Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 27 JUNE 2006
MR STEPHEN
PATTISON, MR
CHRISTOPHER YVON,
MR PAUL
BENTALL, MR
PATRICK GUTHRIE
AND MR
TOM DAWLINGS
Q1 Chairman:
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence.
I am bidden to say to you at the beginning of the session, if
you speak up and speak relatively slowly, we stand a better chance
of understanding what you are saying and getting an accurate record;
and that applies as much to us as it does to you. I do not know
whether you want to introduce yourselves and your role, but I
think that we ought to have on the record who has come and why.
You can sort out amongst yourselves who is going to answer the
questions. We will be very happy to hear from whoever wants to
tell us anything. Perhaps, Mr Pattison, you might introduce yourselves
in whatever way you would like to deal with it.
Mr Pattison: Thank you very much, My Lord Chairman,
for giving us this opportunity. I am Stephen Pattison, the Director
in charge of international security at the Foreign Office where,
among other things, I oversee the sanctions unit in the Foreign
Office, which is headed by Christopher Yvon, to my right. I will
leave it to each member of the panel to say briefly what their
role in sanctions is.
Mr Guthrie: I am head of the Financial Sanctions
Unit in the Treasury. We are responsible for implementing financial
sanctions.
Mr Dawlings: Tom Dawlings, Financial Sanctions
Unit in the Bank of England. We have a very small role as agent
for the Treasury in the administration of financial sanctions.
Mr Pattison: Chris, as I mentioned, is head
of our unit at the Foreign Office that deals with sanctions.
Mr Bentall: Paul Bentall from the Foreign Office
research group. I provide expert advice to Chris and his team.
Q2 Chairman:
Do you want to say something to start with?
Mr Pattison: I am happy to do so if you wish,
but what I would want to say is probably covered by the questions,
which you have given us in advance.
Q3 Chairman:
How has the pattern of UK economic sanctions changed over time?
Could you explain the rationale behind the apparent move from
general to more targeted sanctions?
Mr Pattison: I think you have to remember that
prior to 1990 the UN in particular had experience of only two
sanctions regimes. The expansion of the use of sanctions regimes
that we have seen in the international community has been primarily
since 1990. That expansion has been a process of learning and
adapting. There is no doubt that the trend over the 1990s, as
you say, has been to focus on targeted sanctions. What drove that
trend was a perception that comprehensive economic sanctions,
however defined, ended up having an impact on the humanitarian
welfare of civilians which was not intended and which militated
against the impact of the sanctions themselves. The trend has
been to devise sanctions, which we call "smart" in that
they are focused on particular entities. It can be members of
a regime or members of another group; it can be governments or
entities outside government; it can be commodities or arms; it
could be focused on a ban on travel or assets freeze, and so on.
The trend towards smarter sanctions, I think it is true to say,
has continued to develop. For example, there have been additional
refinements in the area of arms embargoes. Instead now of talking
of an embargo on hardware, the trend is increasingly to talk about
embargoes in addition on the provision of military services. When
you look at assets, we are looking at ways in which we can act
against assets of targeted figures as quickly and effectively
as possible. Commodity sanctions have become part of this trend,
in particular the sanctions on diamonds, particularly the illegal
import of diamonds or the export of diamonds in circumstances
where we believe they will fuel conflict. This has been a major
step forward. We have had timber sanctions and so on. There has
been this refinement of sanctions since 1990, over the last 15
or 16 years. That does not mean, I think, that comprehensive sanctions
can be completely ruled out. In the British Government review
of sanctions policy conducted in 1998 and reported to Parliament
in 1999, we were very careful not to rule it out, but the fact
remains, as I say, that over the period in question the trend
has been in a different direction.
Q4 Lord Sheldon:
How far have economic sanctions been used in a way that has been
combined with other methods of influencing change—diplomacy
and the use of force? If the sanctions are used as an alternative
to force, it has got to be used as a means of persuading the public
that that is the last, ultimate possibility that they have in
mind—but it is always something that is a threat at the
very end if other methods are used before that.
