Economic sanctions as objections are not effective

The argument

Economic sanctions attempt to weaken another country's economy by limiting or restricting trade with it. The difficulty is that this pressure turns out to be tolerable to the sanctioned country as a whole, and the reason lies in the structure of the world economy rather than in any failure to apply the sanctions properly. The global marketplace is large and diverse, so there are usually other options available to a country being sanctioned — alternative buyers, alternative suppliers, alternative routes — and those options help keep its economy running relatively unhindered. Restricting trade with one partner is not the same as restricting trade. Where the pressure does land, it lands on the wrong people. Within the sanctioned country the impoverished are hit hardest, since they have the least capacity to absorb higher prices or shortages, while the wealthy are usually the least affected. That distribution is decisive for whether sanctions work at all, because the wealthy are typically the ones in positions of power. The people who could change the policy are insulated from the cost of maintaining it, and the people bearing the cost have no means of changing it — which is why the result is little or no policy change. Time does not fix this; it works the other way. A lengthy sanction tends to bring about no change from the sanctioned country, because the longer sanctions remain in place, the longer that country has to adapt to them: to find new partners, to reorganise production, to build the workarounds that make the restriction survivable. Sanctions therefore lose force precisely as they are sustained, which leaves them exerting their greatest hardship on the population least able to act and their least pressure on the government they were meant to move.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Countries who control a large percent of a given market have the ability to impose effective sanctions. For example, the 1973 oil embargo imposed on the United States by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was an attempt to get the U.S. to stop supporting Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. While the U.S. still supports Israel, the sanctions were effective in that the U.S. has become more neutral and has supported compromise in the form of a two state solution.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The primary objective of economic sanctions is to speak out against a country's behavior. Changing it's behavior is secondary.