US-POLITICS: Sanctions Debate Latest Episode of Identity Crisis

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 20 1997 (IPS) - Twenty years ago, U.S. arms exporters who saw the opportunity for big bucks from Latin American military dictators were thwarted by President Jimmy Carter’s new human rights policy.

Ten years ago U.S. hi-tech firms saw a bonanza in new markets behind the Iron Curtain, but they were forced to wait until the Pentagon was convinced their equipment would not be used against the West.

These days, U.S. corporations see mega-markets just about everywhere they look, and they’re “mad as hell” about U.S. laws that prevent them from following up. It’s the latest twist in a 200- year-old debate between free-traders and moralists of the left, right, and centre who believe it’s wrong to do business with the “bad guys.”

“People are willing to do business with just about anything to make money. It’s greed,” observed disgusted rightwing Republican Sen. Alfonse d’Amato tlast week, during hearings to review the U.S. commercial embargo of Iran.

d’Amato believes Washington should place even tighter sanctions on Iran and Libya for their alleged support of international terrorism and general roguishness; but the Christian Right in this country is mobilising to deny China trade benefits because of its repression of religion. At the same time, human rights activists are calling on President Bill Clinton to adopt stronger sanctions against the military regimes in Nigeria and Burma to force them to give way to democratic governments.

Multinational corporations, which have seen their overseas investments and sales skyrocket in this era of globalisation , are now fighting them every step of the way. They are emboldened by statistics which show that trade’s share of the U.S. economy grew from 13 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 1995. “That’s where the jobs are growing,” says Chamber of Commerce International Vice President William Workman.

This latest wrinkle in the battle between merchant and missionary over Washington’s soul promises to be a big one, if only because the stakes may be as large as ever and the corporate community is trying to organise itself as never before.

Business wants to junk virtually all sanctions, but especially unilateral ones which they say are self-defeating and cost thousands of U.S. jobs, not to mention millions of dollars in corporate profits.

Just last month, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) listed 61 U.S. laws and executive actions authorising unilateral sanctions that have been enacted during the past four years against 35 countries around the world. The proliferation of sanctions – at federal, state and even local levels of government – had become a trend that is threatening the country’s competitive edge, it said.

That report was followed by the creation of an anti-sanctions coalition, USA-Engage, composed of 440 firms and business associations.

The group’s launch coincided with the release by the ardently free-trade Institute of International Economics (IIE) of a study which concluded that U.S. companies lost 15 billion dollars to 20 billion dollars in exports in 1995 due to economic sanctions against 26 countries. Most of the lost business went to competitors in Europe, Canada, and East Asia, according to the report.

“We have organised, because the evidence is clear: the proliferation of U.S. unilateral economic sanctions undermines American leadership and competitiveness, costs U.S. jobs, and results in significant losses to the U.S. economy,” said Donald Fites, chief executive of Caterpillar Inc. and chairman of the elite Business Roundtable of the largest U.S. multinationals.

Caterpillar, the Illinois construction equipment giant, stands to lose tens of millions of dollars in potential business if sanctions currently being considered for China, Indonesia, and Burma are imposed.

Fites’ litany of complaints about sanctions was a familiar one. In recent months, companies ranging from AT&T, which would like to do some serious business in Cuba, to Unocal, whose pipeline construction project in Burma is threatened by a possible investment ban, have cited very much the same reasons why sanctions don’t make sense. But sanctions boosters from all sides beg to differ, even with respect to unilateral sanctions.

“Unilateral sanctions have been extremely valuable as a human rights tool,” says Holly Burkhalter, Washington director for Human Rights Watch for almost 20 years before she moved to Physicians for Human Rights earlier this year.

“It is a form of stigmatisation whose sting many countries feel deeply,” she says, adding that Washington “has a special responsibility to lead (in imposing sanctions on abusive governments) as a result of its status as a world power. It can bring others along.”

“The American people see their nation as being an exceptional one, with a very special mission in the world,” according to Wall Street Journal columnist Irving Kristol. “This mission has an ineradicable moral component — our foreign policy is supposed to make the world a better place for humanity to inhabit.” Most recently that impulse has been expressed through the use of sanctions, says the prominent neo-conservative.

In the coming battle, which this year will almost certainly centre on China, business has a key ally in Clinton.

After denouncing former President George Bush in 1992 for not imposing sanctions – or at least threatening to impose sanctions – against China for its poor human rights performance, Clinton abruptly bought on to the corporate argument that increased economic engagement results in political reform.

“We remain convinced…that as societies become more open economically, they also become more open politically,” Clinton has said. But this view that, just by doing business merchants really are missionaries for U.S. values, mocked by pro-sanctions forces.

They note that the human rights situation in China has, by the administration’s own admission, deteriorated in recent years even as U.S. and western investments there have reached record levels.