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International sanctions are actions taken by countries against others for political reasons, either unilaterally or multilaterally, and consist of three major forms:

• Diplomatic sanctions - the reduction or removal of diplomatic ties, such as embassies.
• Economic sanctions - typically a ban on trade, possibly limited to certain sectors such as armaments, or with certain exceptions (such as food and medecine)
• Military sanctions - military intervention

Economic sanctions are distinguished from trade sanctions, which are applied for purely economic reasons, and typically take the form of tariffs or similar measures, rather than bans on trade.

Diplomatic sanctions

As an example, the European Union imposed diplomatic sanctions on Cuba after the latter broke a moratorium on capital punishment in 2003. Measures included limitations on high-level government visits.

Economic sanctions

Economic sanctions can vary from imposing import duties on goods from, or blocking the export of on certain goods to, the target country, to a full naval blockade of its ports in effort to verify, and curb or block specified imported goods.

Well-known examples of economic sanctions include the UN sanctions against Iraq (1990-2003) and the US sanctions against Cuba (1961-present).

The United Nations imposed stringent economic sanctions upon Iraq after the first Gulf War, and these were mantained partly as an attempt to make the Iraqi government co-operate with the U.N. weapons inspectors' monitoring of Iraq's weapons and weapons programs. The sanctions were not lifted until May 2003, after its dictator Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

On May 13th 1998, the United States and Japan imposed economic sanctions on India, following its second round of nuclear tests.

Military sanctions

Similarly, military sanctions can range from carefully-targeted airborne assaults of bombers (such as Israel's 1981 bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor) to invasion and occupation. A less aggressive form of military sanctions could be the 15 year embargo on sales of F-16 fighter/bomber aircraft by the United States to Pakistan which ran from 1990 to 2005 in response to Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons. (The latter is considered a military sanction, not an economic one.)

See Also

• Iraq sanctions

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