The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

Confused by the threat to impose sanctions on North Korea? Wonder why the shrewd (or mad) father and son who rule Pyongyang would scrap their nuclear- weapons program in the face of measures that have had little effect on less menacing dictators? Join the club.

Sanctions are a fashion, rising or falling like hemlines, depending on who's running things in Washington. Bill Clinton's reflexive faith in their efficacy is hardly surprising, since he is the No. 1 proponent of the post-cold war's leading fallacy: economic might counts far more than military clout. The quintessential domestic President, Clinton sees everyone as he sees Americans: as bourgeois consumers whose behavior is driven by economic concerns. The idea that bad guys are interested only in raw power, and dissuaded only by countervailing power, seems lost on him. At this rate, Clinton may soon echo the words of a President whose penchant for muddleheaded multinationalism he much admires. "A nation that is boycotted is a nation in sight of surrender," said Woodrow Wilson in 1919. "Apply this peaceful, silent, deadly remedy, and there will be no need for force."

North Korea's Kims see sanctions as an act of war, which technically they are. For that reason alone, but especially because the North fought America to a standstill 40 years ago, it's important to understand what economic warfare can -- and cannot -- do.

Those few sanctions that have worked during the past century had several things in common: the strong imposed them on the weak; allies rather than enemies were the target (as when economic pressure helped the U.S. force the French and British from the Suez in 1956); and, most important, the goal did not strike at the core of a nation's identity -- sanctions designed to compel the release of kidnapped diplomats, for example, do not challenge vital interests. But when the underlying objective is nothing less than regime toppling, even tinhorn dictators have successfully resisted sanctions. Cuba's Castro has survived for 35 years. Panama's Noriega held on until the 82nd Airborne removed him. Haiti's military thugs promised their resignations when George Bush imposed sanctions in 1991, but they reneged after concluding that ! Clinton lacked the guts to take them out. The same goes for Serbia.

The lesson is clear: leaders who command repressive police states, and who couldn't care less about their citizens' economic status, dig in. If the prospect of military intervention is perceived as remote, they quickly come to believe that the will of the international community can be successfully ignored as long as there's money to be made in the smuggling business, which there always is. Local pride, too, often works to support those who defy sanctions; misplaced nationalism sometimes causes oppressed people to rally round their leaders rather than succumb to pressure from outsiders.

When the goal is changing behavior rather than changing governments, the results are mixed. The U.S. has abandoned the trade weapon as a lever to improve human rights in China, yet years of sanctions helped end apartheid in South Africa. Even there, however, it was the possibility of revolution, which prompted foreign banks to stop lending for fear their money would be lost, that was mostly responsible for the white minority's finally ceding power. If, as it seems, North Korea's nukes have become central to the Kims' sense of themselves, no sanctions will deter their desire to expand whatever it is that they already have. Nor will sanctions reduce the probability that they will sell their nuclear technology (and the means to use it), just as they have marketed every other weapons system they have produced. Short of an unlikely diplomatic breakthrough, or war, the West may be left with only the funeral option: live with the North Korea bomb until the Kims die -- or at least until the old man is gone, on the theory that the son can be muscled more easily than the father. It worked that way in Haiti when Baby Doc took control following Papa Doc's death. Perhaps the same could happen with the Kims.

Still, the question remains: If sanctions are so typically ineffective, why bother? There are two reasons. First, as Harvard's Richard Pipes says, sanctions "communicate a sense of moral outrage." Moreover, he argues, "one only has to consider what happens when aggression is not followed by some kind of punitive measures; not to react in such instances is silently to condone it." Pipes and others contend that Moscow was emboldened to invade Afghanistan in 1979 (which provoked a series of ineffectual Western sanctions) partly because the West did little but huff when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Second, and most significant in an era when coalition building is deemed a necessary requisite to military action, sanctions are an important step up the ladder to war. It took half a million troops to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but the alliance probably never would have come together if the sanctions that preceded the conflict had not invested America and its partners with a common sense of frustration at Baghdad's refusal to budge in the absence of force. The need to repel Iraq was appreciated because the world wanted the Middle East's oil at affordable prices and didn't want Saddam brandishing weapons of mass destruction. Today the nightmare scenarios of nuclear-weapons proliferation and regional instability in Asia may soon be seen to justify a second Korean war. If so, the alliance required to prosecute that battle will be impossible to craft unless serious sanctions are imposed first -- and until they fail as miserably as their predecessors have.