Passover and Sanctions
Daniel Drezner has a nice list of things Passover can teach us about international relations including this key point:
Sanctions against an autocratic regime will rarely yield significant concessions. To get the Pharaoh to let the Jews go, God imposes an escalating series of sanctions against Egypt. These sanctions crippled Egyptian agriculture, health, sanitation and, er, sunlight, inflicting great suffering against the Egyptian people. Not until the first-born male children are killed, however, does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape. Not coincidentally, that plague is the only one to truly hurt the autocrat personally, as his son was killed in the plague as well. Compellence strategies would seem to have a greater chance of success if they target autocratic elites.
This is part of the reason that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to slam Rep Bobby Rush for getting so lovey-dovey with Fidel Castro. The sanctions policy against Cuba is horribly misguided and has taken a terrible toll on innocent Cubans. But Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy, and insofar as it’s possible to be hard on him personally rather than inflicting collective punishment on the entire population one should do so. I think there’s a limited amount that can be accomplished in this regard, but saying things like “It was almost like listening to an old friend” is not a promising start.
29 Responses to “Passover and Sanctions”
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April 9th, 2009 at 11:04 am
At the same time, sanctions are effective against democracies.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am
This would make sense if it weren’t for the fact that it was the Lord who hardened Pharaoh’s heart after the plague of boils. I guess this has some correlation with a principle of IR, but not the one Drezner presents.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Also, the purpose of the Exodus is not merely to liberate the Israelites, but also to demonstrate the Lord’s power. (That’s why P’s heart is hardened.)
April 9th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t right. He is a hypocrite, and hypocrites can’t be ‘right’ in the sense you mean it here (that is to say, morally justified and not factually correct).
People like him only manage to find ire for left-wingers. They never see anything wrong with the entire host of death-squad using right wingers. So no, he’s not right. He’s just a POS scumbag who hated people further left than himself. That’s true of all Neo-cons, and of all neo-libs. There’s really no difference.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Another important international-relations lesson that we learn from Passover is that preemptive offensive actions against a potential enemy doesn’t increase your security. “Come, let us deal shrewdly with them,” says Pharaoh, “lest in time of war they join with our enemies.” So in order to prevent the Israelites from joining with Egypt’s enemies, Pharaoh enslaves all of them – and creates a new enemy, rather than increasing Egypt’s security against existing enemies.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I’m not sure that Bobby Rush refusing to meet with an autocrat is a punishment equivalent to killing his son. Anyway, Moses met with Pharaoh just before God killed his son.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:43 am
I wonder if they bowed to Castro?
April 9th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
OTOH, sanctions can succeed in the case of countries where the ruling class whose approval is needed to sustain the oppression is a reasonably sizable group, such as whites in apartheid-era South Africa, or Israelis in Palestine.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
A lesson from reality is that killing someone’s child isn’t gonna make him back down neccesarily, though. Reagan tried it with Muanmar Al-Gaddafi and if I remember correctly, it didn’t work out too well.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I hope no members of Congress speak with anything other than appropriate condemnation about the leaders of China, or Uzbekistan, or Saudi Arabia…
April 9th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy
Ah, you’re a child of the Long American Hissyfit, whereby making the US look stupid at some time in living memory earns you a multi-decade sulk. I’m sure that some of those congresscritters expected to see Cuba looking like the Congo, because of the mental embargo on showing Americans what the place looks like.
What you and Ta-Nehisi don’t appreciate is that the Castros are easing themselves out of power in a way that denies Little Havana, the White House and the CIA their collective Munchkin dance.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Re El Cid.
Mr. El Cid leaves Israel out of his litany of bad actors. An here I thought that Mr. El Cid was of the view that the Government of Israel rivals Hitler in its beastliness.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“. . . does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape.”
Am I the only one who sees a problem in this part of the quote?
April 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Castro is an authoritarian leader, but I’m not clear why that alone makes him a ‘bad guy’. Liberal democracy is strictly a means, not an end, it’s not a very good means in principle and in a country like Cuba it was a terrible one. All it did was empower a decadent, cosmopolitan, oligarchic elite, and cause the peasantry to suffer. Moreover, it had been discredited by the years of corrupt and amoral ‘democracy’ that preceded Batista’s coup of 1952. Simply put, liberal democracy was the wrong form of government for Cuba in 1952, in 1959, and today.
