The modern weapon of “sanctions” seems made-to-order for the foreign policy of Bill Clinton. Remarkably evasive and unprincipled even for a modern politician, Clinton is possessed of a horror of commitment in both his personal and his political life. The armamentarium of minute differentia in sanctions allows Clinton to posture at length as a man of peace or of toughness in foreign policy while seemingly keeping all of his options open. In particular, sanctions allow the President to assume moral stances while avoiding any unpleasant consequences.

Sanctions are measures to inflict economic pain on countries whose governments in some way displease the United States. They can range from seizure of the other country’s assets in the United States to embargoes on financial dealings, investments, or trade. The embargoes can range up to all imports to, or exports from, the sanctioned country. The attractive point to the President is that they exert coercion upon another country without actually dropping American bombs or sending American troops into harm’s way. War on the cheap; exertion of American force on relatively defenseless nations. What could be more attractive?

Bill Clinton, it is true, scarcely invented the sanction device. It has been used ever since Woodrow Wilson launched the perpetual global crusade to impose replicas of American institutions throughout the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s sanctions against the Japanese in the late 1930’s—embargoing oil to Japan and confiscating Japanese financial assets in the United States, coupled with Secretary of State Hull’s ultimatum to the Japanese in late November 1941 to get out of Indochina, or else—drove Japan in desperation to attack Pearl Harbor, thus falling for the trap set by FDR to get the United States into World War II against the wishes of the American people. Presidents Reagan and Bush enforced stringent economic sanctions against South Africa, under cover of United Nations agreement. But with Bill Clinton, sanctions seem to have taken over as almost his only foreign policy. Sanctions against the Serbs are starving them and ruining their economy; sanctions against the Haitians are accomplishing similar goals; and there are a wide variety of sanctions against the North Koreans to prevent them from acquiring one or two puny nuclear weapons. Of course, by the time this article appears in early fall, Clinton may have already decided it is worthwhile to go to war against any of the three countries above.

Typically, these Clintonian sanctions embargo all trade with the hapless country except for “humanitarian” food and medicine, but in practice food and medicine can’t get into the country either, as the Serbs and Haitians have discovered. For how can every plane and every truck be searched in order to exempt whatever food or medicine might be on board? Typically, too, sanctions, from the mildest to the severest, don’t “work” in the sense of forcing the country to obey American commands. They don’t work for a simple reason: if the sanctions are mild, they don’t have much effect; but if they are severe, the economic pain is inflicted not on the country’s power elite, who manage to live high off the hog regardless of what happens, but on the country’s hapless subject population. Victims of American embargoes in Serbia are not Miloshevitch and his ruling elite, but the Serbian people; sufferers from starvation in Haiti are not the ruling military, but the subject people.

Remarkably, the more candid advocates of sanctions admit they don’t work, which means that they can only escalate to the severest forms. The United States must then either forget about the whole thing or launch a military strike. So what’s the point? The point of sanctions is to shore up the psyche and the political prestige of the sanctioners, that is, the American rulers. To the hue and cry of the pundits and the sentimental watchers of CNN who ask, “How can you sit and watch [fill in almost any country] and do nothing?” the President can reply: “I am doing something. I’m imposing sanctions.” As far as actually changing the actions of the despised governments, this is almost beside the point. Sanctions “work” by buying time so that the President can baby the situation along for another few weeks or months without having to commit to any real course of action; they also “work” by enabling him to throw a few bones to the permanent-war crowd and allowing him to oppose whatever foreign evil is being held up for attack this month. And who knows? If the President babies the situation long enough, maybe something will turn up, Allah will provide, or maybe he can stick his successor with the accumulating mess.

Meanwhile, the permanent-war crusaders, the laptop bombardiers, are not really satisfied; in the name of the High Moral Ground, they keep calling for Serbian or Haitian or Korean or Iraqi blood. But even if their full satisfaction has to be postponed, they are partially appeased by contemplating the sight of the United States, in its moral crusade, at least inflicting starvation on millions of poor Serbs, Bosnians, Rwandans, etc. It’s a measure of the debasement of current political discourse that the thirsters after starvation and mass murder are considered the “moralists,” while those of us opposed to such measures are denounced as “selfish,” “uncaring,” and “standing by while . . . ” In the end, however, participating in mass murder and imposed starvation seems to rank a bit worse on one’s scale of values than refusing to do so.

But the biggest delusion concerning sanctions is the notion that they are a moderate alternative to war. Under international law, sanctions are considered an act of war, and indeed how could they not be? In old-fashioned pre-Woodrow Wilson international law, nations were supposed to leave the trade of other countries alone; even warring countries were not supposed to interfere with the rights of neutral nations to trade with their enemies. Moreover, in old-fashioned pre-Wilson international law, carved out over the centuries by scholastics and jurists and more or less adhered to by all civilized nations, civilians of enemy countries are never supposed to be targeted. You are not supposed to bomb enemy civilians unless they are directly in the path of military attack (a fortified city in the path of battle). Sanctions and embargoes, however, are pure attempts to injure the civilian population and thereby put pressure on government to change its ways. But on the contrary, the sanctioned government will be able to rally the public behind it even further, in common and justifiable hatred against the American sanctioner, who has not even had the candor and the guts to declare war.

Sanctions, then, are in no sense a substitute for war. They are a warlike act and a cowardly and deeply immoral means for the United States to inflict pain on hapless civilians without suffering any sort of retaliation. Perhaps one day, in some far-off future, the worm may be able to turn, and the sanctioned country may be able to turn the tables. It will be interesting to see how the President, and the permanent-war pundits, would react to a little sanctioning themselves.