Zam-Zam
Senator
Unfortunately, for the U.S., the answer most of the time seems to be a big fat "No!":
Responding to the cyber attack against Sony, the U.S. government recently issued new sanctions against North Korea. There are few reasons to be optimistic that this newest round of sanctions will change Pyongyang’s behavior. Like Cuba and Iran, the country has decades of experience circumventing and surviving U.S. sanctions.
Why do U.S. sanctions fail so often? The answer lies not just with America’s adversaries, but also with its allies. You just need to look at Cuba to see why.
It is well known that Cuba managed to find international support from countries opposed to the United States embargo for years. Fidel Castro received over $60 billion-worth of Soviet aid during the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban leader succeeded in courting the patronage of both China and Venezuela to help make ends meet.
But that wasn’t the only prop offered to Cuba. Even when most of the Western Hemisphere was cooperating with the U.S. sanctioning effort against Cuba from 1961 to 1973, estimates suggest that Cuba still conducted well over a quarter of its trade with capitalist countries from outside the region, including Japan, Great Britain, and Spain. Western trade with Cuba rose significantly over that period — reaching approximately 40 percent by 1974.
Japan and the United States’ NATO allies undermined the U.S. sanctions by increasing their trade with Cuba in response to the sanctions. The advantages were hard to deny. Foreign companies knew that the U.S. sanctions offered them significant leverage in negotiating trade deals with Cuba, which could no longer buy or sell U.S. products. They could also make a killing in a market free of U.S. competition. Tired of losing out on trade opportunities with Cuba, nearly all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere abandoned their sanctions against Cuba in 1974 and refused further cooperation with the United States’ sanctioning efforts.
Demonstrating his own entrepreneurial streak, Castro funded much of his trade with the West during the 1980s by reselling the heavily discounted oil Cuba purchased from the Soviet Union on the international marketplace.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, policymakers like then-Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) argued that reinvigorating the international sanctions campaign against Cuba would finally cause the Castro regime to collapse. He was wrong. The rest of the world remained far more interested in vacationing in and trading with Cuba than sanctioning it.
U.S. efforts to bully international cooperation failed miserably.
Complete text: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-deba...ds-of-the-time-and-allies-are-often-to-blame/
Responding to the cyber attack against Sony, the U.S. government recently issued new sanctions against North Korea. There are few reasons to be optimistic that this newest round of sanctions will change Pyongyang’s behavior. Like Cuba and Iran, the country has decades of experience circumventing and surviving U.S. sanctions.
Why do U.S. sanctions fail so often? The answer lies not just with America’s adversaries, but also with its allies. You just need to look at Cuba to see why.
It is well known that Cuba managed to find international support from countries opposed to the United States embargo for years. Fidel Castro received over $60 billion-worth of Soviet aid during the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban leader succeeded in courting the patronage of both China and Venezuela to help make ends meet.
But that wasn’t the only prop offered to Cuba. Even when most of the Western Hemisphere was cooperating with the U.S. sanctioning effort against Cuba from 1961 to 1973, estimates suggest that Cuba still conducted well over a quarter of its trade with capitalist countries from outside the region, including Japan, Great Britain, and Spain. Western trade with Cuba rose significantly over that period — reaching approximately 40 percent by 1974.
Japan and the United States’ NATO allies undermined the U.S. sanctions by increasing their trade with Cuba in response to the sanctions. The advantages were hard to deny. Foreign companies knew that the U.S. sanctions offered them significant leverage in negotiating trade deals with Cuba, which could no longer buy or sell U.S. products. They could also make a killing in a market free of U.S. competition. Tired of losing out on trade opportunities with Cuba, nearly all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere abandoned their sanctions against Cuba in 1974 and refused further cooperation with the United States’ sanctioning efforts.
Demonstrating his own entrepreneurial streak, Castro funded much of his trade with the West during the 1980s by reselling the heavily discounted oil Cuba purchased from the Soviet Union on the international marketplace.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, policymakers like then-Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) argued that reinvigorating the international sanctions campaign against Cuba would finally cause the Castro regime to collapse. He was wrong. The rest of the world remained far more interested in vacationing in and trading with Cuba than sanctioning it.
U.S. efforts to bully international cooperation failed miserably.
Complete text: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-deba...ds-of-the-time-and-allies-are-often-to-blame/