Certainly Castro made some mistakes- with respect to Catholics and Baptists, with respect to, yes, gays, and most especially with regard to not doing more to suppress torture in prisons, though I doubt that was ordered from on high any more than the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were ordered by Bush- and I wouldn’t praise everything about him. But Cuba needed an authoritarian government of the Left, badly, and he gave it what he needed. Repression in Cuba certainly existed, but it was far less than in other Eastern-bloc states and far less than in most of the U.S. sponsored right wing tyrannies in the region. For example, socialist Cuba executed fewer people throughout its entire history than France executed (judicially or extrajudicially) in the single year following the fall of the Vichy collaborators. And Cuba’s executions were carried out on exactly the same precedent that DeGaulle had carried out his, that collaborators with a tyranny are guilty of capital treason.
Cuba’s successes at reducing income inequality (one of the lowest Gini coefficients in the world), providing a basic standard of nutrition and necessities for everyone, and in the fields of medicine and education are well known. Less well known is that they solved two problems bedeveling developing countries today. They shifted most of their food production industry to a largely low-input, self-contained, sustainable basis in just 10 years or so. If fossil fuels were to run out tomorrow, Cuban agriculture would suffer but it would suffer less than just about any other country of the same development level.
That’s not the greatest achievement of the Cubans, though. Their greatest achievement is that, for at least a time, they succeeded in creating a society where people cared somewhat less about money, and individual advancement, and themselves, and more about the good of the collective. Castro’s second in command, Guevara, though a man of deep personal flaws himself, set the example by refusing to live on anything more than a modest salary, and volunteering his evenings cutting sugarcane on state farms. And his example was followed by, in fact, a lot of Cubans. Yglesias’ commentary is a cynical crowd, with regard to socialism, nationalism, sexual fidelity and Christianity- with regard, in general, to those things that make life worth living. So I doubt this will be much heeded. But you can look it up; in the 1960s, surveys showed that compared with before the revolution, young people were much less likely to list “making money” and “personal advancement” among their goals in life. Read the anthropological surveys of Mona Rosendahl, or talk to someone who’s visited Cuba with an open mind and spent time working or volunteering there, and you will find this: that like people in every country, Cubans are acquisitive and interested in personal gain, but that these tendencies (in spite of chronic economic shortages) are less intense than in most countries, and that a spirit of sacrifice, self-giving, and duty to the collective are more in evidence. The purpose of socialism, ultimately, is not an economic one, it’s a spiritual one. The purpose of socialism is to reduce the place that greed and self-interest in the human heart: not to eliminate it, but to reduce it. And in that, given its limitations, Cuba has succeeded (at great cost in repression and suffering) and should be given credit for it. Whether you think the benefit was worth the cost is up to you.
Cuba shows, more than most other countries, the pitfalls as well as the promises of revolution, and what should be avoided as well as what must be followed. He has, without question, a heavy share of black marks to his name. But I firmly believe that, as he promised at his trial in 1957, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”
April 9th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
That’s a false and bullshit accusation, SLC, you little frightened shit. Back up this meme with a single quote or go back to your regular loves, Richard Steven Hack or Don Williams. Cheap punk.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
When talking about Cuba, US citizens should be concentrating on lifting the sanctions.
“I get it, the sanctions are bad, but Castro is bad too” that we see from Yglesias and Coates – also from Delong and a lot of putatively liberal commentators evades the point in a spectacular way.
You don’t vote on Castro.
If Castro causes misery for Cubans, and the sanctions cause misery for Cubans
And your elected representatives are fully responsible for the sanctions
And you have no possible way to control Castro, then let’s concentrate on lifting the sanctions.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Yeah, Hector, when one argues, as you have, that human beings are property of the state, then those that control the state bear no responsibility for the deaths of those misguided humans who have the temerity to attempt to leave the boundaries of said state.
You are a good little thug, aren’t you?
April 9th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Re El Cid
Ah gee, and here I thought that Mr. El Cid, Mr. Hack, and Mr. Williams were asshole buddies. What a revolting development.
Re Arnold Evans
What we ought to be concentrating on is a soft landing for Cuba after the Castros have shuffled off this mortal coil.
