Michael Trapido has a very strange post on Zimbabwe, arguing that the United States should lift its sanctions on Zimbabwe because to do otherwise would be inconsistent with Obama’s policy on Iran:

As Africans living in the SADC, a healthy Zimbabwe would be of benefit to the region as a whole. Moreover if Ahmadinejad is capable of redemption then Mugabe should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s time to give Zimbabwe a break.

There are quite a few problems with this. The first is the idea that Obama has made some sort of implicit moral judgement by attempting to engage with Iran, and that having done so, the principle of consistency obliges him to do the same with Zimbabwe. In reality, none of this is true. Obama’s decision to engage with Iran is a strategic judgement, not a moral one: he has calculated that Iran’s actions are harmful to US interests, and since the US does not have the capability to go to war with Iran, he will attempt to cut a deal with the Iranian leadership instead. This is not even remotely comparable to the Zimbabwe situation, and there is certainly no ethical principle that obliges Obama to adopt the same tactics when dealing with two highly dissimilar countries.

Second, when Trapido complains that “the decision to persist with sanctions against Zimbabwe is not only unfair, it’s cruel” and argues that “it’s time to give Zimbabwe a break”, he’s effectively buying into Mugabe’s narrative that the sanctions are in some sense responsible for Zimbabwe’s economic problems, and that sanctions have inflicted hardship on the Zimbabwean people. But once again, neither of these things are true: the US and European sanctions against Zimbabwe are narrowly targeted against Robert Mugabe and his immediate coterie of elites. They consist primarily of asset freezes and a travel ban, along with some other measures such as restrictions on weapons sales. The idea that these targeted sanctions (as opposed to Mugabe’s disastrous economic policies) are responsible for the degraded state of Zimbabwe’s economy is a fiction created by Zanu-PF, and it is unfortunate to see this idea repeated on a South African blog.

Having said all of this, Trapido could still be right: it is possible that the best strategy for the US would be to lift sanctions in order to reward Zanu-PF for forming the unity government and to encourage further political progress. However, I think this would be mistaken. The unity government has achieved some impressive things; most notably, ending hyperinflation by means of dollarisation. And I agree that the unity government should be supported financially, if only because the most likely alternative - the complete collapse of the Zimbabwean state - would be an unprecedented disaster for both Zimbabwe and South Africa. However, the unity government itself remains fragile: it was entered into under duress by Zanu-PF, which has since broken many of the promises it made during the negotiations, and has been paralysed by Zanu-PF provocations such as its insistence on maintaining Gideon Gono as governor of the central bank and the continued harassment and abduction of human rights activists by the security organs of the state. There have been several moments since its formation when it seemed that the unity government was on the brink of collapse.

Given this situation, it would not be a good idea for Western countries to lift their targeted sanctions, when these sanctions are the only leverage they currently have over Zanu-PF’s intransigent elites. This is not to say that the sanctions were solely or even primarily responsible for forcing Zanu-PF to the negotiating table: they were probably far more concerned about the possibility of state failure if Zimbabwe had continued on its ruinous trajectory under Mugabe. Nevertheless, sanctions are one way of inflicting a certain amount of pain on the Zanu-PF elite, many of whom have benefited enormously from the country’s economic crisis by occupying seized farms and buying up assets at reduced prices using foreign currency. If anything, Western countries should be trying to find ways to sharpen these incentives: for instance, by threatening to charge Zanu-PF officials with humans rights violations if the unity government collapses, while offering generous financial aid if the government meets certain preconditions.