To Sanction, or not to Sanction
Jacob Weisberg says sanctions don’t work, because they ultimately turn the oppressed population against us.
Sanctions tend to fail as a diplomatic tool for the same reason aerial bombing usually fails. As Israel is again discovering in Lebanon, the infliction of indiscriminate suffering tends to turn a populace against the proximate cause of its devastation, not the underlying causes. People who live in hermit states like North Korea, Burma, and Cuba already suffer from global isolation. Fed on a diet of propaganda, they don’t know what’s happening inside their borders or outside of them. By increasing their seclusion, sanctions make it easier for dictators to blame external enemies for a country’s suffering. And because sanctions make a country’s material deprivation significantly worse, they paradoxically make it less likely that the oppressed will throw off their chains.
Instead we should continue business-as-usual with the country in question, because exposure to the outside will somehow naturally aid their dealing with dictatorial issues.
Trade prompts economic growth and human interaction, which raises a society’s expectations, which in turn prompts political dissatisfaction and opposition. Trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and participation in international institutions all serve to erode the legitimacy of repressive regimes. Though each is a separate case, these forces contributed greatly to undermining dictatorships and fostering democracy in the Philippines, South Korea, Argentina, Chile, and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
I agree with him on the sanctions, and it would seem the only other alternative is engagement through the normal channels. But I’m not so sure there is an answer here. Does there always have to be an answer? Perhaps that’s the problem with politics in general. We pretend that there is always some knowable answer, some easily predictable Newtonian model solution, when in fact we have wandered into quantum territory.