BIDENS FOREIGN POLICY HIRE CONSIDERS SANCTIONS AN ART FORM
By Aída Chávez, The Nation.
March 28, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Richard Nephew, then State Department principal deputy
coordinator for sanctions policy, testifies before the Senate Banking
Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, 2019. Susan Walsh / AP. Phot
While Progressives Urge The Administration To Curb Punitive Sanctions, Its
New Deputy Iran Envoy Was An Architect Of Obama-Era Sanctions Policy.
Under the Trump administration, the United States imposed a wave of
aggressive sanctions on countries like Cuba, Iran, and Venezuelainflicting
suffering on their populations and hampering the countries ability to
respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Biden administration is now conducting
a review of US sanctions policy, and the potential consequences of these
punitive economic restrictions, to determine which of former President
Donald Trumps sanctions it will keep. The new administration has the
ability to roll back many of these brutal sanctions, but isnt expected to
stray too far from Trumps approach.
While Biden has promised a departure from the volatility of Trump-era
foreign policy, his staff choices have skewed interventionist, with Antony
Blinken as secretary of state and Avril Haines as director of national
intelligence, both veterans of the Obama administration. Some progressives
are also concerned with one of the administrations recent hires, taking it
as a troubling sign for the administrations broader sanctions policy going
forward. Richard Nephew, the lead sanctions expert on the Obama State
Departments negotiating team for the 2015 nuclear deal, recently joined the
Biden administration as deputy Iran envoy. Erik Sperling, executive director
of Just Foreign Policy, told The Nation that Nephews hiring exposes a
moral dilemma for Democrats.
Unlike most others in Washingtons foreign policy establishment, Nephew has
made the rare admission that even targeted sanctions on so-called bad actors
destroy economies, hurting civilian populations in the long run. He also
takes credit for contributing to shortages in medicine and medical devices
in Iran through sanctions he helped design, making these necessities too
costly for the average Iranian. In his 2017 book, The Art of Sanctions: A
View from the Field, Nephew explains how sanctions are meant to inflict pain
so intolerable that it forces the target to acquiesce to US demands,
adding that the casualties and damage of sanctions can be less visible and
seem less destructive than those of military conflict.
US officials often deny that sanctions hurt civilians like this. In 2019,
the special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, blamed the lack of access
to medicine and other basic necessities on the Iranian government, claiming
these items are exempt from sanctions. While this is technically true,
restrictions on financial institutions, combined with the economic problems
that lead to the depreciation of currency, ultimately have the same effect.
Thats what Nephew is counting on.
This no doubt explains part of the attractiveness of sanctions as a tool of
force: it is preferable by far for a politician or national security
official to accept and defend the loss of 1/4 percent of GDP than it is to
accept and defend the loss of a thousand military servicepeople and
civilians, he wrote. And just because the damage wrought by sanctions may
be less visible (at least, with some sanctions regimes), it need not be less
destructive, particularly for economically vulnerable populations that may
be affected.
Nephew goes on to brag about all the different ways the Obama
administrations sanctions campaign destroyed Irans economy, including
pushing the economy into a contraction and driving up unemployment and
inflation to double digitscalling it a tremendous success.
Our sanctions campaign brought unforeseen, knock-on effects that played
into our effort to increase the sense of pressure and unease within the
Iranian economy, he wrote, giving the example of sanctions tripling
chicken prices during important Iranian holiday periods.
It is widely knownbut rarely acknowledged by US officialsthat sanctions
aim to increase discontent by harming the well-being of the general public,
Sperling said. Why would [Democrats] support progressive economic policy
for Americans but seek to undermine those same policies for millions of
innocent people abroad?
Congressional progressives and left-leaning foreign policy groups are hoping
to influence this aspect of Bidens policy, urging the administration to
provide relief from broad-based sanctions that are worsening conditions and
harming civilians abroad. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to Secretary of State
Anthony Blinken this Tuesday, arguing that the United States should end the
misguided ban on diesel fuel swaps with Venezuela. Just last month,
Democratic Representatives Ilhan Omar and Chuy García, along with Senator
Elizabeth Warren, sent a letter to Biden calling on him to consider the
humanitarian impact of sanctions more broadly and provide relief. Before the
pandemic began, Omar had introduced legislation to require congressional
approval to impose or renew existing sanctions.
Far too often and for far too long, sanctions have been imposed as a
knee-jerk reaction without a measured and considered assessment of their
impacts, the members wrote in the letter, which was signed by 24 Democrats.
Sanctions are easy to put in place, but notoriously difficult to lift.
Now, a coalition of 55 advocacy groups and progressive organizations,
including Amnesty International, Code Pink, Just Foreign Policy, and Demand
Progress, is building on this momentum, sending their own letter to Biden to
demand that the administration indefinitely suspend broad-based sanctions on
civilian sectors, implement ongoing reporting protocols to monitor the human
cost of sanctions, and adopt specific policy changes to exempt things like
medical equipment and food.
