ABSTRACT
This book has sought to provide the fi rst systematic analysis of US sanctions in the Asia-Pacifi c. It has done so through a comparison of the use of sanctions during the President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush years. Such an approach was taken on the grounds that it offered to provide a potentially fruitful basis for comparison. President Clinton’s enthusiasm for the use of sanctions, for instance, juxtaposed sharply with the Bush administration’s initial skepticism towards the use of these instruments. Sanctions were also employed quite differently during these two periods, with the use of more comprehensive restrictions and ‘positive’ sanctions characterizing the Clinton years, in contrast to the application of more targeted measures and the ‘lifting’ of sanctions for political and strategic purposes which became such a feature of Bush’s time in offi ce. Interestingly, despite the fact that sanctions were employed in such different fashion across these two periods, the results their use ultimately produced were remarkably similar in terms of their relative modesty. Against the backdrop of a voluminous sanctions literature which, as Chapter 2 observed, has tended either to downplay or to denigrate outright the utility of these instruments of statecraft, such a conclusion was largely to be expected. Perhaps of greater interest both to the theory and practice of sanctions, however, was the extent to which those factors conditioning the use of these instruments remained so remarkably consistent across these two periods. Such an outcome is initially promising in that it offers the opportunity to produce a set of conclusions that are likely to prove enduring in terms of their relevance and utility to sanctions scholars and practitioners alike.
