Iraq has not been adequate. There should be a serious political strategy accompanying sanctions, not just an open invitation to talk. Without real effort at a political solution, sanctions become not an instrument of diplomacy but a means of war by attrition.

3. The goal of the sanctions should be clearly stated so that the targeted government and the sanctioners both know what must be done to have the sanctions lifted. Clear goals also help to avoid the charge of ineffectiveness at home by those with unrealistic expectations of what sanctions can accomplish. Some of the Vatican's displeasure with the sanctions against Iraq has to do with policy shifts by the sanctioners. The sanctioners' statements have not always expressed their true aim, which is to depose Saddam Hussein.

4. Sanctions should be selective and aimed primarily at those responsible for the crisis. Discrimination is needed in targeting. Arms embargoes and seizure of foreign assets ought to be employed before imposing general or comprehensive trade embargoes. Sanctions that pressure a nation's elite who influence policy are to be preferred to undermining the well-being of the average citizen. To accomplish this, each situation requires discernment; what is appropriate in one case - an oil embargo - may not be so in another case. In any event, humanitarian concern requires that basic foodstuffs and medicines not be denied the general population.

5. A monitoring system to assess the effect of the sanctions should be instituted. Private groups may be better situated to provide this oversight than disputing governments. Perhaps human-rights groups, medical-emergency teams from neutral countries, the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, and similar organizations can be asked to provide on-site investigations to assess the consequences of the sanctions.

6. In those cases where sanctions are imposed for humanitarian or human-rights purposes, as in South Africa, there should be support for the sanction policy among those who are the victims of a regime's injustice. That is, within the targeted nation there ought to be substantial support for sanctions in order to determine whether the remedy is creating greater hardship than the original injustice. In extreme situations of governmental oppression and control where it is difficult to know what the general population thinks about sanctions, great care must be taken in designing them. Especially in these cases - selective, not comprehensive - sanctions, aimed at the ruling elite, are to be preferred.

7. Arguments for sanctions should be persuasive enough so that support for the policy is widespread, even if the actual imposition of the sanctions is carried out unilaterally or by only a few governments. Sanctions authorized by the United Nations or regional groups such as the Organization of American States should be the norm.

John Paul II has cautioned that, before imposing sanctions, "it is always imperative to foresee the humanitarian consequences." Although the case would be unusual, it is possible that a UN-authorized, multilateral, armed intervention might be less damaging to a country than a program of sanctions that cripples a nation's economy and causes greater or long-term hardship to innocent civilians. Consider this telling analogy of Lori Fisler Damrosch, professor of international law at Columbia University: We arrest and incarcerate criminals; we do not surround their homes and starve their families, especially if we know the family will starve first. Where an international organization like the UN can authorize an armed intervention in the manner of a domestic police force, quickly and effectively restoring order and apprehending the criminal element with little loss of life, there is an argument for choosing armed force over sanctions.

Still, despite their harmful consequences, sanctions are almost always less damaging for noncombatants and the environment than modern warfare. Sanctions do not pose the same dangers of escalation or irreversible miscalculation. They are ordinarily incremental and capable of being altered. In addition, use of armed force only as a last resort is a longstanding element of the just-war tradition.

Taken together, these considerations underscore the need to consider sanctions as an alternative to armed force. Undoubtedly this is the U.S. response to the Vatican on how best to deal with a regime like Iraq which refused to accept the conditions imposed upon it by the UN at the end of the Gulf War. With regard to Cuba, the U.S. stance seems less persuasive, since sanctions are not so much an alternative to military force as an ineffective means of punishing Castro while causing considerable hardship to the people of Cuba. In the case of Serbia, it appears that sanctions were the response of NATO nations that wanted to do something but were undecided about a more forceful policy or lacked the collective resolve to act more boldly.

The Vatican is suggesting that sanctions ought not to be thought of as easy remedies for complex international situations. From the pope's perspective, sanctions are "a means of exerting pressure on governments which have violated the international code of good conduct and of causing them to reconsider their choices." The pope does not doubt their legality or morality and feels sanctions can be a useful tool in the conduct of foreign policy in principle. What the pope points out, however, is that even sanctions require justification and should not be used as a blunt instrument in resolving international tensions. How then do we judge the use of sanctions in the case of Iraq, Cuba, or Serbia? Perhaps our answer will help better define our chance of designing and maintaining effective and morally tolerable sanctions.

Kenneth R. Himes, O.F.M., is professor of moral theology at the Washington Theological Union. During the 1996-97 academic year he holds the McKeever Chair of Moral Theology at Saint John's University, Jamaica, New York.