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Blunt instruments make for botched jobs and unbothered dictators

INSTEAD of worrying about sanctions, Kim Jong Il might gleefully consider the fate of Athens 2,400 years ago. It decreed a trade embargo on neighbouring Megara, but the ensuing 27-year struggle left the Athenians humiliated and Megara's ally, Corinth, triumphant.

That may be the first instance of sanctions failing, but there are plenty of more recent cases. In the 20th century they were used ever more often, especially by American presidents and lawmakers. Franklin Roosevelt tried sanctions on Japan in 1940. Dwight Eisenhower smacked them on Britain in 1956 to end the Suez venture. Jimmy Carter punished the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 with a wheat embargo and an Olympic boycott. Ronald Reagan imposed them in protest at martial law in Poland. Congress, too, came to see sanctions as an easy, cheap way of expressing ire. In 1996, for example, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Vanuatu and Venezuela were all under American embargo for beastliness to whales or dolphins. In the next five years America imposed 85 new sanctions on foreign states.

Sanctions may feel better than nothing: they are less feeble than scolding an ambassador and less bloody than sending in the marines. They provide a frisson of moral satisfaction. And sometimes they work—ending Britain's Suez foray, for example. The threat of penalties by city and state officials in America in 1998 forced a group of Swiss banks to cough up $1.25 billion for some Holocaust survivors. Libya's return to respectability may have owed something to sanctions. They played a part in ending white rule in South Africa too.

Spotting the failures is easier. The League of Nations' sanctions did not protect Abyssinia against fascist Italy. The United Nations did no better with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Harsh regimes are still in place in Iran (under American embargo since 1979), Myanmar (since 1997), Sudan (since 1996), never mind Cuba (1962).

Regime change may not be sanctions' aim; behaviour change may suffice. Even so, snags abound. The morality of punishing poor people who live in a boycotted autocracy is dubious. It may make the regime more popular or powerful. Mr Hussein easily ensured that sanctions hurt chiefly the innocent. Scarcity provides an excuse for rationing, permits and licences, creating corruption, favouritism and a black market which the regime can control. In Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, sanctions virtually fused the state with the criminal class.

Sanctions may have other results too. Arms embargoes turned South Africa into a huge maker, then exporter, of guns, and may have encouraged Pakistan to go nuclear. They hurt the Serbs and Croats much less than the Bosnian Muslims the West hoped to help. In Haiti the misery they caused in the early 1990s washed thousands of refugees up on America's coast.

Floridians' complaints were added to the more familiar ones of American farmers and businessmen, whose markets shrink with every wheat embargo or investment boycott. Sanctions in 1995 alone cost American firms between $15 billion and $19 billion, and they affected some 200,000 workers. Impex, a Japanese firm, this month blamed American-inspired sanctions for its loss of a leading role in developing an oilfield in Iran. No wonder that sanctions, especially unilaterally imposed ones like America's ban on trade with Cuba, cause friction among allies.

Not that sanctions are necessarily futile. They may have some value simply in expressing condemnation. But they work best when clearly defined and with an achievable end. If that is not achieved, as in 1990 when the UN ordered Iraq, in vain, to withdraw from Kuwait, then it can at least be argued that using force is justified.

It helps, too, if a mechanism for ending sanctions is made clear at the outset; they are easier to impose than to lift, and the sanctioned regime is unlikely to make even small concessions if these are not greeted with some easing of the boycott. Moreover, after years of ritual blacklisting, fatigue sets in among the boycotters.

If they are to work, sanctions must be imposed by as many countries as possible. The rebellion led by Ian Smith in Rhodesia in 1965, which Harold Wilson, Britain's prime minister, expected sanctions to end within “weeks rather than months”, was sustained by neighbouring South Africa for 14 years. North Korea's survival will be similarly affected by how China behaves.

The fashion now is for “smart” sanctions, which try to isolate and hurt the regime and its cronies, not the innocent. But the people sanctioned must mind. Robert Mugabe's wife may no longer be able to go on the shopping trips to Paris that she used to enjoy; her husband seems unworried. On the other hand, Swiss bankers do want respectability. Apartheid South Africa did want to count as a democracy, and it hated its exclusion from world sport. In short: sanctions work best when aimed at hypocrites. Mr Kim, for all his faults, may see no merit in vice paying any homage to virtue.

One other problem arises from the new urge to isolate odious leaders. Such people already tend to be remote from reality. They are surrounded by yes-men and often ignorant of other countries. Increasing their isolation may be dangerous.

It is not far-fetched to argue that most of the nastiest wars of the 20th century could have been averted had the aggressor known what would follow. If part of the blame for the two world wars, and the Korean, Falklands and first Gulf wars, lay with the failure of others to convey the appropriate message, part also lay with the isolation and ignorance on which the aggressors based their misjudgments.

Arguably, Mr Kim should be brought closer to reality, not driven deeper into the realms of ghastly fantasy. History holds lessons for the sanctioner as well as the sanctioned.

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at no time has the Chinese ever been seen as a directly imperialist power

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