Counterterrorism Blog

Jeffrey Imm and Matt Levitt are dead-on about the audacity of Jimmy Carter in meeting with Hamas. My diagnosis: the US needs to look to political activists on the Left and borrow their techniques, if we are ever to fully exploit soft-power tools like economic sanctions. So far, we have lacked the discipline, and the willingness to practice an aggressive form of peer pressure.

The symptoms are on public display. In the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, American prosecutors had to deal with a former State Department official who testified for the defense, saying that he never took seriously the US sanctions that forbid financial transactons with Hamas-controlled zakat committees. Shortly before the trial, House appropriators asked some pointed questions of USAID about its practice of giving funds to students attending Hamas-controlled Islamic University of Gaza. The USAID witness claimed that the university was not known to be equivalent to Hamas (as if). In their book Merchant of Death, Doug Farah and Steven Braun described how US military employed designated arms dealer Victor Bout to get military supplies into Iraq, whereas it would be a crime for American banks not freeze his accounts. What’s wrong with this picture?

The Left that I know from college in the early 1980s understood the power of good, old-fashioned disciplined peer pressure. A labor dispute at your elite Ivy League college, into which you busted your hump (and your parents’ savings) to attend? Better not to cross picket lines, lest your enlightened classmates and professors think you were not sufficiently supportive of organized labor. Order a Coors at happy hour? Adolph Coors was a Nazi. Better to honor the boycott, or risk the disappoval of your friends and romantic interests. Stock in companies located in South Africa under the apartheid regime? Push for divestment, and boycott the companies’ products. The personal is political, they liked to say. Carter and his friends may say his dialogue with Hamas is just talk. Well, talk is political. Hamas has killed several dozens of Americans. They do not deserve a hug from our former President. If Jimmy Carter meets with them, does it mean that Americans can give them money with impunity?

The problem is that our economic sanctions regime has never seen this kind of peer-administered discipline. We have far too many happily unencumbered government actors and private citizens who view the US sanctions regime as inconvenient enough to disregard, notwithstanding that criminal penalties apply to transgressors. This is ironic, for people who ignore economic sanctions are often the most aggressive opponents of the American military. If they disregard soft-power tools against international villains by ignoring US economic embargoes, Pentagon-type remedies become the only remaining option. Of course, that means body bags. When that happens, those who are willfully blind or intentionally cavalier will have blood on their hands. It's best they get with the program, before it’s too late. A little old-fashioned ridicule might help.

The views in this article do not reflect those of the Department of Justice.