Members of Committee, I know, are well aware of my particular interest and concern with respect to using food and medicine as a foreign policy weapon against other countries. I believe it is inconsistent with American values and ideals, damages our international l moral authority, and unnecessarily harms American farm families who already suffer from one of the worst domestic farm economies in a decade or more. The focus of these legislative initiatives has been to provide streamlined guidelines for both the Executive and Legislative Branches to follow in considering the imposition of future sanctions as well as to provide critical waiver authority t the President to guarantee that sufficient flexibility is preserved in the context of legislatively mandated sanctions, both current and perspective. I will touch briefly later in my remarks on what I see as necessary ingredients for crafting a comprehensive sanctions reform legislative proposal drawing from the bills before us today. I would hope that this committee would be about to undertake such an effort in the very near future.
Today is the first step in attempting to do so.
But first, Mr. Chairman, I would like to digress for a moment ti try to provide some historical perspective on how we have gotten to where we are today with respect to US sanctions policy and why their is growing urgency to take a hard look at current practice in this area. In the intervening decades, we have taken greater liking to sanctions that President Wilson ever could have imagined. I doubt very much , however, that he would approve of the way in which we employ that too today nor the results accomplished by sanctions. When President Wilson described his idea of sanctions as a diplomatic tool, he was trying to convince the Senate to ratify American membership in the League of Nations. The sanctions he envisioned were broad, muli-national efforts designed to affect specific results under limited circumstances.