Posts Tagged ‘sanctions’

As Iran continues to flaunt its nuclear program against Western overtures and demands, US officials are now saying that sanctions may be the only resort to attempt to pressure Iran to change their policy on nuclear weapons:

“We must still try and find a peaceful way to resolve this issue. The only path that is left to us at this point, it seems to me, is that pressure track but it will require all of the international community to work together,” Gates said at a joint news conference with French Defense Minister Herve Morin.

SANCTIONS ARE PART OF A BROADER SOFT-POWER STRATEGY VITAL TO ELIMINATING IRAN’S THREAT TO GLOBAL STABILITY

DORAN ET AL 2010 – PROF NYU WAGNER SCHOOL

WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE SOFT POWER SOLUTION IN IRAN, 1-21

Al Qaeda bombers on U.S. airliners need prompt attention, but it is Iran, a supporter of terrorism now developing the capacity to fire nuclear-tipped missiles, that may pose the greatest threat to global stability and American security.

That threat can be diminished three ways: by military action, by compromise by Iran’s regime, or by a new, less bellicose government taking power in Tehran. The first two appear unlikely, but the third, at least since protests broke out last June after the presidential election, seems more and more realistic. Yet so far the United States and its allies have shrunk from seriously encouraging that third way.

Immediately after the post-election Green Revolution protests began in Iran, some policy makers argued that overt U.S. support would allow the regime to claim that those in the opposition were somehow our agents. Even with no evidence, the regime did that anyway—to little effect.

So how can the U.S. support the opposition? The key is strategic communications that integrate words and deeds to achieve a major political goal—in this case, changing the character of the Iranian leadership. Everything that we do, everything that we say—and everything that we don’t do and don’t say—should be coordinated to meet this goal.

Such a policy would have four separate tasks:

• Provide moral and educational support for the Green Revolution. Here third parties, rather than the U.S. government, should play the main role. Dissidents should be reminded that others have succeeded on the same path they are travelling.

We should, for instance, publicize reports on what worked in Ukraine or Georgia, spread testimony by leaders like the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, and distribute, in Farsi, guides to nonviolent change like Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy” and Peter Ackerman’s “A Force More Powerful.” It’s time to dub into Farsi documentaries on the fall of Ceausescu, Milosevic and Pinochet; the transitions in South Africa and Poland; and the achievements of the U.S. civil-rights movement.

• Tighten sanctions on the Iranian economy and publicize the connection between regime belligerence and economic malaise. Despite Iran’s oil wealth, the economy has for years been in miserable shape thanks to bad management, corruption and the squandering of funds on Arab terrorist groups and the nuclear program. The slogans of the protestors demonstrate that they are connecting the dots between the regime’s foreign policy and economic privation.

• Do all we can to increase communications within Iran, as well as between Iran and the outside world. Opposition movements succeed through sharing and disseminating information. Broadcasting by the taxpayer-funded Radio Farda and Voice of America satellite TV should be ramped up, and we should encourage the U.K. to do the same with the BBC. We also should vigorously protest attempts by Iran to jam broadcast signals in defiance of international law, back private media—from satellite TV pitched at young people to cell-phone messaging to social networking—and help Iranians get the technology to overcome regime attempts to block and censor.

• Finally, we should refute, in campaign style, the four key propositions of Iranian propaganda. These are that the reformers are unrepresentative and unpatriotic; that the U.S. is in decline and wants to cut a deal with Iran and extricate itself from the Middle East; that Iran’s nuclear program will advance the country technologically; and that international opposition to the program is a Western plot to keep Iran, as a Muslim nation, poor and backward.

For this last task, America’s comparative advantages—our technology and imagination—are the best tools. For example, to counter the claim that the West wants to hold Iran back, the U.S. government, using a private foundation, could rally CEOs in Silicon Valley (and Japan, India and Indonesia, for that matter) to offer Iranian engineering students seminars on high-tech entrepreneurship. We could saturate the airwaves of Iran with messages from, say, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking applicants for the seminars. The Iranian government would likely oppose such a program and the message would be: “Your regime, not the West, wants to keep you down.”

Similarly, we should be using all our tools, including intelligence, to track the individuals responsible for cracking down on the protesters, and to publicize their identities. Naming and shaming perpetrators would put the regime on the defensive and assure the protesters that their sacrifice will not be forgotten. As we know from Soviet dissidents, moral support works.

A serious strategic communications program for Iran could have dozens, even hundreds, of programs like these. It should extend across government agencies with clear leadership and include private-sector participation.

Too often in foreign policy our interests demand that we compromise our core values. With Iran, however, we have been blessed with remarkable luck: Our strategic and moral imperatives stand in perfect alignment. And Iranians like Americans.

The Iranian challenge appears more amenable than any other serious national threat to a soft-power solution. Let’s get going.

