ARTICLE: "Should States Sell Stocks To Protest Links To Iran?" by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2007, p. A1.ARTICLE: "Missouri Treasurer's Demand: 'Terror-Free' Pension Funds," by Craig Karmin, Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2007, p. C1.
The history on this (check John Mueller at Ohio) is stunningly clear: economic sanctions overwhelmingly kill the poor and disenfranchised and have little to no effect on the rich elites.
Yes, yes, apartheid South Africa is the sole exception, but it's a profound outlier that didn't feature oil and gas in an expanding global economy where rising powers face skyrocketing energy requirements.
Americans love sanctions and divesting, but they simply don' t work.
Bush opposes this stuff, preferring the highly targeted financial squeezes using banks. He's right.
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Comments (2)
South Africa shows that sanctions work with countries that are democratic, or "democratish", i.e., countries that have some electoral process that results in feedback to the government against hardships resulting from sanctions. This is why Israel supporters go ballistic whenever anybody talks about sanctions or divestiture: Israel is also a country in which sanctions could be effective. No such mechanisms exist in authoritarian regimes so sanctions just hurt the most powerless people in the society.
Posted by stuart abrams | June 14, 2007 2:03 PM
Another factor is the number of countries involved in the sanctions. Sanctions from a few powerful countries may hurt, but can be shrugged off as bullying. But suppose most of the countries in the world dislike you enough to apply sanctions; the pain will be more acute and the notion that you might actually be in the wrong will be harder to shrug off.
As I recall, only one or two countries DIDN'T sanction SA.
Posted by Michael | June 15, 2007 12:07 PM