Economic sanctions ought not be used to achieve foreign policy objectives.

The importance of economic sanctions is something that governments seem to enjoy trying against our foes with no success. While it is true that if a sanction fails just once, that is not reason to scrap the entire process (with your computer analogy), but so true is the opposite, if works once but fails countless times, it is not worth keeping. Such as if you have a car that starts only once every several weeks, even though it does sometimes start. So the question is do the benefits from economic sanctions justify its use, or do the consequences it causes strike it from the table? --Contention 1, Economic sanctions do work-- Economic sanctions may have seemed to have been a useful tool in the past. However a closer look into them shows that they are quite impotent. Drezner (2003) looked into US sanctions from 1975 - 1994 and found that when threatened with sanctions (but without the sanctions actually being imposed), the THREAT had a 56.34% success rate, as opposed to the only 33% success rate of actual sanction use [1]. That means that threatening to impose sanctions (but not actually doing it) is more effective then actually doing it. In sanctions regarding labour standards, the threats (without actually doing sanctions) was 57.69% (1988 - 2000), but of the sanctions that were actually imposed, "no significant concessions had been made in any of these cases [1]." On another similar note, sanctions in regards to environmental regulations found that the threats yielded a 92.11% chance of success, while actual sanctions yielded only a 52.63%, once again, the sanctions proved to be horribly under par compared to the threat of sanctions. --Contention 2, Economic sanctions by one country can affect the world-- There is little doubt that it can effect the world. It effects everyone, including us. When we decided that we are not going buy product X from one country, that effects the supply for said product. When the supply goes down, the cost for us goes up. Likewise, the for the country being sanctioned, the demand goes down, meaning they must sell the item for less, hurting them. What ends up resulting is the country doing the sanctioning (or group of countries) end up paying more for product X and the country receiving the sanctioning has to sell product X for less. The only nations that benefit from the economic sanction are those that are not participating in it, since (if they import product X) they now get to buy it for less, or (if they export product X) they now get to sell it for more. --Contention 3, Multilateral sanctions increase efficiency-- That is also correct, and like wise, they increase efficiency of the same issues presented in contention 2, the effect of supply and demand. --Contention 4, they are better then the alternative, war-- This is a false dichotomy fallacy. War is not the only alternative, there are a multitude of alternatives. In cases where there is normally a good standing relationship, a positive trade deal (make offerings, rather then threats). In the nations where we have less then friendly standings a positive trade deal will not work (not likely, though it is always worth a try to better international goodwill), and those are actually the nations that are least likely to respond to sanctions anyway [2]. For example, North Korea and Iran aren't exactly letting their nuclear programs get shut down as we are wanting. The whole time, they don't mind so much letting their people suffer from any sanctions because it works as fuel to them to call us the bad guys. [1] http://www.ima.org.uk... [2] http://www.google.com...= (first link, will download the pdf file)