April 9th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Actually, I was probably a little too moderate in that post above- while
Will Allen,
I understand that you don’t like the idea that you are bound to work for the common good, and that the common good is more important than Will Allen. Sadly, it is, and unless you realize that human virtue lies in obedience to an objective moral order, not in indulging one’s greedy and gluttonous habits, you will remain no better than Larry Craig, who also devoted himself to greedy desires, in his case for anonymous restroom f*cking.
The greatest thing the Cubans ever did was teach people like Will Allen a lesson. I suspect that several years cutting sugarcane in a voluntary work brigade would teach Will Allen a well deserved lesson, too. Sadly, we don’t live in Cuba.
April 9th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Hector, what little murdering thugs like you, or in an attempt to be fair, what those, like you, who are advocates of murdering thugs, always lie about, is that the moral requirement to be virtuous gives legitimacy to the use of violence to compel faux virtue. Thus thugs like you say with a straight face that those who drowned or were eaten by sharks, because Castro believed, as you have stated is also your belief, that the human beings who lived on the island known as Cuba are the property of the Cuban state, and have no inherent right to leave if they wish, is not part of Castro’s murderous tally.
Say, you dishonest advocate of murder, if Castro was so successful in changing societal attitudes, why did he have to keep it illegal to leave Cuba, and thus give many people who wanted to leave the sole option of risking a horrible death? Are you truly so stupid as to not grasp that unless someone has the option of opting out, one can’t really buy in to a society? That virtuous behavior is only possible when one has the option of saying “no”?
Nice to see you observe the Castroite tradition of homophobia, by the way. Or are you going to now say that your choice of a homosexual Republican who engaged in gluttonous sexual behavior was merely coincidental? You really are a pathetic little apparatchik, aren’t you?
April 9th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I sometimes think that Hector is a Jonah Goldberg alias, working diligently to provide some basis of truth for “Liberal Fascism”.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
NJorl,
No, I mean every word. And I’m not a liberal, by the way, in fact I strongly reject liberalism.
Will Allen,
Yes, I see that you’re willing to justify anonymous sexual encounters in restrooms. “Homophobia” indeed. How tiresome it is to hear little scumbags like you whining like babies because they got offended. Of course, there’s very little your sort won’t justify. A pity you don’t live in Cuba, so you could be sent to cut sugarcane for a few years. That would probably cure you of being a decadent little b*stard. Honestly, a few years being required to cut sugar would do you a power of good. Sadly, it appears to be too late now.
What you don’t seem to get is that life is not about Will Allen doing what Will Allen pleases. Life is about obedience to the natural moral order, and about subordinating one’s own desires to the common good. It’s too bad that moral idiots like you don’t seem to get that, but if you insist on acting like a five year old then the government must treat you like a five year old.
Fidel has made some mistakes, but at the end of it all he’s a great man, not least for striving to create a world without people like you.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Hector makes some interesting points. And Will Allen is clearly illiterate. Seriously, I can’t understand what that doofus is saying through all the spittle and burblings about “murderous…ack…..”.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Hector, you truly are a totalitarian thug, with the typical slavish obediance to the powerful, the inability to discern that behavior compelled by threat of violence has nothing to do with virtue, and the desire to make others your slave. You are worse than an apparatchik. You are rather like the Berias or Himmlers of the world; a bootlicking sadist, ever eager to serve your master.
Now, Francisco, HE is most likely an apparatchik.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
It’s interesting to see Will Allen’s penchant for defending the indefensible. Thus far, he’s defended the Cold War, the War in Iraq, and Larry Craig’s anonymous restroom f*cking. I wonder, how low can Will ALlen go?
Too bad he doesn’t live in Cuba, I suspect nothing but a few years being forced to cut sugarcane could wean Will Allen away from being as stupid and/or morally degenerate as he seems to be.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Yes, yes, more totalitarian thugs, obsessed with closeted homosexuals.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Klansman Will Allen,
You appear to be gravely deficient both intellectually and morally, so I’m not going to dignify you with further debate. Debate is possible only between equals, so you should probably go debate with a five year old sociopath. Since you don’t live in a society that can send you to the sugarcane fields, being ignored by decent people is probably the best thing we can do.
Have a nice day.
April 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Yeah, Hector, you choose to be an advocate for slavery, and then think others are fit for the label of “Klansman”. I’d say you are a piece of shit, if that wasn’t an insult to feces.
April 10th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
So have you ever actually read anything by Fidel?
He’s a “baaaaad” man….what a fucking pussy you are, Matt.