A Price of Success, or Buyer's Remorse? The Tension between the United Nations Sanctions and the United States' Unilateral Approach

Working through the UN Security Council (UNSC) is rarely easy. The most decisive actions in the UNSC's history have typically not been secured merely in response to the presence of dire threats to international peace and security, but have materialized when key, permanent members were absent (as in the Korean War) or distracted (the First Gulf War). The political divisions among UNSC members are so stark that they rarely approach issues with similar enough vantage points to permit collective, assertive action. This tension was particularly magnified in the context of the Cold War, but even after the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union the old mentality returned to bedevil UNSC deliberations.

An exception to this general tension has been the use of sanctions. Multiple resolutions adopted against North Korea—some unanimously—join less politically sensitive cases to give the impression that the UNSC can readily adopt sanctions. But the large number of resolutions adopted underplays the difficulty of their negotiation and adoption. Moreover, the challenges associated with the implementation of these sanctions undermine their efficacy, particularly when permanent UNSC members are involved.

Mindful of the ponderous pace of UNSC deliberations and the difficulty of negotiating in the UNSC format, the last three US administrations have each developed and implemented their own sanctions approaches that make use of—but do not define as essential—complementary UNSC action. In shifting away from dependence on the UNSC, they joined the US Congress, which as early as the mid-1990s had determined that UNSC sanctions were potentially not worth the trouble. UNSC programs seemed particularly superfluous when set against the efficiency of a national US sanctions approach that enlists private sector economic interests—rather than international legal requirements—as their operating principle.

There have been impressive and positive results of this approach, particularly in the case of Iran from 2006 to 2013 when unilateral US sanctions motivated the regime to open negotiations on nuclear issues. But what of the costs? Reliance on national sanctions may have diminished the allure of approaching the UNSC for its imprimatur. At the same time, the effectiveness of national measures—particularly those facilitated by ambitious reading of the requirements of UNSC resolutions—has sensitized other UNSC members to the potential risks of agreeing to resolutions with open-ended sanctions language. Both of these dynamics may affect the UN Security Council's tool-kit for nonmilitary forms of coercion into the future.

This article will briefly review the history of UNSC sanctions use before examining at greater length the use of national sanctions measures, especially those related to UNSC sanctions resolutions. It then examines the potential consequences of these recent dynamics on the use of sanctions as a tool by the UNSC before offering two recommendations to address this particular dimension of the challenge of operating within the UNSC framework.

UNSC Sanctions Use

Hufbauer, Elliott, and Schott's extensive examination of the historical sanctions record usefully summarizes the UNSC's involvement in sanctions as such:

Freed from its Cold War straitjacket after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United Nations began to intervene more aggressively in international affairs … the shift in the international environment, combined with an evolving and expanding definition of collective peace and security, led the UNSC to impose far more sanctions during the 1990s than during the previous 45 years.¹

They note that "prior to 1990, the UNSC had imposed mandatory economic sanctions only twice—against the white minority regime in Rhodesia and an arms embargo against South Africa."² After 1990, the UNSC imposed sanctions regimes on various states and non-state actors for a range of ills, including human rights violations, terrorism, threats to regional peace and stability, and illegitimate government transitions. Sanctions targets occupied nearly every inhabited continent. This broader application of United Nations power appeared to satisfy the moral and political imperatives of "do ing something" that often arise in international affairs.

At the same time, concerns were growing as to the effectiveness of sanctions and their potential consequences. With respect to the...