Mr Pattison: I do not see sanctions as a substitute
or alternative to the use of force. I see them as a quite distinct
tool. They are recognised as a distinct tool under the UN Charter,
which has separate articles on sanctions from the article on enforcement
measures. I do not think we should assume that sanctions are a
substitute for force, nor do I think we should always assume that
sanctions are a stepping-stone towards the use of force. In fact,
the history of sanctions regimes that the international community
has imposed do not suggest that at all; they suggest quite the
opposite. As to the effectiveness of what you describe as economic
sanctions, in a sense it applies to all sanctions. It is true
to say that sanctions are most effective where they are not imposed
in isolation, and what we are usually looking for is a policy
which underlines that sanctions are not an end in themselves;
sanctions are a way of achieving an objective. Usually, to achieve
that objective a number of things will be required. In some cases
we will need to make sure that we have a diplomatic process that
is open to have the target entity in the sort of negotiations
or resolution of the problem that we want to achieve. In other
cases, economic sanctions, whatever they are, may be combined
with other sorts of sanctions, so that one would look at an arms
embargo and a travel ban and an assets freeze, and maybe a commodity
ban on a particular entity, in order to achieve the desired effect.
The two points that I would emphasise are that sanctions are not
an alternative to the use of force; they are a separate tool in
their own right. Second, sanctions have to be seen as part, usually,
of a wider picture of levers that the international community
can use to attain its objectives.
Q5 Lord Sheldon:
Are there not occasions when force is there in the background
as a possible threat if sanctions are not going to work?
Mr Pattison: There have of course been occasions
where the threat of enforcement is there in the background. In
almost every case those have been preceded by sanctions or the
threat of sanctions in order to achieve the objective, but if
you look at the range of sanctions regimes, those cases are in
a pretty small minority.
Q6 Lord Skidelsky:
Do I understand you to then reject the theory of graduated sanctions?
Mr Pattison: No, not at all.
Q7 Lord Skidelsky:
When you said it was a distinct tool, you almost implied that
it was a discrete thing and then used in combination, whereas
the traditional view would be that you had an escalating set of
sanctions, the ultimate step of which was war if you did not achieve
the objectives that you had set out to do. That was one quite
popular view of it in the past.
Mr Pattison: I have no problem with the idea
of graduated sanctions; on the contrary. Quite often, in designing
sanctions regimes one is looking first at imposing a certain range
of measures with a view to moving on to other measures, if necessary
and if attainable, within the international community. My only
point was that the logical end of that process does not always
have to be force, nor would we start that process thinking that
the use of force is going to be the logical end of it.
Q8 Chairman:
When you are considering sanctions, do you consider the effect
of them not working when you bring them in and what you will do
subsequently, for example the use of the sunset clause?
Mr Pattison: There are several questions wrapped
up in that, if I may say so. We always consider the effectiveness,
and that boils down to whether they can be effectively enforced
and policed. We also consider the impact that those sanctions
are likely to have on the target regime. We certainly consider
that if we cannot get the particular sanction we are going for
and it is not effective, are there any other options that we could
go for. We would consider that on every occasion. Once the sanctions
are implemented we would look very carefully at the humanitarian
impact of sanctions. As I say, that has changed a bit over the
last 15 years. During the 1990s the UN would conduct studies before
the imposition of sanctions of any measures under contemplation.
Increasingly, as we have moved to smarter sanctions, where the
humanitarian side-effects are, by definition, less, the humanitarian
assessment usually happens after the sanctions are in place. On
sunset clauses, there is a slightly different range of issues.
Our view has always been that it does not make enough sense to
set an explicit time limit for sanctions, because that only creates
an incentive on the part of the target to sit it out and wait.
One of the lessons of sanctions is that they do not have the impact
that you might wish they would have overnight; it is usually a
longer-term arrangement. We have therefore been traditionally
reluctant to consider setting clear end dates for sanctions. We
prefer to talk about an end state, i.e., looking at the objectives
which we hope the sanctions regime will bring about in terms of
changing the target entity's behaviour. That said, as part of
the growing concern about minimising the secondary impact of sanctions,
as a matter of practice these days all sanctions regimes are subject
to careful periodic review at the Security Council, drawing on
information provided by monitors both within and outside the UN,
to make sure that the sanctions are not causing adverse humanitarian
or other unintended impacts.