DEBATES OVER AMERICAN CHINA POLICY CONSTRUCT UNITED STATES IDENTITY AS OPPOSED TO A KNOWABLE CHINESE OTHER

PAN 2004 – PROF POLY SCI @ AUSTRALIA NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

CHINA THREAT IN AMERICAN SELF-IMAGINATION, ALTERNATIVES VOL 29 NO 3, PAGE 305-331

China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over “what China precisely is,” their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that “it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world.” (2) Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially “something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment.” (3)

Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as “disinterested observers” and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality.

And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of “what the United States is.” That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt.

I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own “observation” of “where China is today,” nor to join the “containment” versus “engagement” debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the “China threat” literature.

More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the “China threat” into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the “China threat” problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the “China threat” literature–themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.

These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the “China threat” literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S. “China threat” literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution.

I begin with a brief survey of the “China threat” argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this article will illustrate some of the dangerous practical consequences of the “China threat” discourse for contemporary U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident.

LINK – CHINA RELATIONS – IRAN SANCTIONS

SANCTIONS ON IRAN CUT OFF MASSIVE AMMOUNTS OF TRADE WITH CHINA

HENDERSON 1-8-2010 – FELLOW HOOVER INSTITUTIONS

THE CASE AGAINST IRAN SANCTIONS, IRAN TIMES INTERNATIONAL

Let’s put aside the fact that the bill, taken literally, would give the U.S. government the power to cut off much of our trade with China. Even if that weren’t true, economic sanctions rarely achieve their stated goals and almost always harm innocent people. These innocentpeople will not thank our government for its action.

How would the bill cut off much trade with China? Here’s how. Section 3(a) (1) A of the bill, H.R. 2194, “Iran Petroleum Refining Sanctions Act of 2009,” states: “(A) INVESTMENT-Except as provided in subsection (f), the President shall impose 2 or more of the sanctions described in paragraphs (1) through (6) of section 6(a) if the Presidentdetermines that a person has knowingly, on or after the date of the enactment of this Act, made an investment of $20,000,000 or more (or any combination of investments of at least $5,000,000 each, which in the aggregate equals or exceeds $20,000,000 in any 12-month period), that directly and significantly contributed to the enhancement of Iran’s ability to develop petroleum resources of Iran.“

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), who voted against the bill, pointed out on the House floor: “Recently, the Financial Times reported that, ‘[i]n recent months, Chinese companies have greatly expanded theirpresence in Iran’s oil sector. In the coming months, Sinopec, the state-owned Chinese oil company, is scheduled to complete the expansionof the Tabriz and Shazand refineries–adding 3.3 million gallons of gasoline per day.’”

Congressman Paul went on to say: “Are we to conclude, with this inmind, that China or its major state-owned corporations will be forbidden by this legislation from doing business with the United States?”

It seems so. Of course, no one believes that that is the intent ofthose 412 congressmen. But this wouldn’t be the first time that manyof them voted for a bill that achieves destructive ends that they did not intend.

Pollack and Takeyh discuss a potential rift within the Iranian leadership that economic sanctions might exploit with a nuanced foreign policy. Regardless of how it’s done, there seems to be no question that Iran nuclearization is something to avoid:

There is no question, however, that the United States, the Middle East, and probably the rest of the world would be better off if they did not have to deal with a nuclear Iran. The hard part, of course, is making sure that Tehran never gets to that point. It appears to have made considerable progress in many aspects of its nuclear program, thanks to extensive assistance from Chinese, Germans, Pakistanis, Russians, and perhaps North Koreans. Iran’s clerical regime has also shown itself willing to endure considerable sacrifices to achieve its most important objectives.

Read the full article here. Also find many more Iran sanctions resources here.

RESISTANCE TO NORMALIZING GLOBALISM WILL CAUSIVE LARGE SCALE NATIONAL CONFLICT ALONG XENOPHOBIC LINES

PETERSSON 2003 – ASSOCIATE PROF POLY SCI @ LUND U

COMBATING UNCERTAINTY COMBATING THE GLOBAL, IJPS, VOL 8 NO 1, AUTUMN/WINTER

Much current research tends to nurture the idea that the influence of nation states is overall on the wane, squeezed as they are between globalising influences and the concomitant greater assertiveness of local belongings. Ulrich Beck (2000: 14), for instance, argues that “globalization means one thing above all else: denationalisation”. Basically, I concur with this analysis, provided that it is designed to point out a discernible, long-term trend. However, what seems to be overlooked in much of the literature and above all in the general public debate, is that we may well be talking of processes that could take several decades to complete. In this sense, there seems to be a lack of awareness that the sandwiched position of the nation-state might in the interim give rise to rather violent recoils, as national identities seek to assert themselves and stave off perceived dangers. Jan Aart Scholte (2000: 160) is certainly one of those who displays recognition of the processes that might occur in this context: “[N]ations have remained buoyant and show little sign of disappearing”. What has happened, he concedes, is that the bond between state and nation has loosened up to a certain extent (Scholte, 2000: 164). The state has not “withered away” as predicted by Marxism in quite another context, but it has “withered somewhat” (Waters, 2001: 158).

