Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation
An Interview with Etel Solingen
IGCC
04/30/2012, 11:52amLink: http://igcc.ucsd.edu/publications/igcc-in-the-news/news_2012043082489.htm
Etel Solingen’s latest book Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation was released last month by Cambridge University Press. It includes chapters by PPNT alumni David Palkki, Celia Reynolds, and Wilfred Wan. In an exclusive interview with Solingen, IGCC shares the origins of the research, key principles, and the potential implications for policymakers.
Q: What was the genesis of this particular project? How did you come to be interested in this topic? How does it fit in with the research you have done so far in your career?
A: This current volume is in some ways a sequel to a previous book Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East. That book looked at the demand side of nuclear weapons and concentrated on which countries pursued nuclear weapons and which did not, and why. The current project, Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation, focuses on the supply side of the equation. I look at the supply of positive and negative inducements from the international community to persuade states to abandon their illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons and to uphold their commitments to nonproliferation treaties that they had ratified.
Q: What do you think the role of universities should be in informing nuclear policy in general and in particular? Do you feel that the University of California is at an advantage or disadvantage in playing this role?
A: The current volume is the product of a collaboration with prominent experts from several University of California campuses and beyond. The UC—including PPNT alumni—is uniquely endowed with expert faculty in the study of statecraft—both on the positive and negative inducements sides of the spectrum. I am also delighted that two of my students and former IGCC PPNT participants contributed their own research—Wilfred T. Wan, now a 2011/2012 Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, and Celia L. Reynolds, a Nonproliferation and International Security Analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As a multi-campus research unit IGCC has, over the years, deployed the strength of UC faculty and students through various other projects that inform policy on a wide range of pressing topics in international security, environmental, technical, and other issues.
Q: Tell us about the goal or objective of the volume.
A: The hope is that the volume can contribute to the current national debates on these issues, including Iran and North Korea, but also more generally to a better understanding of the broader application of sanctions in various issue-areas. The objective was to improve our knowledge of scope conditions and causal mechanisms that may explain the complex connection between international inducements and specific outcomes. I was particularly interested in advancing our knowledge of the domestic distributional cost and benefits of external inducements (both positive and negative) for target states. This goal was designed to broaden the typical focus on whether inducements “work,” because this narrow focus on outcomes has sometimes come at the expense of a deeper inquiry into why different inducements may or may not yield particular expected results under certain circumstances.
The main objective was not to take sides in the sanctions’ pessimism/optimism debate, although there is some of that in the volume as well. The chapters reflect ample divergence among contributors on what types of inducements are best and what the right mix should be. Overall, we aimed to advance the understanding of causal processes that inducements unleash in the domestic politics of target states as well as the intended and unintended/unexpected outcomes that inducements tend to produce.
Q: The book talks about why self-reliant autocracies are more often the subject of sanctions. What are the unique/specific characteristics autocracies have that make them appear more threatening to the world than a democracy with a full nuclear arsenal?
A: Looking at the nature of regimes that have violated their nonproliferation treaty commitments in recent years, it is not so hard to see why there are serious concerns. Libya, Iran, Syria, Iraq, are examples that help explain the main dilemma that emerges from the volume’s focus. The dilemma stems from the fact that domestic political economy models of regime survival closer to the inward-looking ideal-type tend to account for most cases of non-compliance with international commitments to eschew nuclear weapons in the last two decades. Hence, regimes advancing such models have also been the most frequent targets of external inducements, particularly sanctions. The dilemma also arises because the very structure, composition, preferences, and strategies of inward-looking models also make them most resistant to external inducements, particularly negative but even positive ones. To make matters worse, there is a high degree of confluence between inward-looking political economies and autocratic regime type, as evident in these cases. Autocratic regimes are less vulnerable to sanctions and better able to channel their negative effects onto the population. The convergence of autocratic regime types and inward-looking models thus yields targets that are especially resistant to, or hardened against, external inducements. In other words, this dilemma points to the irony that the most frequent targets of external influence attempts are also expected to be the least vulnerable to them. Yet, two and perhaps three of the four major cases since the 1990s, and perhaps others before that, suggest a rate of success that may be far from negligible. Such incidence of success may be even more remarkable given that nuclear proliferation is among the toughest realms for tools of statecraft to prove effective. The Libyan case in 2003 on the nuclear deal, and Iraq prior to the 2003 war, suggest that even these regimes can become receptive to the right combination of inducements, positive and negative. Libya’s dictator in 2011 was not receptive to inducements because they entailed his separation from power.
A related dilemma is the problem of “serial transgressors.” Violators of nonproliferation commitments have also been involved in human rights violations, repression, terrorism, narcotic trafficking, money laundering and other illicit activities. “Serial transgressors” create a dilemma for the international community, which must decide if they should link compliance in one issue area with other issue areas or demand compliance across the board in all issues or create a hierarchy of issues that must be complied with in some sequential order.
Another dilemma is what I labeled “Goldilocks in the world of inducements.” Many disagreements over the relative merits of sanctions and positive inducements, their causal mechanisms and imputed outcomes, stem from competing readings of the empirical record as well as from competing political, theoretical, and even philosophical assumptions. Some regard positive inducements proffered to target states to have been insufficient. Others consider them to have been generous enough to have yielded the desired effects had they indeed worked as advertised. The same is true for sanctions, which are sometimes considered too-little-too-late or, conversely, far too exacting. Calibrating between too-little and too-much so as to arrive at “just right” is quite difficult because of unintended effects.
Q: Some scholars argue sanctions are ineffective; would world security be worse off or the same without sanctions?
A: First, it may be hard to come up with a generic theory of sanctions that applies to human rights, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other issues, although the focus on causal mechanisms described in the volume hopefully helps advance that broader research agenda. Secondly, the volume reveals wide variation regarding whether or not sanctions are effective, particularly vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea. The range of goals can run the gamut, and they differ significantly. Those who expect regime change can be disappointed but others seeking economic and political pressure on the regime may not be. Either way, building on Voltaire’s dictum that “perfect is the enemy of the good” one can think of circumstances where sanctions trump no action. The volume discusses 10 dilemmas underlying the design and implementation of inducements, all of which render them imperfect instruments, as most tools of statecraft are. The inevitable question is the “relative to what” question. Relative to other alternatives, sanctions or positive inducements may remain the most appropriate option even when they cannot yield the precise desired outcomes.
Interestingly, none of the chapters in the volume proposes the “do nothing” option, particularly since dramatic internal transformations that may do away with the problem do not seem to be in the offing in either of those 2 cases. There is also a negative utility of doing nothing or allowing unimpeded nuclearization. The nonproliferation community, including many in IGCC, is particularly concerned with demonstration effects on other countries, and with the consequences of “doing nothing” for the integrity of the nonproliferation regime. That’s why many consider sanctions as an inevitable component of maintaining the regime’s credibility. This may also be the background for recent IAEA reports on Iran that seem to be more forceful. Yet, at the end of the day few believe that sanctions are silver bullets for preventing proliferation; they are more often than not one important component in the toolkit of nonproliferation statecraft.