Washington s weapon of choice has become economic sanctions. Sanctions represent a course of action, short of war or covert action, designed to hit back at a state s bad behavior. They are easy to implement. They respond to the need to register disapproval but avoid taking a tougher approach. But this increasingly uniform response may not always be effective in persuading a targeted regime to mend its ways or bring it down.
Economic sanctions are blunt instruments that wreak havoc with an economy.
They especially afflict a country s ordinary citizens, often without affecting the ruling elite. Like mass bombings during World War II, however, economic attacks may rally a beleaguered population to its despot, who points to the United States as the source of its lowered living standards rather than his failed statist policies. The real damage to both which exist as Stalinesque anomalies in our interdependent, interconnected, and market-driven world has resulted from the demise of their Soviet patron. Thus, the case for sanctions in general is weak, although Washington s toughened sanctions against South Africa in 1986 are often cited as the eventual cause of the white minority s relinquishing its apartheid policy toward the African majority. Also, embargoes directed at Vietnam s 1977 invasion of Cambodia are claimed to have persuaded Hanoi to pull out.