In discussing the effects of this process, Ole Waever and Morten Kelstrup (1993: 69-70) some years ago sketched a scenario where the national states are on their way out, but where national identities struggle to defend themselves from local, transnational and global pressures. As they (1993: 69-70) pointed out, “[l]eft behind we find nations with less states, cultures with less shell”. This might add up to a situation where, for the first time in world history, national sentiments are widespread among sizable collectives of individuals, at the same time as there are dwindling numbers of territorial state frameworks to defend and promote them. Such a world would be volatile and unpredictable indeed, for we are here entering the realms of terra incognita.

Before we pass into this unknown domain, however, one might well envisage that promoters and defenders of the national rally to defend their cherished values against the perceived onslaught of globalism and its representatives. In Giddens’ (1999: 20-35) vocabulary, our times are fraught with risks of a never hitherto experienced magnitude and variety. Globalisation, being perceived as a cause as well as a symptom of many such risks, seems to have prompted nationalists all over the globe to take reactive measures. “The more that distance and borders have disintegrated, the more national differences have seemed precious”, maintains Scholte (2000: 164). The globalising world, he goes on to argue, “has left some people feeling torn and lost” (Scholte, 2000: 226). The consequences of such feelings of loss are well worth delving into.

Considerable attention has in recent years been awarded the so-called processes of glocalisation, whereby substantial effort has been spent analysing the global-local nexus (Robertson, 1992). My own preference is instead to study the somewhat neglected national-local nexus, where I assume national and local identity structures interact and reinforce each other. Together they combat the unknown, which one way or another is perceived as emanating from the global. I hold that there is a need to study these defensive mechanisms, as they might be expected to generate tensions and conflicts in the interaction between majority and minority groups. As Cris Shore (2000: 232) rightly admonishes, “[l]ike decapitating the mythical hydra, the break-up of old nation-states may simply replace them with a plethora of new nationalisms often more xenophobic and ethnically exclusivist than that from which they seceded”.

IL – ETHICS ARE VITAL TO EVALUATING CASE FOR OR AGAINST SANCTIONS – EFFECTIVENESS IS A FAILED CRITERIA

HIMES 1997 – PROF MORAL THEOLOGY WASHINGTON THEOLOGICAL UNION

WAR BY OTHER MEANS, COMMONWEALTH, VOLUME 124, FEBRUARY

The ethical component is an additional but essential factor in the debate over sanctions. This is the concern raised by the pope. Sanctions may be effective, but at what price to a population? Is a particular conflict sufficiently deadly and intractable to justify targeting an entire people? What responsibility, if any, do they share with the leaders of their government? If none, then must not sanctions be selective so as to minimize harm to innocent segments of a target nation? For policy makers as well as military planners and moralists there is an analogue here with the requirement to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants in war. As John Paul said in his address, sanctions are “an act of force,” and current experience demonstrates that a policy of sanctions “inflicts grave hardships upon the people of the countries at which it is aimed.” Indeed, after a March 1995 meeting with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, said that sanctions “must not be used as a means of war or to punish a population.” For all of these reasons, the criterion for sanctions cannot be reduced to the one of effectiveness.

Check out our first Neg LD file for the January-February economic sanctions topic!

You can find evidence here about:

• Debunking key studies on economic sanctions
• Sanctions effectiveness for a laundry list of reasons
• Criteria for having the best results from economic sanctions
• Moral and Ethical criteria and values for sanctions
• Sanctions, the United Nations, and Proliferation
• and even some complimentary AFF updates!

See the index here.

Get your Sanctions Neg Now!

The US is about to be embroiled in another controversy over economic sanctions as Obama evaluates his options on Iran:

Two senior administration officials, Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey and Undersecretary of State William Burns, have for months quietly assembled working groups across the government to determine what a sanctions package might contain. The groups examine Iranian vulnerabilities across a variety of economic sectors, “everything from energy to IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an influential and ideological branch of the Iranian military] to financial sector” activity, said a knowledgeable U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss the unsettled contours of administration policy. The House of Representatives last week approved a bill giving Obama new authority to enact additional unilateral sanctions on Iran’s energy imports.

