November/December (3) Evidence
Lincoln-Douglas Debate Evidence
For the Resolution
Resolved: The use of economic sanctions to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals is moral.
November/December 1999 NFL LD Topic
Editor and Researcher: Craig Linton
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Richard N. Haass is the Director of the Foreign Policy Studies program at Brookings and editor of the new book, Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy.
SANCTIONS MUST BE WEIGHED
This said, the challenge goes beyond improving sanctions, something that will tend to make them narrower and less unilateral. The more fundamental question is one of the selection of the most appropriate foreign policy tool to deal with a particular challenge. Sanctions of any sort must be weighed against the likely costs and benefits of military action, covert programs, and both public and private diplomacy.
SOMETIMES IT IS BETTER TO USE MILITARY FORCE
Sometimes it will be better to use military force. This was the lesson of Desert Storm and Bosnia--and may yet prove to be the lesson of Kosovo. Cuba is also worth considering in this context. Rather than tighten sanctions (which increased the misery of the Cuban people) and go along with Congress's introduction of secondary sanctions against U.S. allies, the Clinton Administration might have been wiser to launch a cruise missile salvo to take out the MIGs that shot down the unarmed plane flown by Cuban exiles. More broadly, it can be argued that American dollars, tourists, and ideas constitute a greater threat to Fidel Castro and communism in Cuba than the embargo.
SOMETIMES SANCTIONS CAN HELP
In other instances, focused sanctions appear attractive. A more appropriate response to India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests would have been export controls designed to slow missile and nuclear bomb development and deployment. With Haiti, narrow sanctions aimed at the illegitimate leadership would not have triggered the human exodus that pressured the Administration into an armed intervention that could have proved extremely costly. Differences with China and Russia over their technology and weapons exports would best be dealt with by narrow sanctions.
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Richard N. Haass, Director of Foreign Policy Studies. "Sanctions Almost Never Work", The Wall Street Journal. June 19, 1998.
POPULARITY OF SANCTIONS
Economic sanctions have never been more popular than they are now. Congress imposes them; the executive branch implements them; even states and municipal governments want to get into the act. More than 75 countries with over two-thirds of the world's population are subject to U.S. economic sanctions -- whether aimed at discouraging weapons proliferation, bolstering human rights, deterring terrorism, thwarting drug trafficking, discouraging armed aggression, promoting market access, protecting the environment or replacing governments.
BAD IMPACTS OF SANCTIONS
Unilateral sanctions almost never work. Secondary sanctions -- trying to compel others to join a sanctions effort by threatening sanctions against them -- can seriously harm relationships with the secondary states. Sanctions have caused humanitarian suffering (Haiti), weakened friendly governments (Bosnia), bolstered tyrants (Cuba) and left countries with little choice but to develop nuclear weapons (Pakistan). From a domestic perspective they are expensive, costing U.S. businesses billions of dollars a year and many thousands of workers their jobs.
ECONOMIC SANCTIONS MUST BE CONSIDERED CAREFULLY
Economic sanctions are a serious instrument of foreign policy. They demand consideration as rigorous as that which precedes military intervention. The likely benefits of a particular sanction to U.S. foreign policy should be greater than the anticipated economic and political costs. Moreover, the relationship between how the sanction is likely to affect U.S. interests should compare favorably to the likely consequences of all other policies, including military intervention, covert action, diplomacy, offering incentives (used to manage North Korea's nuclear ambitions) or doing nothing.
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ELISE DeGOOYER. " Sanctions amount to genocide, activists say.(organization attributes thousands of deaths US sanctions against Iraq )" National Catholic Reporter, March 5, 1999 v35 i18 p5(1).
SANCTIONS ARE GENOCIDE
Warfare and genocide were terms used by two activist to describe the impact of economic sanctions on Iraq, where the World Health Organization attributes at lest 5,000 deaths each month of children under 5 to sanctions-related malnutrition and disease.
SANCTIONS ARE A MORAL ISSUE
"Morally we are on very barren ground," said Halliday. "We don't want to be held responsible for what is genocide in Iraq today." Bennis added: "When the U.S. kills 200 children today and 200 children yesterday and 200 children tomorrow, this is no longer a political issue, it's a moral issue."
SANCTIONS BREED AN EVEN WORSE GOVERNMENT
While making no excuses for Saddam Hussein, he said sanctions are pushing young members of the Baath party to further extremism; they are beginning to see Saddam and others as too moderate.
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TOM ROBERTS, "Can sanctions be alternative to war?", National Catholic Reporter, June 18, 1999 v35 i32 p19.
SANCTIONS JUST LIKE WARFARE
Sanctions at first glance seem a reasonable alternative to conventional warfare: no bombs, no ground troops, no chemical or biological weapons. Used in a limited way, economic sanctions were credited, for example, with having expedited change in South Africa. But as the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United States via the United Nations have shown, such measures can become a quiet extension of the bombs, causing considerable death and destruction (NCR, May 21).
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Jeffrey J. Schott, Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Economics. Before the
Committee on International Relations. US House of Representatives. June 3, 1998
USE OF SANCTIONS
Economic sanctions are an important tool of US foreign policy. Sanctions are deployed as part of the overall US policy response to objectionable actions of foreign governments and to advance laudable US policy goals: to stop military adventures, arms proliferation, support of terrorism and drug trafficking, and human rights abuses among others.
In conjunction with diplomacy and other measures, sanctions seek to demonstrate US resolve and express outrage, change the behavior of the target country, and deter other countries from resorting to similar actions in the future.
SANCTIONS INFLICT DAMAGE ON OWN COUNTRY
One main function of economic sanctions is to inflict damage on the target country as a means of coercing compliance with our policy goals. However, firms and workers in the United States also pay an immediate price when trade and financial relations are disrupted. Even though the aggregate cost in relation to our GDP is usually very small, the costs may be significant for individual firms or industries.2 Furthermore, even if sanctions cost the US economy only one or two-tenths of a percent of GDP, that still adds up to a recurring cost of $10-15 billion per year. Some of that money is well spent, but much is lost in failed sanctions episodes. That is too much money to waste!
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