Going Soft. Does Barack Obama need to start flexing his muscles?

During the Presidential campaign and even during the primaries, Obama’s opponents were swift to underline his relative lack of foreign policy experience and question his ability to make tough decisions. Following his election, his subsequent commitment to dialogue and the abandonment of the Bush era Manichean rhetoric these voices began to decry the Carter-esque weakness of President Obama. To critics such as Rush Limbaugh he is too soft on America’s enemies and too quick to talk where only force will be understood. To what extent, if any, are these criticisms valid?

President Obama has made it clear that he views the world through a prism almost diametrically opposed to that which coloured the thoughts of George Bush. Where Bush saw the need to assert US hegemony through overwhelming force, a fact succinctly illustrated by the label applied to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Operation Shock and Awe), Obama seems more motivated by the pressing need to counter the anti-American sentiment which has blossomed in many parts of the world during the past decade with dialogue and engagement. Take Iran for example, where Bush seemed only to threaten a metal fist Obama has extended an outstretched hand- albeit one that has yet to be accepted.

While dialogue and engagement were also employed during the Bush era, the six party talks involving N Korea being one such example, they seemed to take a back seat to a more abrasive approach. Following the recent N Korean nuclear test Obama has increasingly come under fire for not knowing when to change track from soft to hard power. Obama’s capacity to at once empathise and reason, lecture and enquire, reassure and challenge would seem to be of little use when confronted by the intransigence of the isolated dictator. Words carry very little, and probably no, influence at the court of Kim Jong-il. Elsewhere, Benjamin Netanyahu’s unwillingness to bend to President Obama’s will with regard to the halting of the expansion of Israeli settlements seems to be another failure of soft power when faced with a refusal to compromise.

Yet this reading of both the North Korean and Israeli case are somewhat misleading. By engaging the other four members of the six party talks the “soft” approach can still exert pressure on Kim Jong-il’s regime through the tightening of closely targeted financial sanctions and reassure its neighbours through the formulation of a cohesive contingency plan. Similarly while Mr Netanyahu may seem closed Obama’s suggestions, Obama’s speech in Cairo may well have laid the groundwork for a fundamental rethink of US policy which would force Netanyahu into making the decision between compromise and profound damage to the US-Israeli relationships. Similarly, critics of Obama’s supposed reticence to respond decisively to pressing foreign policy concerns often overlook the fact that he is sending 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan and that drone attacks on targets in the AfPak area have increased since he came to power.

The much needed paradigm shift from the ineffective and ultimately self defeating world view of Bush should be welcomed by Americans as a valuable opportunity to reverse the decline of Amerian power and influence in face of what is increasingly being called the “Asian century”. The attempt to tar Obama with the label of an overly soft President is a reduction a more complex reality. The desire to engage with countries of great importance for global stability is both laudatory and necessary. The real danger, as Gideon Rachman so astutely pointed out in a recent article in the Financial Times, is that expectations for soft power surpass realistic barometers, for as Obama himself pointed out in his speech in Cairo - words alone are not enough.

However, Obama is aware that a successful combination of both soft and hard power is integral to the formulation of the “smart power” America must exude if it is to consolidate or even maintain its influence on a rapidly evolving world stage. Thus, Obama’s efforts to reinvigorate US soft power should be welcomed and not scorned. President Obama’s foreign policy does not rest purely on eloquent speeches and empathetic sentiment but rather on a pragmatic blend of both his and America’s strengths.

If this approach is deserving of criticism, I must be missing something?

Economic sanctions.

The recent underground nuclear test in North Korea has once again focused minds on the pressing need to control nuclear proliferation. Mr Obama’s laudable desire to see a non-nuclear world appears a distant utopia when confronted by the determined efforts of states such as N. Korea and Iran to arm themselves with nuclear capabilities. To most sane commentators the question is not should these two countries be permitted or even encouraged in their quest, but rather how can the rest of the world stop this quest before it becomes an even greater threat to regional stability. Inevitably, the responses to these two scenarios have varied, in large part as a function of the proponent’s position in the political spectrum, with diehard neo-cons continuing to support a surgical bombing campaign and more liberal aspects proposing dialogue backed up by a more comprehensive raft of economic sanctions.

While the absence of large scale public support for military intervention in Iran or North Korea as well as resource shortages have rendered it far less likely than it appeared to be in 2006 or even 2007, economic sanctions have remained at the forefront of many proposals. However, the effectiveness, desirability and morality of economic sanctions are the subject of much debate. Are economic sanctions effective in targeting political regimes? Should the US and other countries continue to build many of the policies around their implementation?

Many, but not all, of the criticisms levelled against economic sanctions originate in the humanitarian domain. The UN sanctions imposed on Iraq during the 1990’s are a vivid illustration of the negative effects of sanctions on the welfare of the people who live under the target regime. A 2003 report by the Norwegian Red Cross cited a negative correlation between economic sanctions and average life expectancy and employment levels, and a positive correlation with infant mortality. The suffering which these measures inflict upon the population leads to a number of outcomes; firstly it can lead to a criminalization of the economy and of civil society of both the target country and even neighbouring states, as people try to bypass the sanctions, and secondly it can lead to a “rally around the flag effect” and the demonization of the countries or bodies imposing the sanctions.

In response to these criticisms, the last decade has seen the emergence of the concept of “smart sanctions”. Much like the bombs from which they derives their name these aim to minimise the deleterious effects of the sanctions on the general population by specifically targeting the political regime through instruments such
as asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes.

Efforts to justify the use of general economic sanctions and the human suffering inflicted by them is often based upon the belief that the benefits outweigh the costs and that other policy instruments such as crude force have a much higher human cost. Similarly, while the seminal work on the topic “Economic sanctions reconsidered” states that economic sanctions have only been effective in the partial or full attainment of their goals in 34 percent of the cases examined between 1914 and 2000, David Baldwin reminds us in “Economic Statecraft” that few other policy options except perhaps, direct application of military force have a higher success rate.

Faced with leaders as intransigent as Kim Jong Il the reality is that sanctions can often appear to the most politically expedient response to conflicts which offer few, if any, viable solutions. Economic sanctions demonstrate a will to tackle a problem, while avoiding often unpopular and costly direct intervention. However, their symbolic potency is enfeebled by increasing systemic impotency. In order for economic sanctions to be effective they have to be multilateral, and with the current recalibration of world power and the competition for influence and resources which this has engendered, consensus is far from easy to achieve. Also the level of influence which sanctions exercise is often a function of their impact on the country’s economic well being, and thus is closely linked to their impact on the well being of the population.

So where does that leave us? Economic sanctions often negatively impact on the well being of the people of the countries they target, yet both their efficiency and their inherent weakness springs from the level of economic stagnation they provoke. “Smart sanctions” seem on paper to annihilate the worrying side-effects but also risk not having the dosage necessary to solve the problem. Under domestic and international pressure to act politicians often take refuge behind the imposition of sanctions while failing to identify clear goals which they are supposed to achieved.

Economic sanctions are a lever of influence which can play an important role in foreign policy. However their efficiency is reliant on their implementation alongside other policy instruments, as part of a multilateral agenda and in the search of pursuit of clearly defined goals. Both North Korea and Iran illustrate the limits of sanctions, the difficulties of effectively targeting specific programs and the challenges posed to enforcement by a world defined to a large degree by globalisation and the multiplicity of trade and communication channels. While economic sanctions are by no means an end goal in themselves, they are a means of getting there. It is policy makers own interest to clearly demarcate the often blurry line between moral probity and political expediency.