No abstract

Sanctions are impractical and morally destructive but politically convenient. " 4 " Sanctions can be devastating to the population of the targeted state. " and Japan, and can effectively bar poor countries from having meaningful economic relations with the developed world. Consider the case of Iran. Before 2016, the EU, the United States, and the UN all had sanctions that applied to the Central Bank of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards, and the oil, banking, and insurance industries. Upon the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, the UN sanctions were removed. 14 Relief for U.S. sanctions was to be phased in, but that policy was reversed under the Trump admin istration, which now justifies its approach by pointing to Iranian behavior unrelated to the pursuit of nuclear weapons. 15 The Trump administration has also encouraged the European Union to join it in the economic embargo-a move that the latter has resisted as it has sought to preserve the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. 16 Venezuela has been another target of comprehensive economic sanctions, as imposed by a series of executive orders signed by President Trump since coming into office. These documents give the Treasury Department the right to sanction anyone working in the Venezuelan gold or oil sectors, and blocks the country's access to U.S. financial markets. 17 In July 2019, the Treasury Department even sanctioned individuals and companies involved in a Venezuelan government food-subsidy program on the grounds that it was plagued by corruption. 18 While only a handful of such policies are widely covered in the press, lesser-known sanctions regimes abound around the globe. The Department of the Treasury maintains a Specially Designated and Blocked Nationals List, which is composed of individuals and entities that have their assets blocked and are prohibited from business dealings with Americans. As of November 2019, the list, which includes drug traffickers, terrorists, individuals, companies, and even specific aircraft and ships, runs 1,346 pages. 19 Most of these sanctions are decided on and applied within the executive branch with little input from Congress or the broader public.

No abstract

Among both elites and the mass public, conservatives and liberal differ in their foreign policy preferences. Relatively little effort, however, has been put toward showing that, beyond the use of force, these differences affect the day-today outputs and processes of foreign policy. This article uses United Nations voting data from 1946 to 2008 of the five major Anglophone democracies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to show that each of these countries votes more in line with the rest of the world when liberals are in power. This can be explained by ideological differences between conservatives and liberals and the ways in which the socializing power of international institutions interact with preexisting ideologies. The results hope to encourage more research into the ways in which ideological differences among the masses and elites translate into differences in foreign policy goals and practices across governments.

Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by specific policies. Three experiments are used to test the utility of this framework. First, when conservatives heard about Muslims killing Christians, as opposed to the opposite scenario, they were more likely to support a humanitarian intervention and agree that the United States has a moral obligation to help those persecuted by their governments. Liberals showed no religious preference. When the relevant identity group was race, however, liberals were more likely to want to help blacks persecuted by whites, while conservatives showed no racial bias. In contrast, the degree of persecution mattered relatively little to respondents in either experiment, and the effects of moral foundations were shown to be generally weak relative to those of prejudice. In another experiment, conservatives adopted more isolationist policies after reading a text about the country becoming more liberal, as opposed to a paragraph that said the United States was a relatively conservative country. While not necessarily contradicting the Vertical Hierarchy Model, the results indicate that under most conditions the Prejudice First Model presents a better lens through which to understand how foreign policy preferences are formed.