If the latest round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and Western powers has proved anything, it's that the raft of sanctions deployed against the Islamic Republic, supposedly the toughest in history, has failed to change the regime's calculus. Two days of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, yielded no deal to end enrichment and no deal to close Fordow, Iran's secretive underground facility near Qom -- just a pledge from both sides to pick up where they left off again in April. Far from caving to Western demands, moreover, Iran's chief negotiator boasted that the Barack Obama administration, in dropping its insistence that Fordow be shuttered, had moved "closer to the Iranian position." Yet on Feb. 27, the day after the talks concluded, U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation that would further restrict commercial dealings with Iran and punish foreign companies that violate U.S. sanctions.
More...
Almaty was hardly Exhibit A for the efficacy of sanctions, but then again nobody expected it to be; Iran has repeatedly voiced its unwillingness to negotiate under pressure, and on Feb. 24, lawmakers in Tehran even signed a petition urging the negotiators to take a hard line at the talks. "The West must learn that Iran's nuclear train, which moves on the rails of peaceful goals, will never stop," the petition read, according to a state-run news agency. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei put it more bluntly in a statement on his website earlier this month: "You are pointing a gun at Iran saying you want to talk. The Iranian nation will not be frightened by the threats."
Nonetheless, a central feature of the Obama administration's Iran strategy has involved turning the screws on Tehran. The question is: why? Unless they are deployed in conjunction with other coercive methods (read: war), economic sanctions have a pretty abysmal track record of altering states' behavior. Examples of failed sanctions regimes abound: The League of Nations couldn't halt Benito Mussolini's conquest of modern-day Ethiopia in the mid-1930s; a crushing financial and trade embargo didn't persuade Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait in 1990; and North Korea just conducted its third nuclear test in violation of U.N. sanctions. And oh, how's that half-century old embargo of the Castro regime working out?
The truth is that sanctions rarely, if ever, work. In the only quantitative study that's been carried out on sanctions' effectiveness, economists at the Washington-based Peterson Institute found that 75 of the 115 sanctions episodes between 1914 and 1990 failed to achieve their desired effect -- meaning that they succeed only 33 percent of the time. That's a pretty good batting average for a baseball player, but the estimate, it turns out, was probably overly generous. According to political scientist Robert Pape, many of these supposed successes were actually resolved directly or indirectly by force; others exhibit no evidence of concessions by target states. In the end, Pape argues, only five of the 115 cases considered by the Peterson Institute economists can be considered unqualified successes. Economic sanctions, in other words, "have little independent usefulness for pursuit of noneconomic goals."
Even the supposed success stories are problematic on closer inspection, according to Pape. The end of white rule in Rhodesia, often attributed to the success of a U.N. sanctions regime, for example, is actually better explained by increasingly destructive guerrilla warfare. Indeed, the sanctions regime went into effect a full 10 years before the Rhodesian government reached a political settlement with African nationalist parties in 1979. Likewise, multilateral sanctions against South Africa may have actually slowed the pace of reform, according to former President F.W. de Klerk, who presided over the end of the apartheid system. It also "hurt the black population much more than the white population," he said in a 2012 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It didn't help those who it was intended to help; it actually harmed them more than it harmed the intended victims of the sanctions."
The only real examples of successful sanctions regimes, according to Pape, involved minor diplomatic quibbles over political prisoners and, in one case, the relocation of an embassy in Israel. The singular exception is South Korea's decision to forgo purchasing a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant from France in 1976, a move that is difficult to explain without taking into account U.S. and Canadian sanctions.
SUBJECTS:
