ABSTRACT
Right from the outset, President Bill Clinton made little secret of his enthusiasm for sanctions as an instrument of statecraft. While seeking the Democratic nomination in April 1992, candidate Clinton criticized the incumbent President and his eventual opponent, George H. W. Bush, for his failure to apply sanctions against China and Japan. During Clinton’s eight years in offi ce, most estimates suggest that the US applied in excess of 100 new sanctions for foreign policy purposes.1 Consistent with this, by the end of Clinton’s presidency a leading American commentator was describing sanctions as forming ‘the core of US foreign policy.’2 As this chapter goes on to demonstrate, the Asia-Pacifi c was no exception, with the Clinton administration employing sanctions against a diverse range of countries in this part of the world, in the service of a broad range of foreign (and domestic) policy objectives.
