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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, MARCH 11: It’s now official. Thought hit five times harder than India by the impact of the US-inspired sanctions following its nuclear tests, Pakistan’s response has been a typical I-don’t-care’ one. The Punjabi machismo of its politicians, presumably, prevented it from letting the US pressure it into signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and it only agreed to do so when it seemed reasonably clear that India was willing to sign it. This, and other such nuggets (trivia, say some) of information, such as the sanctions-induced loss of income to both India and Pakistan, are contained in a recent analysis by the Institute for International Economics (IIE) in Washington, one of the world’s best-reputed centres for the study of all sanctions in the current century.
The total cost or impact of sanctions on India, according to C Fred Bergsten, director of the IIE, who spoke at a seminar in the Capital this evening, was around $500 million, or around 0.1 per cent of the country’s GDP. Pakistan’s loss, primarily in the form of the hardship caused by reduced IMF and other such assistance, was roughly equal to this. But, given that its economy is smaller than India’s, this adds up to roughly one per cent of its GDP.
In other words, Bergsten concluded to the delight of his India hosts, the ICRIER and the CII, that sanctions do not really work. They are not too hard on the countries they are being imposed upon, nor do they necessarily help achieve the foreign policy or other goal that is being sought to be achieved. Bergsten said that in India’s case, on a scale of 1 to 16, sanctions got a score of 4, which is less than modest. In the case of the more machismo Pakistan, the score was even less, only one on the same scale.
The problem from the US point of view, as Bergsten’s analyses shows, is that huge as it is, the US simply isn’t big enough. The size of the US economy to that of India, for example, is 20:1. Impressive as that undoubtedly is, IIE’s analyses of 170 cases of sanctions shows that for sanctions to work, the imposing country’s GDP should be around 100 times that of the country being targeted. One of the most successful instances of sanctions, Bergsten noted humbly, was the Indian blockade of Nepal in the 1980s — India’s GDP to Nepal’s was 94:1 — when India successfully got Nepal to change its policy on China. India’s score then, on the 1 to 16 scale, was in fact, an outstanding 9. The US GDP to Pakistan’s of course, was even higher, at 135:1, but obviously the Pakistanis are a lot more resilient than the Nepalese!
On an average though, the IIE analyses shows that sanctions have succeeded once every four times they have been imposed; though understandably, their impact has been far greater when they are multilateral (of the UN kind) rather than when they are unilateral (of the US variety). In fact, prior to the Cold War, the US unilateral sanctions were partially successful in half of the cases; post-Cold War, this has fallen to just around a fifth.
In many cases, as Planning Commission deputy chairman K C Pant put it while chairing today’s seminar, sanctions can actually harden positions in countries where policies enjoy public support. The US sanctions on Cuba backfired so badly, Bergsten joked, that the team which reported on their impact said the Helms-Burton law which necessitated the sanctions, should be renamed the Helms-Burton-Castro law since the sanctions were helping Castro consolidate his position!
Of course, none of this, as the IIE study shows, has prevented countries from imposing sanctions. US sanctions, for instance, cover countries which house half the world’s population and if you take into account the fact that the companies in these countries also export to other areas, virtually the entire world is covered by US sanctions. Worse, while the US is actually (Bergsten verifies this) becoming less of a lone ranger imposing unilateral sanctions in the post-Cold War period, the UN is imposing more sanctions. Pre-1990, the UN approved of only two cases of sanctions, in the last nine years, it approved of nine cases.