Q9 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
You have answered my question in part when you were talking about
graduated sanctions, but can we focus a little more on the purposes
and objectives of sanctions themselves? At times they seem to
be very modest and no more than registering disapproval of some
action with no great expectation of change in behaviour; but at
other times they are seeking a major objective, and maybe a major
change in policy or perhaps even a regime change. Can you comment
on the range of different objectives and their relevance to different
situations; and can you comment on how far you consider objectives
have been made explicit in specific cases in the past?
Mr Pattison: Sanctions, obviously, have a range
of different objectives, and they also have a range of different
scopes. There are sanctions that range from a travel ban on members
of a regime, right through to some of the other things we have
talked about such as arms embargoes, commodity embargoes or other
commodity control measures. The objective of sanctions varies,
depending on each situation. We have had sanctions in the past
that were designed to effect regime change. We have had sanctions
in respect of Rhodesia and in respect of illegitimate governments
that were in power temporarily in Sierra Leone and Haiti. Generally
speaking, the aim of sanctions has been to change behaviour of
a regime or of a targeted entity—because now we have sanctions
on Al-Qaeda and terrorist groups. The primary objective of sanctions
at the UN, almost by definition, has to be to address the threats
to international peace and security. This is a crucial bit of
UN Security Council theology. The UN Security Council, under the
Charter, is mandated to deal with threats to international peace
and security. As a rule of thumb, in order to get sanctions adopted
by the UN Security Council, you will have to make a case that
international peace and security are under threat. This is a rule
of thumb that we are trying to stretch, if you can stretch a rule
of thumb! Sanctions imposed by the European Union under common
foreign security policy are not limited to threats to international
peace and security. Under the guidelines that the European Union
has agreed, the European Union can impose sanctions for a variety
of other objectives, which include, broadly, human rights, good
governance and rule of law issues. For example, we have EU sanctions
on Belarus and Zimbabwe, where our judgment is that it would be
quite difficult to obtain sanctions at the Security Council against
those entities. That is not to say we do not try. There are a
number of cases where we will try hard, particularly in respect
of Zimbabwe, and we would want to look quite carefully at pushing,
in the case of, say, Burma, to get the Security Council to take
more of an interest in the situations in those countries. The
objectives of sanctions clearly differ. The tools differ. I do
not think there is any hard and fast correlation. Obviously there
are links that you can look at, looking at the history of sanctions,
but I would not want to say that if we are after regime change
we must do this range of sanctions, and if we are not we do not
need to do that range of sanctions. We will calibrate the sanctions
we use, taking into account a variety of concerns—the seriousness
of the situation, the attainability of the sanctions and the prospects
of other developments.
Q10 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
The second part of my question is that the objectives are always
clearly stated in advance, so you can judge whether—
Mr Pattison: Very much. We do not insist on
this, but sanctions—again, I will say now, because it was
not always thus, but following the announcement of our policy
in favour of smart sanctions, we are very keen to ensure that
the objectives are as clear as possible for a variety of reasons,
which are obvious. The first is so that the target entity knows
exactly what it is the target entity has to do. We can then look
at sanctions lift as and when our objectives are met, so we have
a clear idea of what it is we are setting out to achieve.
Q11 Lord Powell of Bayswater:
In these very complex calculations that you make about what sort
of sanctions to impose and what the effect might be, how explicitly
do you weigh in the balance the possible contrary effects of sanctions
that is that they may actually strengthen support for a regime—it
has been known to happen? Secondly, how explicitly do you recognise
that it may be politic to impose sanctions, but basically you
are doing it because you cannot think of anything else to do and
it is better than nothing, and salves the consciences of the people
who are applying the sanctions. One might point perhaps to the
European Union sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s. I
seem to remember a particular gesture that was described as being
very minimal.
Mr Pattison: There are two big questions there.
First, let me say that we never apply sanctions for the sake of
doing something. Whenever we design and apply sanctions, our hope
is that those sanctions will effect a change in behaviour. The
question of considering the negative impact of sanctions—yes,
of course we consider it. There is a debate to be had about the
extent to which sanctions increase support for a regime. It is
a tricky debate, this, and my own view is that there is an argument
that sanctions will increase a regime's natural support. If a
regime is isolated, its natural supporters in that particular
country might rally around it and fall for the rhetoric of the
government portraying itself in an adversarial relationship with
the rest of the world. I am not sure that that is the same as
increasing the fundamental levels of support for a regime, and
on that particular question the jury is still out. The answer
to your point about whether we consider if sanctions are likely
to have a detrimental effect in achieving change, yes, of course
we do.
