The sanctions against South Africa forced the business establishment and the government in that country to reject apartheid and provide full equality for all citizens. The Reagan administration's restriction of the Soviet Union's access to international funding and other economic pressures helped to weaken the communist leadership, fomented change, and is credited today as one of the major contributing factors in the fall of the Soviet communist bloc. The United States also assumed the leadership on sanctions to restore democracy to Haiti and to curtail the massacres in the former Yugoslavia. Throughout, the United States has been cognizant of the fact that attaching an economic cost to offensive behavior acts as a disincentive and can directly correct a problem by limiting the target government's capacity to engage in such practices, and that sanctions implicitly express commitment to certain norms of international conduct, human rights, and nonaggression. They reinforce these standards by punishing those who violate them.
Sanctions also offer a more acceptable alternative to military intervention.
They can serve as powerful deterrents to aggression, can help reverse hostile action, and can prevent the destruction of society. This is the reality that prefaced and substantiates the trade embargo as a foreign policy instrument. But for engagement to work, there must be openness that allows benefits to flow broadly to the general population. This is not the case in Castro's Cuba. A policy of engagement ignores the fact that the Cuban people are still denied their fundamental rights as human beings.