Trade sanctions don’t work. They hurt ordinary people in your country, the country you are targeting, and boost the regime you dislike.
They are an exercise in performative legislation, intended to signal your disapproval of another government rather than to achieve any practical outcome.
This is difficult to say because it risks sounding soft on Russia, China, or whoever. So let me use the most recent example: Israel.
Last week, the European Union announced that it was reconsidering its trade relationship with Israel, and the United Kingdom suspended talks on a deeper commercial relationship, talks launched after Brexit, when Britain was finally free to negotiate its trade deals.
London and Brussels were protesting against excessive noncombatant deaths in Gaza. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy seemed especially outraged by remarks from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called for the people of Gaza to be pushed into third countries.
This is not a column about the rights and wrongs of the conflict in Gaza. You can take the view that Israel suffered a monstrous attack, and is entitled to self-defense; or you can take the view that the civilian fatalities in Gaza should shock the conscience of the world. Most people, I suspect, simultaneously believe both these things. But that is not what I want to discuss here.
I want to rather focus on the malign effects of sanctions — the withdrawal of a trade deal being the mildest form of economic sanction, the first in a series of escalating steps that lead to a full blockade. Those malign effects are the same whether the target is Israel or Iran, but the argument is often received differently.
What will be the practical effect of less trade between the U.K. and Israel? The citizens of both countries will be slightly poorer than they would otherwise be. The narrowing of a market means that other things are equal and that prices are higher, which means that consumers have less to spend on other things, which means slower growth.
In the case of the U.K. and Israel, the effect will be marginal. Britain ranks eighth as an export destination for Israeli goods and 11th as a source of imports. But even if each state were the other’s chief market, most economic activity would still be domestic.
The political effect of sanctions is the same regardless of how big the economic consequences are. People rally to the regime. Many Israeli leftists who intensely dislike Benjamin Netanyahu now feel that their country has its back to the wall, and that this is not the time to create domestic divisions.
In cases where there is a total blockade — Iraq before 2003, for example — the sense of wounded patriotism is commensurately stronger. There is a reason we call it “siege mentality”. In such situations, the regime can also use the restrictions to strengthen its control of the economy and, therefore, of society. Saddam ruthlessly exploited the oil-for-food boondoggle to reward allies in Iraq and overseas. Only a military force toppled him.
A major study of post-1945 sanctions regimes by the Peterson Institute found that 66% of them failed in their stated aim. In the remaining 34%, they may have played a part, though it does not follow that they were determining factors. South Africa was under sanctions when apartheid ended, for example, but most historians believe that the chief agent of change was organized resistance within the country, as well as a waning belief in the legitimacy of the old regime among those who used to uphold it.
There have been isolated cases where sanctions have had some effect, usually when their goal is limited (the release of a single political prisoner, for example) and when the sanctioned state is sensitive to international opinion. However, they fail more often in their stated aim.
Sanctions have not prevented Kim Jong Un from pursuing his nuclear ambitions, or brought down the ayatollahs, or pushed Vladimir Putin out of Ukraine. They allowed Fidel Castro to survive the collapse of communism in 1990 because he was able to blame his people’s squalor, not on socialist economics, but on the yanqui siege.
ENGLAND’S DISAPPEARING PUBS SIGNAL ITS DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSFORMATION
If you want to deter a foreign government, you must go after individual officials. Seize their assets, ban them from traveling or, in extreme cases, carry out an Eichmann-style judicial kidnap.
That, though, is too much hard work. It’s easier to claim, Trump-like, that trade alone can bend other nations to your will. Voters always seem ready to swallow it.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
