Thank you very much for the invitation to speak with you today. I'm honoured to be asked to address this committee and to offer my views.
You asked in particular for my thinking with respect to Canadian and international sanctions against Iran in the context of your legislative review. I took a careful look at the questions you are asking during this review. I believe I am best equipped to address three in my statement, and I look forward to addressing any others with your questions. I'll prioritize how effective sanctions are in compelling behaviour change on the part of state and non-state actors, what the relationship is between the imposition of sanctions and a variety of international goals, and whether unilateral sanctions are more or less effective than multilateral ones.
To the first, I believe strongly that sanctions can be quite effective if they support an underlying policy that is sensible, coherent, and achievable. For non-state actors, the ambition of sanctions is much more narrow—simply denying access to resources and capabilities that can be used for harm. In this they're essentially as effective as any other law enforcement tool or device.
For states, to be kind, this is not always the case. Sanctions are all too often looked at by international leaders as a tool to be employed when nothing else seems to work and when a policy-maker wishes to appear decisive. Most of the sanctions regimes imposed in Africa over the past two decades bear this hallmark: measures preventing use of the global economy by insurgents who are not using it; measures freezing the assets of entities that have none; and embargoes on weapons and goods that only smugglers provide, in any event. These kinds of sanctions are imposed mostly to assuage the consciences of the sanctioners and to demonstrate to their population that they've done something about the problem. All too often these sanctions are embedded in policies that have no chance of success, or where there is little interest on the part of senior officials to press forward with implementation...and ultimately seeking diplomatic resolutions to the problem at hand.
To my mind, the critical variable is not the form of sanction used or the manner in which it is employed, but rather the consistency of the sanction with the overall policy and degree to which that policy is accorded appropriate seriousness and status in the sanctioning government. In the case of Iran, I believe sanctions were effective because they were part of a policy that was embraced the world over, attentively pursued by senior officials of all the major countries and balanced with a sense of strategic purpose and desired outcome that everyone could understand. That policy, with sanctions as the leverage, created a situation that Iran needed to escape, the only escape being the nuclear agreement that we reached.
Seen through this lens, it is possible to answer the second question about the applicability of sanctions to broader multinational goals. In my view, they have become a primary tool for international statecraft, because they offer a source of leverage for addressing problems that might otherwise have to rely on force. In this, sanctions are a significant tool for maintaining international peace and security and for addressing the various threats to the international order, such as proliferation, terrorism, and violations of human rights.
To be truly effective in addressing global problems, however, they have to be multilateral in effect. This is less because the underlying problems are multilateral in nature—though certainly it helps to accord legitimacy to sanctions as a tool in fixing them—and more because the nature of the global economy demands partnerships to achieve effectiveness. Witness the U.S. embargo on Cuba. True, for a few years in the 1960s Cuba had a rough time, but with the Soviet decision to support the Cubans, they were able to persevere until the 1990s, when Venezuela took over.
Iran is another case in point. U.S. sanctions were exhausted in 1995, but starting in 1996 the United States was able to apply pressure by taking away the option for Iran to evade the punishment by going to non-U.S. sources for goods, services, and technology.
One could imagine a scenario in which one country so completely governs the economic future of another—China and North Korea, say—and therefore has the ability to implement sanctions pressure akin to a global embargo on its own, but those cases are exceedingly rare in the global economy today. This demands intense co-operation and coordination among partners or, failing that, an overriding ability on the part of one state to compel the economic behaviour of other entities.
To some extent, this is what happened with Iran from 2006 to 2013. But as my friends in Washington may soon find out if they try to go it alone with sanctions pressure on Iran, they are dramatically overstating the power of the U.S. economy to dominate the economic, political, and legal decisions of others. Foreign partners of the United States have the ability to block adherence of their companies to U.S. sanctions legally, and those same companies have banks and can de-risk themselves from the U.S. market if sufficiently concerned about the impact of sanctions. I fear that without co-operation in the future, this is precisely the scenario that will take place with Iran.
Sanctions can be useful and effective, but they have to be wielded properly, with clear goals and an ability to bring the desired leverage to bear on the desired target. This takes care, patience, and sophisticated analysis. Sanctions are not what you do when you can't think of anything else. They're what you use to create leverage to solve problems.
To the specific case that my fellow witness was referring to earlier, as an American looking humbly at the Canadian system, I can see right here a difficulty in the Canadian terrorism sanctions that goes right to this argument. Without the ability to sustain international pressure on Iran to change its support for terrorism and support for things like Hezbollah, Canada is to some extent harming itself and its ability to move forward with the relationship with Iran that it may not wish to do at this point any further. I think that ultimately, as Canada looks to address this issue in the broader sanctions regime, it's worth thinking about the degree to which its effectiveness in implementing sanctions, and the multilateral nature of most of them, can be brought to bear on this particular problem as well.
Thank you again and I look forward to your questions.