Sanctions – They’re Working!
David Ignatius wrote an interesting column for yesterday’s Washington Post (I’m afraid that I didn’t have time to link to it yesterday – but because it’s about such an important subject I decided to link to link to it today) about sanctions. He starts off by writing that the conventional wisdom is that sanctions don’t work: just look at – for instance – Cuba (but also Iraq under Saddam may I add). However, it now seems that “a new variety of sanctions” are working in the “recent cases of North Korea and Iran.”
As you all know, I’m not exactly a firm believer in the effectiveness of sanctions. They have, quite simply, not worked well enough in the past. Recent developments, however, do – as David points out – indicate that sanctions can work, even in quite exceptional cases like that of Iran and North Korea. Obviously I’m still not a ‘believer’, but I am more open to it and believe that further sanctions should be persued in the case of Iran: it seems that the sanctions are encouraging reformers to oppose Ahmadinejad and to call for moderation in Iran’s foreign policy.
So, why are the new type of sanctions effective, where the ‘old type’ were not?