Q12 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
I would like to try to separate out a little further the different
types of sanctions. Do sanctions such as arms embargoes, travel
bans and asset freezes and non-military trade restrictions have
different success rates? How far does each category require different
monitoring and enforcement mechanisms? Are the various types of
sanctions actually so different that they need to be analysed
separately? Perhaps you can bear in mind that final part, bearing
in mind that we are an Economic Affairs Committee, and should
we be concentrating on one particular aspect and leaving perhaps
arms embargoes aside?
Mr Pattison: Yes. Let me take that last point
first. Again, the international community has got much better
at monitoring sanctions. There is a very interesting history of
this through the 1990s where the UN started by appointing ad
hoc panels to look at the effectiveness of sanctions against
Angola in particular but also other countries in the 1990s. As
a result of those experiences, one of the innovations has been
that whenever the Security Council agrees sanctions, almost always
it establishes a panel of experts to monitor and advise on various
aspects of the sanctions. This would include effectiveness, enforcement,
the capacity of key countries to implement them, and so on. Those
panels will almost always include experts in the particular area
of sanctions that are under consideration; so we would want, if
we are looking at a diamond ban, somebody who knows about trade
in diamonds or commodities. If we are looking at financial sanctions,
we will want someone who knows about the genuine difficulties
of implementing financial sanctions. The international community
is getting better at that whole area of monitoring and adjusting
the way in which sanctions are implemented and the way in which
they operate. As I said, the fact that most of these sanctions
come up for regular review, gives us an opportunity to step back
to see how they are working. Are some forms of sanctions more
effective than others? I think it is impossible to answer this
question. It is very difficult to assess the effectiveness of
sanctions. There is academic work that has been done in this area.
It is certainly true that sanctions can have an effect in changing
behaviour, which is the fundamental thing we want to do; but I
think there are other important reasons for adopting sanctions.
One is to register the international community's disapproval of
what is being done, to send as strong as possible a signal that
the international community will not tolerate a certain kind of
behaviour. The other is to increase the costs to the regime or
the entity of continuing to do whatever it is that we do not like,
and to demonstrate to them that this is not just "business
as usual" but that there is a cost. In certain specific situations,
sanctions have other objectives. If you are looking at a conflict
situation, sanctions may have the objective of trying to minimise
the flow of arms into the conflict, and trying to bring one party
to the negotiating table. They can have in that sense different
objectives. It is very hard to assess with any precision the impact
of sanctions, and therefore particularly hard to rank them and
to say that certain sanctions are likely to have a quicker impact
than others.
Q13 Lord Sheldon:
Where have sanctions been most successful?
Mr Pattison: We would certainly point to the
sanctions on Libya in the run-up to Libya's decision to hand over
the Lockerbie suspects as a good example of sanctions bringing
about the desired outcome. The sanctions on Serbia in the run-up
to Dayton, which sought to detach Serbia from the Bosnian Serbs,
I think proved to be successful, not least because there was a
huge economic problem in Serbia at the time that the sanctions
exacerbated. I think one can point to examples where sanctions
have been successful, and there are other examples where sanctions
may have played a part, but other circumstances were also a factor,
and in those circumstances you cannot sometimes disaggregate the
impact of sanctions from everything else.
Q14 Chairman:
I wonder whether I could ask you the flipside to that question:
if those were the good ones, what were the bad ones? Where have
sanctions simply not been effective?
Mr Pattison: I come back to the point I just
tried to make: it rather depends what you are trying to achieve.
Let me talk hypothetically. Has a regime changed its behaviour
as a result of a travel ban, so that leading members of the regime
are unable to travel to Western Europe—or certainly has
a rebel group in Africa ever changed its behaviour because of
a travel ban? It is very hard to say they have, but there my point
is that the sanctions register the disapproval of the international
community, and they bring home to the regime that there is a price
to be paid. In terms of changing behaviour, we can debate it,
but I am not sure that is the only criterion by which to judge.
Q15 Lord Skidelsky:
A cynic might say that you have broadened the objectives of sanctions
to cover their ineffectiveness in most situations. If a legitimate
objective of sanctions is to express disapproval, by definition,
if you have sanctions they must always be successful! Let us go
on to another question. How do you distinguish between sanctions
aimed at states and those aimed at groups, the non-state groups;
and what are the problems that apply in that category? Are there
differences in problems—differences in sanctions?
