The days are long gone when Labour was torn apart by a ban on the bomb. For the party leader, Ed Miliband, the Trident missile is what HS2 is for Prime Minister David Cameron. It is political tokenism, machismo, image candy. Am I big on defence, Miliband said to an interviewer. “Hell, yes.” Look at my weapons.
For Britain (and France), nuclear bombs are to foreign policy what Olympics are to proper sport: Chauvinism bereft of intellectual justification or value for money. But what of weapons that actually hurt people? Last week, the US was still refusing to lift economic sanctions on Cuba, even while admitting their failure for half a century to bring down the Castro regime. Indeed, the effect of sanctions is Cuba’s chief tourism appeal.
At the same time, America and Britain are resisting Iran’s demand for sanctions to be lifted following the inspection of its nuclear plants this summer. In the case of Russia, pressure is on for sanctions to be tightened in response to Putin’s constant provocations along his western flank. They are the “something” that can always “be done”.
Sanctions remain in place against North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Congo and other weak and vulnerable states, irrespective of whether they achieve any policy goal. They have become the default mode of western diplomacy, the acceptable face of aggression, a casual flick of contempt by the rich against the poor.
Surveys of economic sanctions always equate “hurting” with “working”. Lots of things hurt, such as torture, but that doesn’t make them work. The studies by the Chicago academic Robert Pape in the 1990s on the futility or counter-productivity of almost all the century’s 115 uses of sanctions have never been seriously challenged. Yet, sanctions’ supporters persist in rosy-tinted language about their “signalling”, their “pressure mixes” and their “changing the calculus of repression”. They all assume dictators think like democrats. Sanctions can be briefly effective against democracies (against Britain during Suez), yet tend to make democracy less effective through isolation (as probably in Russia and Iran).
The BBC’s Bridget Kendall has just returned from a determined search for critics of Vladimir Putin across Russia. She can hardly conceal the fact that sanctions have bolstered support for the regime. They have entrenched a siege economy, silenced criticism of Putin and encouraged his chauvinist belligerence. They have also divided and weakened Europe. They are the most dangerously counter-productive policy imaginable and all because “something must be done about Ukraine”.
None of the countries targeted by sanctions threaten the safety or survival of Britain. All are based on the “economic fallacy” that money is what motivates power in a modern state. Attack the money, especially of a regime’s “cronies”, and policy must change. Yet, years of business articles about the Russian economy “facing collapse” (along with the Cuban, Iranian and Syrian ones) must make Putin laugh. So a babushka (an old woman or grandmother) freezes and an oligarch’s daughter cannot shop at Harrods? Big deal. It is like Harold Wilson pledging that sanctions against Rhodesia would work in “weeks not months”. They lasted 14 years.
Iran is a relative newcomer to the ranks of regimes stabilised by western sanctions. It has seen just 36 years of their not toppling clerics and not stopping them going nuclear. The current detente resulted from the election of a reformist leader, Hassan Rouhani, opposing the domestic chaos of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is no doubt that sanctions hurt Iran and it would like them to end. But that does not make them effective.
The West cannot conceivably conquer Iran or bomb it into submission. A military attack would merely speed an arms race and force the country back towards fundamentalism. Only the soft power of economic and cultural exchange might avert that danger. Neither the West nor the Iranian people have the remotest interest in sanctions continuing and Rouhani needs every card he can play against his hardliners. Yet, Washington and London still hold hard to sanctions. They have all the diplomatic subtlety of Game of Thrones.
The one true coercion that dictatorships understand is an army firing guns. It worked against Serbia, against the Taliban, and against Saddam Hussain, just as the absence of an army has not worked against Syria or Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). But such force is advisable only when that army is liable to win — rarely the case against AK47s — and when it is ready to occupy territory indefinitely. As for armadas of costly ships and planes, they are hangovers from 20th-century conflicts. Britain’s present defence (or rather attack) policy is where medicine was in the days of wart-charmers and bleeding.
Sanctions have become as sacred to western armouries as nuclear bombs were 50 years ago. No one dares question them for fear of being thought a dove or a wimp. They cost little to the aggressor but make them feel good. They repress trade rivals. They attract macho adjectives, such as tough, meaningful, targeted and smart. They are chiefly aimed at domestic consumption. Only the poor (and a handful of rich) in the victim states suffer.
Influencing policy in foreign countries short of war is a mug’s game. It is realistic only where it takes the form of diplomatic, trade and cultural exchange, and strengthens the professional and merchant class from which brave criticism of authoritarian government tends to emerge. Yet sanctions suppress such groups and drive them into exile, as now in Russia and Iran.
The idea that economic warfare would ever cause Iraqis to rise up against Saddam or Libyans against Muammar Gaddafi or Cubans against Fidel and Raul Castro, was always daft. The idea that it will turn Russia against Putin is beyond absurd. Yet, such warfare remains British government’s policy. And in Labour’s manifesto, sanctions are no more questioned than nuclear weapons. Stupid still rules.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
