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command these resources and the willingness to use them, but also the international
credibility to make the possession of those resources and the willingness to use them
believed by the other states which it is trying to coerce. In this model, the United States
would have pressured other United Nations Security Council and United Nations
member-states to cooperate with economic sanctions against Iraq by using its coercive
political capital with those states to obtain the desired result of cooperation.
The third hypothesis advanced by Martin is that of coadjustment to induce
cooperation on the enforcement of multilateral sanctions regimes. The coadjustment
argument is based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) understanding of global politics. In
this model, states are in a situation of mutual discord, where it is always better to be the
state not cooperating when all of the other states do. For example, a state trading with
Iraq during economic embargo would have a unique economic advantage relative to the
rest of the world. However, this behavior creates a “suboptimal equilibrium” where all
states are worse off than then they would have been had they cooperated (Martin 1992,
39). Aware of this pitfall, states coadjust to create the preferable situation of mutual
cooperation. In this situation, states that did not have interest in sanctioning Iraq would
still cooperate with the good faith intent to obtain international cooperation in some case
that was more important to them. Martin argues that each of these three hypotheses holds
explanatory value when attempting to determine why states cooperate in the multilateral
enforcement of sanctions regimes, and that their relative influence is dependent on the
structure of the state interests involved (Martin 1992, 30). The international cooperation
on sanctions regime against Iraq appears to be a combination of coincidence, coercion,
and coadjustment on the part of United Nations member-states.
Convention