Mr Pattison: It is not a straightforward question.
Quite often now, sanctions against states include sanctions against
individuals associated with the regime, so there is a grey area
where the two are the same. I am not sure that there are substantive
differences in principle, to be honest. Of course we could apply
an arms embargo against a country. We would be unlikely to apply
an arms embargo against an individual, but we might apply an arms
embargo against other parties to a conflict—non-state actors,
rebel groups, terrorist organisations and so on. I do not think
there is a clear distinction between the fundamental approach
of applying sanctions against a regime, a country, and against
an individual. Of course there are huge and different challenges
in enforcing sanctions, depending on what the sanction is. A travel
ban against a relatively small number of individuals ought to
be fairly straightforward, one would have thought. But a diamond
ban against an African country, where diamonds are illegally smuggled
and where the diamond trade is fairly informally organised, is
a different kettle of fish altogether. There, we learnt from the
lessons of trying to control the trade in conflict diamonds in
the late 1990s, and we have now introduced something called the
Kimberley Process, which provides for the certification of legitimate
diamonds and a sanction really against those who trade in diamonds
that are not certificated. Depending on what sanction you are
using, there will be different questions of enforcement, and some
undoubtedly easier than others. Financial sanctions pose particular
problems in a number of areas. First, like others, it is best
if you impose them quickly so that people do not have a chance
to switch their assets somewhere else. Second, there are all sorts
of problems of tracing the beneficial owners of particular accounts
that we need to be fairly confident we have cracked before we
start to apply financial sanctions in a less precise way.
Q16 Lord Skidelsky:
I get the feeling—and perhaps this is just a feeling of
irritation—that Europeans particularly have got terribly
interested in smart sanctions, but actually lack the will to do
anything else, and they talk about avoiding costs on the sanctioned
population because they actually do not want to bear any costs
themselves; and that these are covers and that the whole thing
is a smokescreen. In a way it has its reference in international
relations literature when they talk about the difference in soft
power and hard power; and Europe's role is to exert soft power,
but that action means—well, all right, President Mugabe
and fifty people are not allowed to travel in some capitals. In
what sense has that altered their behaviour? However, at the same
time the European Union can say, "Oh, yes, we have hardened
our sanctions; we will move from 12 to 50 or 60, and we are graduating
them, and you can see that this is clearly having an effect on
his behaviour, is it not?" The answer is, "No, zero,
but we feel a little better from doing it". Is that not what
it is all about? Are we really talking about anything that is
an instrument of power rather than an instrument of disapproval?
Mr Pattison: There are several things. On the
question of Zimbabwe, the sanctions we have in Zimbabwe clearly
demonstrate our support for those forces working for change and
democracy. The wider point about smart sanctions versus tougher
sanctions is that I think you have to see the emerging approach
to sanctions against the background of the lessons learned from
the sanctions regimes that the UN has imposed in the past. Most
recently, of course, you have to see it against the background
of the Iraq sanctions, where there were many views expressed in
the 1990s about the adverse humanitarian effect of sanctions.
We were fairly sensitive to those early on and we tried to negotiate
different sanctions regimes at the UN to address the humanitarian
impact, and we were frustrated first by Saddam's unwillingness
to negotiate. And then eventually the Oil for Food Programme,
although the Volcker Commission conceded that it did very well
in assisting people in dire circumstances that programme itself
has subsequently been discredited because of the latitude given
to Saddam to smuggle and obtain resources outside the programme,
and the corruption that has been identified within the programme
itself. The Iraq experience, I think, has coloured the way in
which the international community now thinks about sanctions.
Smart sanctions were designed not as a cop-out but designed to
see if we could identify a more intelligent approach to sanctions
which would really focus on those entities whose behaviour we
wanted to influence, and to focus on those entities in a way which
might change their behaviour. Again, looking back, the effort
we put into the diamond ban in respect of Angola and Sierra Leone
was one element but an important element in bringing an earlier
end to some of those conflicts, and it was an imaginative response
to a particular situation where it was in no-one's interests to
impose comprehensive sanctions on countries that were already
poor and made even more desperate by a history of civil war. We
are trying to be clever and to achieve real objectives.
