Should All Trade Sanctions Be Stopped?

SHOULD ALL TRADE SANCTIONS BE STOPPED?

To most of the world, sanctions are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they reinforce trade rules and promote respect for them. On the other hand, they tend to undermine the principles of free trade and provoke a kind of ‘trade envy’(Charnovitz) in other international organizations.

Trade retaliation goes back quite a ways; we see examples of it in much of US law:

-Antidumping Act of 1916, which has seen little use.(Charnovitz)

-International Labor Organization, from the Treaty of Versailles 1919, which served as an international dispute system, but no economic measures were ever recommended until 2000, against Burma.(Charnovitz)

-UN Security Council, which handles breaches of peace, only used sanctions 3 times between 1920-1990, but now uses them much more frequently.(Charnovitz)

To understand the difficulty I have agreeing with the suggestion that all trade sanctions must be stopped, I feel it is important to discuss some of the good, the bad, and the ugly involved with imposing sanctions. I’ll start my discussion with some of the good that comes from restricting trade, move into some of the negative affects, and summarize with improvements I feel could be made to this defunct system.

The first advantage that comes to mind about imposing trade sanctions would have to be the ability of the sanctioning government to let everyone know how