More Ethical than Not: Sanctions as Surgical Tools
Joy Gordon has made a major contribution to both the ethical analysis and the policy evaluation of economic sanctions. But her claims against sanctions should be understood as critique rather than condemnation and rejection of sanctions on ethical grounds. Through a series of arguments and examples, this response points out that Gordon may be too narrow in defining sanctions' success, and that, where sanctions have gone awry, it is because they were unimaginatively formulated and poorly implemented, not because sanctions are categorically unethical. Multilateral sanctions in the late 1990s are simply more finely tuned than a few years ago. As a technique of coercive diplomacy, sanctions are meant to change dramatically the costs and benefits that leaders of a nation calculate operate in their favor as they pursue policies that the majority of the international community have declared abhorrent. We can, with the help of Gordon's critical claims, accomplish this goal in a more ethical manner, and by so doing, increase the likely success of sanctions in the future.
Democratic disengagement: toward Rousseauian global reform
What are the moral costs of democratic trade with dictatorships, and what action these costs demand of our elected governments? This article develops as a Rousseauian answer the idea that democracies ought to boycott corrupt dictatorships and establish themselves collectively as an autarkic bloc, in order to reform not others but themselves. I articulate the basis for this democratic disengagement, first through a reconstruction of Rousseau's social contract, as seeking to replace corrupt dependence with egalitarian interdependence between citizens. I then examine the potential for egalitarian interdependence between democracies that treat their citizens equally as collectively sovereign, contrasted with corrupting cooperation between democracies and dictatorships, which distorts democracies’ values, specifically by making them complicit in despots’ theft of their peoples’ resources. Ending this corruption requires disengagement, elaborated here first against liberal objections and then against skeptic criticism.
U.S. intervention policy for the post-Cold War world : new challenges and new responses
With the end of the Cold War, the United States faces the challenge of new and more complicated military interventions in the world. In today's smaller scale ethnic and intranational disputes, U.S. forces must play more of a peacekeeper role than deliver massive firepower. How will the military adapt its forces and strategies to the new environment? What new techniques are available for enforcing economic sanctions? What nonlethal and less lethal technologies can be used or developed instead of force? In this collection of original essays, sponsored by the American Assembly, some of America's leading military policy experts examine these questions. They pay special attention to recent trouble spots, such as Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and the former Soviet Union, and they put forth a framework for evaluating a U.S. decision whether or not to intervene in a foreign land.