Introduction

Abstract

Economic sanctions are becoming increasingly central to shaping strategic outcomes in the twenty-first century. They afford great powers a means by which to seek to influence the behaviour of states, to demonstrate international leadership and to express common values for the benefit of the international community at large. Closer to home, they can also offer a ‘middle way’ for governments that apply them, satisfying moderates and hardliners alike. For some great powers in the multipolar world order, however, they pose a threat to trading relationships. They may also serve as a prelude to military action. With China's international voice growing in prominence and Russia asserting its renewed strength, often in opposition to the use of sanctions, it will be ever more difficult to reach a consensus on their application.

Against this backdrop, knowing what kind of measures to take and in which scenarios they are most likely to work is invaluable. This Adelphi focuses on the different sanctions strategies of the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the EU, with regard to the unfolding nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea. It examines how these measures, designed to marginalise the regimes in both countries and restrict their ability to develop nuclear weapons, have also influenced the sanctioning states’ international partners. As such, they are not just a tool of statecraft: they are potentially an important facet of grand strategy.

Notes

For a useful exposition of this case see Hugh White, ‘Why War in Asia Remains Thinkable’, Survival, vol. 50, no. 6, December 2008–January 2009, pp. 85–104.

The characterisation of the EU as a great power may seem initially contentious. To be sure, the EU does possess economic weight worthy of the description, but there is not yet any single EU foreign policy, despite the controversial appointment of Lady Catherine Ashton as Europe's first foreign minister in November 2009. That said, for the purposes of this study the EU will be described as a great power on the grounds that sanctions legislation is now largely at the EU level, rather than by individual member states. Some sanctions scholars even go so far as to suggest that the EU has developed its own ‘distinct approach’ towards sanctions. See, for example, Anthonius W. de Vries and Hadewych Hazelzet, ‘The EU as a New Actor on the Sanctions Scene’, in Peter Wallensteen and Carina Staibano (eds), International Sanctions, Between Words and War in the Global System (London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005), p. 95.

See, for example, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, Kimberly Ann Elliott and Barbara Oegg, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd ed. (Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007).

See, for example, David Cortright and George A. Lopez (eds), The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

See Joakim Kreutz, ‘Hard Measures by a Soft Power? Sanctions Policy of the European Union 1981-2004’, Bonn International Center for Conversion, paper 45, 2005; and Clara Portela, European Union Sanctions and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2009).

Kim Richard Nossal, Rain Dancing: Sanctions in Canadian and Australian Foreign Policy (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

Sidney Weintraub (ed), Economic Coercion and US Foreign Policy: Implications of Case Studies from the Johnson Administration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), p. x.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 12.

David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 36.

See, for example, O'Sullivan, Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism, p. 12.