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Originally Posted by cthulu23
You are right that sanctions do not always have the desired effect. Military action is always in the background as an option during negotiations with tyrants, a la Serbia, but preemptively striking a country without any sort of global support or credible justification is dangerous and reckless.
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But no country with a significant military force took the threat of military force seriously. The UN certainly has no stomach for a real fight as they barely show up to keep the peace in places already committed, in some form, to decreasing violence.
Additionally, the threat of sanctions is almost completely ineffective because states know the process that such approvals need to go through. It can be years between the threat of sanctions to the first implementation of them. And the process can be delayed by any number of simple concessions on the part of the to be sanctioned country or back room deals with UN member countries.
Now the US has proven that there could be a real militaristic threat. We can debate whether this is a good or bad thing but the invasion of Iraq has underlined that our strategy for dealing with "rogue" nations may run the gamut from international sanctions to more "unilateral" (if you consider Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, et al all pawns of the US) action that doesn't follow the same old easily manipulated process of approval through the UN.