Today 76 countries put up with or are seriously threatened by one or more US trade sanctions, says the SELA report, which quotes a study by the Washington-based Presidential Council of Exports. Of the trade-related reprisals the United States has taken against other countries for actions it considered attacks on US national interests, more than half have been enacted since Democratic President Bill Clinton took office in 1993. Congress is fighting to gain a stronger grip on US foreign policy and limit presidential authority, and the most far-reaching sanctions approved since 1994 have included one or more clauses of compulsory application by the executive branch. In 1997, transnational corporations, export firms and associations of exporters created USA-Engage, a lobbying group pushing for the elimination of the practice of sanctions. The outcome of the current internal U.S. debate on sanctions will also have direct consequences for WTO agriculture talks that begin next year and for International Monetary Fund financing, says SELA, besides the significance it will have for the negotiations on the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas by the year 2005, which get underway next month.
National security is the traditional justification for sanctions.
But lately increasingly influential church groups have been throwing their support behind bills on new global causes that have been springing up in both houses of Congress, such as the elimination of family planning programmes. Nevertheless, those opposed to the use of sanctions have scored several significant tactical victories since May, according to SELA, although it is not yet clear whether a strategic change has been made or the conservatives will once again win out. SELA interprets what occurred with the sanctions, based on a 1994 law against the proliferation of nuclear arms, that were slapped on India and Pakistan in June for their nuclear tests as a real watershed. Pakistan is one of the United States' biggest clients for wheat, and against the backdrop of the marked reduction in demand and crashing prices caused by the Asian meltdown, no market is superfluous. Congress was forced to submit a bill providing for assistance to agricultural exports, which amends the 1994 law in order to bolster sales in that sector and to allow the president to suspend partly the application of the law.