Dissecting US sanctions: The domestic politics
Regional, Analysis, 1/28/1998

With the US-Iraqi conflict that surrounds UN inspection efforts, it has become clear that there is a fundamental difference in the strategic implementation of the interests of the United States of America and that of the Arab states individually and collectively.

The US has been the dominant, and only country capable of driving these sanctions and inspections forward to the point they have reached. The US is seeking endless sanctions against Iraq as it has done with every country the US had ever imposed sanctions against. Cuba is still suffering as a result of those sanctions and its economy is a basket case. Few would think Cuba is a threat to the US or to its neighbors, but the sanctions exist, nonetheless, decades later, rightly or wrongly.

Similarly, the US imposed sanctions against Vietnam that were only lifted decades later, and only because of the extreme need in the view of US strategic analysts for a counterbalance to a rapidly-growing economic and military power in China, as the USSR dissolved and ceased to be the counterbalance to China and with Russia moving to develop friendly relations with China. Vietnam was seen as a future counterbalance since it is populous and has traditionally been a Chinese border enemy and thus a potential US ally in this effort.

In Vietnam's case as in all US-imposed sanctions, domestic politics play a primary role in these issues as they do in all political issues as well. Domestic politics drive US foreign policy, and where there is no broad-based citizen interest or awareness in a particular issue that has an immediate impact on US citizen's life, that area of the foreign policy becomes vulnerable and is always driven by narrow domestic special-interest groups.

In all the sanctions that the US imposes, there is a regional interest that is defined, and the sanctions imposed on these countries will not be lifted until the objectives of the domestic special-interest groups are met. In Cuba, it is the Cuban community that drives the agenda on Cuban sanctions, in Vietnam it was Vietnam veterans related groups who drove the issues relating to the Vietnam sanctions, in South Africa, it was the African-Americans who drove the agenda.

In South Africa, African-Americans succeeded in their goal and the sanctions were lifted. In Cuba, the stated goals of the Cuban-Americans have not been achieved and the sanctions remain. In the case of Vietnam, the Vietnam veterans related groups

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