Q17 Lord Paul:
On the Oil for Food Programme, one cannot blame Saddam alone because
there were racketeers all over the world who were very much hand-in-glove
with him. It could not have happened if it had just been Saddam.
The cynics say that it does create racketeers, and they are mostly
from the countries which started the sanctions. Sanctions create
racketeers because the Oil for Food Programme would not have been
abused if there were people not in collusion with Saddam Hussein
from some of the countries that imposed the sanctions.
Mr Pattison: The record of Saddam's efforts
to smuggle oil out of the country so that he could have access
to revenue that was completely outside the programme demonstrates
the lengths to which he was prepared to go to frustrate the objectives
of sanctions. I would not personally have much confidence in a
line which said he would have implemented them had it not been
for the rest of the world wanting to make money out of it. It
seems to me odd.
Q18 Lord Kingsdown:
Would you like to enlarge a bit on what you have already said
about monitoring and enforcement? Are the existing arrangements,
both in this country and the multilateral ones—are these
mechanisms sufficient, and which of the international organisations
are of most value? I do not know whether you would care to comment
on the role of the effectiveness of the EU, the UN or even regional
organisations. Could anything be done, should it be done, to improve
their capacity in relation to sanctions? Also, I believe there
are organisations called "sanctions assistance missions".
How valuable are they?
Mr Pattison: I think the monitoring of sanctions
has got much better. By and large we, the international community,
devised a number of mechanisms, some of which I have already spoken
about, which I think have given us much more confidence in monitoring
how sanctions are implemented, their effectiveness and their unintended
consequences. The key to this is that a committee of the Security
Council oversees the sanctions, and they are informed by these
expert panels. The expert panels draw on material from a very
wide range of resources, and this is an area where, again, civil
society in the years has played an increasingly important role.
The role of those sanctions committees and their expert groups
is to do a number of things. First, they ensure that sanctions
are properly implemented, so as to help states implement them
and to develop the capacity for implementing them. We spent a
lot of time after the imposition of Resolution 1373 on terrorism,
in the wake of 9/11, on something called the Counter-Terrorism
Committee, going through every country at the UN and talking to
them about the way in which they were approaching these sanctions,
and the problems they had with implementation.
Q19 Lord Kingsdown:
Who would go to talk to them?
Mr Pattison: The Security Council committee,
which sounds rather bureaucratic—but it is basically the
members of the Security Council. As I say, now those people are
supported by expert panels. We are building capacity. We are checking
to make sure that countries do what they are supposed to do in
implementing sanctions, and we are collecting data from a variety
of sources about the impact of sanctions so that we can adjust
accordingly, if necessary. The mechanisms are pretty good. That
is not to say they are perfect; there is always scope for improvement.
One of the things we are looking at is whether it would be desirable
to give the UN Secretariat more capacity—not necessarily
more resources, but perhaps from re-prioritising resources—to
try to support these sanctions committees in a more coherent way.
In the European Union the machinery is not quite so elaborate.
We rely very heavily on EU missions in targeted countries to report
back on the impact of sanctions. However, we have agreed principles
in the European Union on the application of sanctions, which helps
to streamline our approach quite considerably. Sanctions assistance
missions were developed really for the Balkans during the early
1990s, when we were more interested in comprehensive sanctions
than we have been since, and they were an attempt to strengthen
the capacity of Balkans countries to implement and monitor sanctions
in circumstances where border crossings were relatively easy.
They have not been used since. I would not exclude their use again,
but, as I say, the trend since then has been to focus more on
the monitoring by the groups in New York, rather than sending
assistance missions to the countries themselves. You mentioned
regional sanctions. As a general principle they have a role to
play and we should not exclude regional sanctions. The West African
ECOWAS sanctions against Sierra Leone in the 1990s were not regarded
as a good model for sanctions, and certainly we would like to
see regions where they impose sanctions adopt the best-practice
standards we have been discussing, i.e., awareness of the humanitarian
impact, the importance of monitoring and the importance of careful
design and clear objectives. I would not rule out regional sanctions
in themselves. There may be cases where they can have a very important
role to play. It is certainly true that in the case of a lot of
sanctions, unless you have the support of neighbouring countries,
regional countries, it will be much harder to achieve your objectives.
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