Sanctions Are War

By: Daniel Larison

 

Broad economic sanctions are a form of warfare, and the U.S. is by far the most frequent economic belligerent in the world. Our government’s overuse and abuse of sanctions has increased by leaps and bounds in just the last two decades. Sanctions designations increased significantly during the Obama years, and then they exploded under Trump with 1,457 designations in the year of 2018 alone. Trump’s multiple “maximum pressure” campaigns represented a dramatic escalation of economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria, and so far Biden has kept all of them intact. In each case, the US chose to launch these economic wars to try to compel capitulation by the targeted states as if they were rebellious subjects that needed to be brought to heel rather than the sovereign and independent countries that they are.

 

Economic wars cause the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of people, and in the most extreme cases they have caused deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The death toll doesn’t fully account for the misery that economic warfare creates, but it reminds us that broad sanctions are coercive and destructive by design. The US doesn’t need to resort to military action to cause civilian casualties in unnecessary wars. It just abuses its great economic and financial power to choke intransigent nations when their leaders refuse to bend to Washington’s will.

 

Full article is on this link: 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/sanctions-war/5744380