Blunt Instrument Sanctions Don’t Promote Democratic Change- in Iran or Elsewhere
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Come July, Iran’s oil will no longer flow to Europe, thanks to an EU embargo announced on January 23. That same day the United States approved sanctions on the country’s third largest bank, Bank Tejarat, which the Treasury Department says “has directly facilitated Iran’s illicit nuclear efforts.” Twenty-two other Iranian banks face U.S. sanctions.
The official objective of the sanctions is to compel Iran to negotiate with the West toward the implementation of existing UN Security Council resolutions calling for Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program. Unofficially, there are hints that the sanctions are aimed at collapsing the Iranian regime and bringing about democratic change.
Supporters of the policy assume that there is a positive relationship between broad economic sanctions and democratization. The policymakers responsible for these measures either are ignorant of or are simply ignoring the empirical evidence: broad sanctions—total financial and trade embargoes—do not have a good track record of changing target countries’ policies or of pushing them toward democracy.
Tool of Failure
Some scholars have found in sanctions limited success. A widely cited study by Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliot holds that of 116 cases of sanctions since 1914, only 34 percent have been successful.1 Scrutiny of those cases, however, suggests an even lower rate. Security expert Robert Pape argues that only five of the 40 reported successes were correctly designated; the majority was settled by the threat or use of military force rather than by sanctions, as the study had not adequately controlled for military intervention. Pape notes that economic sanctions “are often a prelude to using force, not an alternative to using force.”2 Indeed, other studies have shown that broad economic sanctions actually increase the likelihood of military conflict.3
A more recent study by Cliff Morgan, Navin Bapat, and Valentin Krustev analyzes 888 cases of threatened and imposed sanctions from 1971 to 2000. They report an optimistic 39.5 percent success rate when sanctions are imposed unilaterally and a 54.8 percent success rate when imposed multilaterally.
However, the study covers a diverse spectrum, from limited sanctions to total embargoes. Limited economic sanctions are distinct from total embargoes in that they prohibit trade in particular products or sectors and limit access to imports or export capabilities without obstructing a majority of the target’s economic outlets. The data, collected in the Threat and Imposition of Sanctions (TIES) database, show that total embargoes are far less likely to succeed than limited sanctions.