SANCTIONS ENACT AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY IN A VIOLENT WAY – CRITICISM OF THEIR CONSTITUTIVE NATURE IS A PRIOR QUESTION***

ADDIS 2003 – PROF PUBLIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW @ TULANE

ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL, HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY VOL 25 NO 3, PP. 573-623

Sanctions have a dual purpose: in the process of attempting to compel compliance with what is regarded as the will of the international community they define the nature of that very community. In this sense sanctions are as performative as they are declarative. They constitute the very community whose existence is thought to be threatened by the actions and behavior of the target regime. What the noted cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, observed about legality generally applies to international processes as well. He said: “Law . . . is, in a word, constructive; in another, constitutive; in a third, formational.” 141 Economic sanctions have a constructive, constitutive, and formational aspect to them.

In order to understand international (legal) processes fully one needs to be aware of the fact that those processes have constitutive as well as instrumental dimensions. They are a means through which the international community (or any sanctioning community) imagines itself because they are instruments of behavior modification. These processes declare the boundaries of the community because they declare the bounds of acceptable behavior. They elaborate the nature of the community because they define the outlaw other, the negation of the normal. Traditionally, the state was said to legitimize citizens, all the way down to determining who was “deviant,” “outlaw” and “alien.” In the age of globalization, international institutions are assuming that role with increasing zeal and reach. Thus, the processes through which such judgments are made and the actors that make those judgments must be carefully and closely examined, for those judgments and actors will have a profound impact on the kind of community that is constituted and inhabited in the twenty-first century and beyond. The [End Page 622] problem of evil haunts the international community as it does national communities. How to dissociate oneself from evil is an important question for individuals as well as communities, national as well as international. But one must be careful not to engage in a process of dissociation that creates another evil. Unfortunately, however, that is what economic sanctions often do.

Martti Koskenniemi closes his book, From Apology to Utopia, with these words “We [international lawyers] need to reimagine the game, reconstruct the rules, redistribute the prizes.” 142 But perhaps to do all that what we need to do first is reimagine the community in which these games are played, the rules formulated, and the prizes distributed. Perhaps then, and only then, would we know what game is worth playing, what rules are proper for the game and what prizes are to be distributed and in what manner.

ECONOMIC SANCTIONS DEFINITION: NEGATIVE ECONOMIC LEVERADGE = DISTINCT FROM AFFIRMATIVE

DAMROSCH 1989 – PROF COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, POLITICS ACROSS BORDERS, 83 A.J.I.L. 1

III. ECONOMIC LEVERAGE
In addition to the forms of election campaign assistance discussed in the preceding part, various techniques of economic leverage are available to influencing states in their efforts to strengthen or weaken political factions and trends in another state. These techniques fall roughly into two categories: (1) affirmative tools of leverage, which include the award of economic and financial benefits such as government-to-government aid, trade preferences and loan facilities; ¹²⁰ and (2) negative techniques, often called economic sanctions, which involve suspending or terminating such benefits (or threatening to do so). ¹²¹ In general, legal regulation of the application of economic leverage is the subject of a large literature going well beyond the scope of this article; ¹²² for present purposes, the relevant question is the extent to which state practice and elements of principle legitimize or delegitimize the use of economic techniques to affect internal political developments in another state.

By now most have you have probably memorized the topic, but here it is for reference:

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

Also check out some of our definitions of Economic Sanctions here.

Both a topicality argument as well as a description of all sorts of possible affirmative and counterplan options, Ohaegbulam describes all the different ways a nation can utilize economic statecraft to achieve foreign policy objectives. Many distinct options exist, and it is also a helpful piece of evidence differentiating things that might not be considered sanctions.

THE TOOLS OF ECONOMIC STATECRAFT INCLUDE A VARIETY OF TANGIBLE MECHANISMS

OHAEGBULAM 1999 – PROF INT’L AFFAIRS @ U SOUTH FLORIDA

A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, PAGE 333

Economic Instruments of Foreign Policy

Historically, the principal instruments of economic statecraft which the United States has used to achieve its foreign policy goals include free trade, tariifs, investment, freezing of assets, trade embargos, economic sanctions, trade boycotts, trade quotas, fair trade, and foreign economic and military assistance.

On the January LD topic, can the negative argue that we should not deploy material sanctions, thereby eliminating much affirmative offense, while maintaining that “threats” of sanctions can still be used in foreign policy.

Or, is the affirmative advocacy able to still allow the threat of sanctions by arguing that sanctions are only the material imposition of restrictions on trade or market access?

The term “economic sanctions” encompasses the deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal, or threat of withdrawal, of customary trade or financial relations. (“Customary” refers to the levels of trade or financial activity that would probably have occurred in the absence of sanctions.) In this article, we discuss the use of economic sanctions to achieve politicalgoals; in other words, we exclude cases of economic sanctions used to achieve commercial goals, such as the withdrawal of tariff protection.

Read more about sanctions terminology as well as history of deployment in international relations.