EVER SINCE the Greeks crossed the Aegean to lay siege to Troy, nation states have tried to win wars by surrounding their enemies and starving them out. As nations grew, so did the complexity of such tactics. Napoleon tried to blockade the continent of Europe. The Union tried the same against the Confederacy.
What was once the military siege is now the economic embargo. It is employed by the United States most notably against Cuba and Iraq, but also against Iran, Libya and, in a limited way, other countries. But in the ebb and flow of globalized commerce, it is no longer clear that such embargoes work. Nor is it clear that their efficacy matters, because they are often imposed as much for domestic political reasons.
From one viewpoint, the argument that President Bush used a few days ago, reiterating the United States' 40-year-old embargo with Cuba, sounds great. "I want you to know I know what trade means with a tyrant. It means that we will underwrite tyranny, and we cannot make that happen," he said, listing various abuses of human and democratic rights that the Castro regime sponsors.
But, from another viewpoint, the argument used by those - including the Bush and Clinton administrations - favoring expanded trade with China appears attractive, despite abuses there manifestly worse than those in Cuba. This contends that trade brings the type of engagement, economic and otherwise, that helps to further the democratic process.
Generally, the position varies according to one's position on the political spectrum. Most who say trade would help the reform movement in Cuba probably thought that was not the case with apartheid South Africa. With China, some on both ends of the spectrum encourage use of economic weaponry, while the middle goes with the trade-is-good mainstream.
From an objective viewpoint, there is scant evidence that such embargoes do any good.
"If you are going to declare war on somebody, don't use a weapon that is either going to misfire or backfire," says Steve H. Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University. "That's what sanctions and embargoes do."
Certainly there is little anecdotal evidence that they work. Four decades of the U.S. embargo against Cuba don't seem to have shaken Fidel Castro's hold on that country. A decade of embargoes on Iraq finds Saddam Hussein as firmly entrenched as ever. Libya is trying to get its sanctions lifted by paying $2.7 billion to victims of the Pan Am 103 bombing, but Col. Muammar el Kadafi hasn't offered to resign. Military action - the U.S. bombing of Tripoli - is given more credit for getting Kadafi to withdraw from the terror business than economic sanctions.
In Hanke's and others' view, embargoes misfire because they don't do the damage that's intended.
"It depends on your aim," says I.M. "Mac" Destler, senior fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. "If your aim in Cuba was to weaken it economically, presumably it contributed to that. But if your aim was to bring about political change, it is hard to think of the embargo as anything but a massive failure."
Says Wayne Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington and a longstanding proponent of greater openness toward Cuba: "Unilateral embargoes have never worked in history, and this one is certainly not going to work against Cuba. ... Our embargo is an inconvenience, that's about all. It's nothing all that significant, nothing that's going to force them to make any alteration in their system, certainly not to bring it down."
Embargoes backfire because they help their intended target by giving people such as Castro and Hussein an excuse for their economic travails, an enemy to blame all their troubles on.
"I think they tend to be counterproductive because the nation under boycott may place the blame for all its internal problems and failure to govern well on the boycotters," says David A. Crocker, senior research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. "In Sandinista Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was able to blame everything that was going wrong on the war and boycott, taking away from his own failures. In Cuba, all of Castro's shortcomings are blamed on the U.S. and the embargo."
Says Hanke of the Cuba embargo: "I think it's one of the main reasons the old man [Castro] is still in the saddle. Embargoes just get an indifferent population nationalized and riled up."
The one exception to the embargoes-don't-work rule that many point to is South Africa, where there is a presumption that the widespread economic isolation of that country helped to bring about the downfall of the apartheid regime.
"My basic perspective is that these are not very useful or effective tools in achieving the goal of changing the behavior of nation states," says Crocker. "The one case that prevents me from making that a blanket statement is South Africa."
Says Destler: "South Africa is the one case often cited on the positive side of the ledger."
But South Africa is considered unusual because the embargo was nearly universal. Once Congress passed sanctions in 1986 - over the objections of the Reagan administration - virtually the whole world isolated South Africa economically. That is not the case with Cuba, Iraq or Libya.
Even in South Africa, the picture is not entirely clear. For one thing, the economic wall was hardly foolproof. Coca-Cola moved its syrup plant to a neighboring country and continued to supply its locally owned South African bottlers. General Motors sold its holdings to local interests who continued to build the same cars. Diamonds and other resources continued to flow from the country. Plenty of African neighbors kept anti-apartheid rhetoric high and kept low-profile economic ties with the continent's richest economy.
Within the country, the apartheid regime used the sanctions as more evidence to convince the white population that a hard line was needed to combat the onslaught that their country faced from hostile forces on all sides. That argument lost its force at the end of the Cold War and the white leaders saw the need for reforms so South Africa could join the world economy.
One of the arguments used against sanctions, in South Africa and Cuba, is that the people they hurt are the poor, that the rich find a way to make out nicely. Certainly the plight of Iraq's poor has been used as an anti-U.S. rallying cry in the Arab world. During apartheid, while Nelson Mandela's African National Congress called for the embargo, many dissidents opposed it, arguing that South Africa needed a vibrant economy to turn over to the new democratic regime.
"Typically, those in power, those who are well-off, are not harmed at all by an embargo or boycott," says Crocker. "The consequences are borne by the little guy. And when the margin of safety is very small, those can be disastrous consequences, pushing [the disadvantaged] below the line of survival."
But Crocker does not dismiss them as potential weapons in international relations: "I think the embargo did play a role in the end of apartheid, and that makes me say that you've got to be careful, that there may be times and places where they can be useful, but you've got to look to the long run."
However, those who impose embargoes rarely think of the long run. The sanctions are supposed to bring about acute economic pain that will force a change of course. It is doubtful that those who put the embargo against Cuba in place ever thought it would be in effect in the 21st century.
The longer the sanctions are in place, the better the target country adjusts to them.
"Sometimes an embargo in the short term can disrupt things, but then countries readjust and retool and use alternative sources," says Hanke. "The longer they go on, the less effective they are."
Still, it seems hard to open the doors to heinous regimes. Smith says we should listen to what the dissidents want. In South Africa, many wanted the embargo; in Cuba, he says, most in the democratic movement want trade with the United States.
"You try not to directly subsidize the government," says Destler. "You avoid being too nice to them in what you say about them. You don't stop bugging them about human rights. ... But you expose them as much as possible to our ideas and our economy. If they get some, they will want some more."
Hanke says that trade is crucial in the spread of ideas.
"If you want your ideas and ways of doing things transmitted, one of the great transmission belts is to have people from your country as traders, running all over the world having contact with people," he says.
"So I say turn the traders loose. They'll spread your ideas much more effectively."