"Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work" by Robert A. Pape, in International Security (Fall 1997), Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Univ., 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

Economic sanctions, frequently regarded as the liberal alternative to war, have become an increasingly popular tool of U.S. foreign policy. Between 1993 and 1996, by one account, the United States imposed new sanctions on 35 different countries. But do such measures work? The conventional scholarly wisdom now says that, often, they do. Pape, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, throws considerable cold water on that optimistic view.

Until the mid-1980s, scholars generally agreed that economic sanctions were less effective than military force as a means of achieving major political goals, Pape notes. But then, in Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (1985; 2nd ed., 1990), Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, assisted by Kimberly Ann Elliot, reported that sanctions worked in 40 of 115 instances between 1914 and 1990—or 34 percent of the time. That success rate was high enough to alter the conventional academic wisdom, Pape says. And in recent years, scholars have grown even more optimistic, in the belief that greater international cooperation in the post–Cold War era may make economic sanctions even more effective than in the past.

Unfortunately, the Hufbauer-Schott-Elliot study is "seriously flawed," Pape maintains. Of the authors’ 40 success stories, he says, only five really deserve to be considered successes. Eighteen cases were actually settled by the direct or indirect use of force; sanctions failed in eight others, since the target state never made the demanded concessions; six cases were trade disputes, not instances of economic sanctions for political purposes; and three cases were too murky to determine whether the sanctions worked or not. Hufbauer and his colleagues failed to apply their definitions rigorously enough, Pape charges, and, more seriously, they failed to take into account the role played by the threat of force.

Of the five instances in which sanctions clearly worked, Pape says, three "were over trivial issues." Canada, for example, in 1979 agreed not to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The "most substantial" success involved India’s sanctions against Nepal after Nepal purchased antiaircraft guns from China in 1989. "King Birenda surrendered power to a pro-democratic government that agreed to consult India on defense matters," Pape notes. In the fifth successful case, the United States and Canada pressured South Korea to abandon its plans to purchase a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant from France.

Since economic sanctions have worked less than five percent of the time—not 34 percent—"the world would have to change considerably before sanctions could become a credible alternative to force," Pape concludes. The hope that greater international cooperation will increase the effectiveness of sanctions is a mirage. "The key reason that sanctions fail" is that the target states are not fragile, according to Pape. Nationalism often makes them "willing to endure considerable punishment rather than abandon their national interest." External pressure against even the weakest of states is "more likely to enhance the nationalist legitimacy of rulers than undermine it." After five years during which "the most extreme sanctions in history" shrank its economy by nearly 50 percent, for example, Saddam Hussein’s rogue state of Iraq still has not buckled.