Economic Sanctions and Public Health: A View from the Department of State

Sanctions as an Alternative to Force

Historically, sanctions have been used as a tool—short of war or other, more extreme measures of coercion—to induce a government violating international norms to improve its policies. Sanctions have also been used as a punishment for such violations. In recent years, especially, sanctions have often been supported or proposed by nongovernmental organizations concerned with such matters as religious freedom, respect for human rights, and the apprehension of war criminals. In the United States, this support is reflected in the flood of sanctions-related legislation annually considered by Congress.

Despite this, the overall record of sanctions as an instrument of policy has been mixed. In many cases, sanctions have been imposed for years, even decades, without achieving their objectives. However, most observers would agree that U.N. sanctions contributed significantly to the downfall of racist regimes in the former Rhodesia and South Africa. In this decade, sanctions caused Libya's government to make available for trial two men suspected of the terrorist sabotage of Pan American Flight 103. Currently, sanctions are an important source of pressure against the regime of indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. In Burma, the democratic opposition, led by Nobel Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, strongly supports sanctions as a way to prod that nation's repressive military toward a more open political system.

Mitigating the Harmful Effects of Sanctions

As a policymaker, I have long been concerned that sanctions—like force—can be a blunt instrument. When the United Nations or the United States imposes sanctions against a regime, whether in response to military aggression or egregious …