Economic Warfare
Blockades, commerce raiding, boycotts, embargoes, and sanctions are asymmetric methods for attacking an opponent through its economy. During the American Civil War, the North maintained a blockade against the South, which the South attempted to counter with small fast blockade-runners.
During World War II, German submarines targeted ships supplying Britain and Russia until the Germans were defeated in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic. American submarines destroyed Japanese merchant shipping. In Operation Bernhard, the largest counterfeiting operation in history, Germany tried to destabilize the British economy during World War II by flooding the country with forged currency. The Allies preemptively bought mercury from Spain and cobalt from Turkey far in excess of their own needs to reduce German ability to produce explosives and hardened steel. Eisenhower responded to the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain and France by flooding international currency markets with British pounds, causing them to decline precipitously in value and threaten massive inflation. Britain pulled out of Egypt immediately, forcing the French to do the same.1A boycott may involve no more than refusing to participate in a meeting, conference, or election. Most entail refusal to buy goods or services from a target company or industry. It takes its name from the individual targeted by Charles Parnell during the Irish potato famine. Gandhi made frequent use of boycotts in his quest for Indian independence. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man as required in the segregated South. In the mid-1960s, the United Farm Workers made extensive use of boycotts in its struggle for the rights of its members. As the charismatic Cesar Chavez put it, “The consumer boycott is the only open door in the dark corridor of nothingness down which farm workers have had to walk for many years.
It is a gate of hope through which they expect to find the sunlight of a better life for themselves and their families.” In 2012, Syrians boycotted parliamentary elections in unusual fashion by writing in the names of the people killed by the Assad regime on their ballots.Article 41 of the UN charter legitimizes economic sanctions that target violations of international law including aggression, drug trafficking, environmental destruction, fixed elections, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, sex trafficking, state support of terrorism, uncompensated nationalization of property, and unfair labor practices.
Figure 15.1 contains a representative list of 25 sanctions imposed during the twentieth century. Only one—the Suez Crisis of 1956—was a major conflict. Nine ended in war. Only four completely succeeded in achieving their aims, usually when other factors were involved as well. Sanctions against South Africa in combination with diplomacy, internal resistance, and moral suasion ended apartheid. Twelve years of sanctions against Myanmar combined with the Saffron Revolution, the example of the Arab Spring, increasing dependency on the unpopular Chinese, and the moral example of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi led to elections in 2012 resulting in 44 members of the National League for Democracy winning seats in the 664-seat Parliament.
Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi eventually turned the accused Pan Am 103 bombers over for trial in 1999, but the sanctions bothered him not a bit. Italy bought 42% of Libyan oil, while Germany, Spain, France, Greece, England, Turkey, and a few others bought the rest. Libya continued to operate more than 2300 gas stations in Italy and the refineries it controlled in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland and to receive dividends and capital gains from investments in over 120 multinational corporations. What did get his attention was Reagan’s bombing of his residence (killing his daughter), the end of the Cold War, the efficiency with which the US destroyed hostile governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and rumors that he was next.
In 2004, he agreed to halt his weapons programs and open the country to inspection, only to be overthrown in 2011 in a civil war in which France, the UK, and the US intervened, leading in turn to serious unrest throughout the central Sahara.Sanctions against North Korea have only led the regime to alternate between military provocation and negotiations used to blackmail food from Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Sanctions failed to induce Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, and failed to induce him to fulfill treaty obligations despite claims of 800,000 deaths which if true were five times the number of people killed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in a much smaller population. Instead, he bribed French President Chirac and Russian President Putin to obtain their vetoes in the UN, and several UN officials to allow him to divert over 20 billion dollars of the Oil-for-Food program from its intended purpose. Sanctions, undermined by Russia and China have so far failed to persuade Iran to refrain from developing nuclear weapons.2
Sanctions are most likely to work against weak economies that are heavily dependent on the sanctioning countries for a few critical supplies for which few alternatives are available or against governments that face viable internal opposition. They seldom succeed when they require the cooperation of many countries or if they threaten the survival of the target. They often are harder economically on the sanctioner than on the sanctioned as jobs are lost and other countries seize the opportunity to become suppliers. They sometimes are implemented to satisfy public demands to “do something” when the conditions for success do not exist. They often fail because they are preceded by lengthy debate and are ratcheted up gradually instead of being implemented hard and fast, giving the target country plenty of time to adjust.3
Given the rarity of success and the high humanitarian costs to civilians who do the suffering (despite recent efforts at targeting regime elites), sanctions are appropriate only when conditions make success likely.