Boycotts can backfire

I remember one evening, I could say long ago, but there would be no memory of what happened if it had been any other time than 1947. It was the bitter, the very contentious year before Israel became an independent state and the Zionists were accusing the British foreign secretary of ruthless treatment of the Jews in the process of trying to hold on to Palestine with the support of the Arabs.

In New York City, in those days, the name, the reputation, of Ernest Bevin was not to be defended by reminders of the fine work he'd done improving the lot of dockers and transport workers or mobilising the manpower of Britain in the dark days after Dunkirk.

I was going to dine with some friends, and in New York City that is more likely than not to mean Jewish friends. I recall that we started the evening amiably enough. It was not so much that politics was barred, it was one of those evenings when politics didn't come up. 'What would you like to drink?' my host asked. He was a fairly old friend, not old enough to know that nobody ever needs to ask me what I'd like to drink. I, long ago, gave up cocktails and had taken the pledge to imbibe nothing before dinner but the barley wine of old Scotland. My host was sorry, he was courteous but firm, he was serving anything but Scotch.

I don't know how long this ideological prohibition went on in his home and many other Jewish homes in the United States. Not more than a year I should guess. Many years later, when the Russians moved into Afghanistan, there were similar idealists who would not serve Russian vodka and the same man went into effect when the Russians shot down the Korean jet liner.

I once made a little list of all the things you ought to deny yourself if you wanted to be consistent in boycotting products that came from totalitarian countries. Sherry from Spain, while Franco was in power. I don't remember anybody refusing you sherry. How about coffee from Brazil, frozen beef from Argentina? Nutmeg from Grenada? Grenada, that is, in the West Indies, once it set up a one-party state. If you meant to keep your ideology pure, you could go on and on until you'd have to pin up a shopping list, a non-shopping list, in the kitchen.

Of course, this form of acting on principle is a very old form of retaliation. Think of the colonial committees signing up thousands and thousands of people from Boston to the Carolinas to turn back from American ports all shipments of tea. And one of the bravest campaigns of the American civil war was that of the workers in the Lancashire cotton trade who condemned themselves to unemployment for a year or two for refusing to unload shipments of Southern cotton that had run the blockade. Now both these boycotts, of tea coming into America and cotton going into Britain, worked in the sense of inflicting heavy losses on the exporting country because its product could not be resold and smuggled in by a third party.

Economic sanctions are, I suspect, as appealing today as they've ever been because they offer the sop to the conscience of acting on your principles without having to fight for them. Merely the latest form of them is penalising the foreign firms that supplied parts for the Soviet pipeline and Mr Reagan's embargo on grain to the Soviet Union – a bold action, cancelled with regret when it was seen that the people penalised the most were the wheat and corn (maize) growers of the American Midwest, while the Russians were getting most of the wheat they needed from other sources.

Ever since that grain embargo, there has been a running, or trotting, battle in the Reagan administration about the sense or the effectiveness of economic sanctions, especially against the Soviet Union. Only a month ago, a group of advisers within the administration, experts from various government agencies, recommended to the president that 17 products which helped in exploring for oil and petrol be put under export control by the defence department.

Ten days ago, the president and his men turned down the plan. They apparently felt, after the orgy of abuse directed at Moscow over the Korean jetliner incident, they felt that enough righteous indignation was enough for the time being.

I imagine that somebody in the administration has been reading a book just out, a collection of pieces by foreign trade experts and former government officials called, 'Common sense in US-Soviet Trade'. Together, these pieces constitute a pretty objective study of the pros and cons of economic sanctions. They conclude that 'the trade sanctions the United States has imposed on Moscow have been ineffective in their main purpose'.

They go further, obviously bearing in mind the hullabaloo that was caused by the sudden cancelling of export licences for all sorts of technology that could be used on the Soviet pipeline. Those licences, you'll recall, had been granted to American firms, especially American firms with an operating base in Europe. This book says that once a contract is signed, it should be honoured and not subject to cancellation for reasons of American government policy.

