In recent decades, the United States has wielded the big stick of sanctions everywhere, and this time it has hit Russia with a big rebound.
The United States imposed economic sanctions for the first time in 1807, when the country was founded. At that time, The Napoleonic Wars were going on in Europe. In order to oppose Britain’s kidnapping of American sailors and force Napoleon to cease hostilities, the United States passed a bill to impose trade sanctions on Britain and France.
But given the economic power of the United States at the time, the sanctions could only be described as failures. For the next century, America was lukewarm about economic sanctions.
After World War I, the United States brought the concept of economic sanctions into the new League of Nations, but it did not join the League itself. The League of Nations’ pre-World War II economic sanctions, such as in the case of Japan’s occupation of northeastern China, were also less effective. Sanctions against Italian aggression in Africa were also anticlimactic.
After World War II, with the deepening of global economic interdependence, economic sanctions gradually showed some effects. Since 1968, the UN Security Council has set up more than 30 sanctions committees to impose sanctions on countries such as South Africa, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia and Somalia, as well as groups such as aL Qaeda and the Taliban.
The security Council’s sanctions are aimed at guaranteeing human rights, facilitating a peaceful transition and countering terrorism. They take the form of a total ban on trade with the targeted countries, as well as an arms embargo and travel ban.
In addition to the United Nations, the United States is most accustomed to using economic sanctions because of its economic strength and advantage in the international economic and trade system, and has used this means more frequently since the Cold War. So far, the United States has imposed sanctions on countries like Cuba, Iran and Syria,
In ordinary times, the United States still relies on “secondary sanctions” to intimidate others to take sides. In other words, if the United States imposes sanctions on a certain country or organization, it may also impose sanctions on other countries if they have dealings with other countries, except American companies.
While proponents of sanctions argue that they are a good way to bring adversaries to heel, critics seem to have a stronger case for three main points:
First, economic sanctions are hard to achieve. In past decades, no more than 20 per cent of economic sanctions achieved their goals. For example, if India and Pakistan develop nuclear weapons, no amount of US sanctions will help. Even if sanctions against South Africa were widely regarded as a success (forcing it to abandon apartheid), some argue that racial tensions in South Africa became too acute to abandon apartheid.
Secondly, economic sanctions are also harmful to the sanctioning countries themselves. For economic sanctions to be successful, one of the basic conditions is that the target is highly dependent on the sanctioner, but this can also cause losses to companies in the sanctioning country. (In order to reduce losses, the sanctioning country often chooses industries that cause more damage to the other party than to itself, and carries out so-called “targeted sanctions”.) Statistics show that the ECONOMIC sanctions imposed by the United States on other countries cost American companies an average of 15 billion to 19 billion dollars a year.
Third, economic sanctions often hurt innocent civilians. For example, when the United States imposed sanctions on Iraq and Libya, senior officials in those countries were still able to obtain goods through various channels, while ordinary people were impoverished by the sanctions.
That is why the United States has imposed sanctions on Cuba since 1958, and the Cuban people have suffered the most. So the UN General Assembly has passed resolutions condemning US sanctions against Cuba almost every year since 1992.
Economic sanctions have many shortcomings, why is the United States still addicted to this, and the international community sometimes collective sanctions against some countries or organizations? The answer is that economic sanctions are a second-best option when diplomacy fails to resolve some international disputes and military force is too costly.