I think this may be the strongest point the book has to make in contending that when American government policy invades trade and traders without warning, what suffers most is America's reputation as a reliable trading partner. The book also points out that American trade with Russia is far less than the Russian trade with West Germany, Japan, France, Italy and that the likelihood of all these countries jumping to toe the line of every new policy that the United States lays down is remote.

What is not stressed is something that has dogged and defeated not only embargoes, but well-intentioned shipments of foreign aid. It is the devil of trans-shipment. Obviously a sanction fails hopelessly when, as this book demonstrates, Moscow can get embargoed goods elsewhere. What is worse is the ability to receive, say, the very goods that are being embargoed from the country that's doing the punishing by simply receiving them through a third country whose trade with the United States is not in question.

Something that the United Nations discovered long ago is that foreign aid, sent in all good faith, to a needy country can be re-shipped from the port of entry by unscrupulous importers and corrupt politicians and sold at a profit to another country that wants the stuff but is not in dire need of it. It was the American once in charge of American aid to the needy peoples of the Third World who pronounced the sad maxim, 'Trans-shipment is the curse and the doom of foreign aid'.

Talking of our unflaggingly unhappy relations with the Soviet Union, it had better be said that there's almost no hope in Washington for any agreement with the Russians at the arms talks in Geneva. The Russians have evidently decided that the day, which is at the beginning of December, that the United States deploys its Pershing 2 intermediate missiles in Europe, the Russians will recess the talks on such weapons and will also ask for, or call, a break in the strategic arms reduction talks.

Senator John Glenn, one of the two leading Democratic candidates for the presidency, has come out and urged the administration to delay one last time the deployment of the Pershing missiles and see if that gesture will persuade the Russians to come to some compromise agreement. If this proposal had come from the White House, it would make thundering news, but Mr Glenn is not in the White House, yet – if ever – and nothing could be easier for the administration than to say he's making a straightforward electioneering ploy.

We – I, at any rate – am always looking down that interminable, dark tunnel where the Americans and NATO and the Russians stagger and squabble and, like many other people, am almost pathetically eager to glimpse a ray of light. Well, this week there was one. Whether it will strike the men of Geneva and Moscow and Brussels and Washington as a ray of light, I don't know. It's all the more welcome and all the more poignant in that it is shed by two groups of children, one from America, the other from Russia.

The Harvard Medical School lent three of its psychiatrists to a project conceived by the now very large and impressive group known as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. They first interviewed a group of American children between the ages of 11 and 14 about their knowledge of nuclear weapons, their ideas of what a nuclear war would be like, their fears, their hopes of its not happening in their lifetime.

I ought to say that the American children were statistically chosen, that's to say they did not represent any common economic group or a prescribed high standard of intelligence. They were, so far as the psychiatrists could determine, a cross-section. The same, I think, can be said of the Soviet children, so far as it's possible to isolate in a totalitarian society a true cross-section. Obviously, it did not contain the children of defectors or non-conformists.

Well, the answers were much the same from both groups but they were the same in a heartening way if intelligence and freedom from patriotic sentiment can be called heartening, which I think they can. To us, naturally, the replies of the Russian children were the more fascinating because, I suppose, we should expect them to spout, however sincerely, the party line.

They all knew about Hiroshima. One mentioned that radioactivity lasts so long that there can never be much hope of underground survival. They all know it would be terrible but they were quite specific about imagining a world in which, as one put it, there would be no parents and no use for doctors or teachers. Both sides made the point that our computer or your computer could make a mistake and that would be it. And that a nuclear war cannot be won, that there would be no hope after the first strike. Some of them said or hoped it won't happen because America and Russia will come to terms. What message did the Russians have for American children?

'We would like to wish them well in their struggle against nuclear war. We are like them. We are the same race, we are the human race.' One little girl said, very gravely, 'Our message to American children is, hello.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.