December
19, 2019
©
Photo: Flickr/donkeyhotey
US
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin seems to think that nations under the hammer
of American sanctions should be thanking Washington for not attacking them
militarily instead. How generous, how virtuous of Uncle Sam!
Speaking
at the Doha Forum in Qatar last week, Mnuchin made a virtue of the US imposing
economic sanctions on countries it dislikes because such measures, he claimed,
were a way to avoid the worse alternative of war.
“The
reason why we’re using sanctions is because they are an important alternative
for world military conflicts,” said the US Treasury
Secretary.
The
sleight of hand here is to portray Washington as somehow being more responsible
and principled in its foreign policy by using coercion against other nations
supposedly without harming civilians, damaging infrastructure or spilling
blood.
Billionaire
Mnuchin is living in a bubble of American propaganda if he thinks that economic
sanctions are some kind of sterile lever which do not have any impact on human
suffering. Sanctions are acts of war, conducted as other means to troop
invasions, air strikes and naval blockades.
International
lawyer and former UN diplomat Alfred de Zayas calls the sanctions imposed
by the US on Venezuela “economic terrorism”. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans
are estimated to have died as a result of Washington’s tightening embargo on
the South American country since 2017.
Iran’s
government has also condemned US sanctions on its nation as “economic
terrorism”. So too has Syria, North Korea and Cuba – the latter having been
embargoed by the US for nearly six decades without relent.
Typically,
sanctioned countries cannot import vital medicines and medical equipment due to
US restrictions on banking systems and trade. That leads to premature deaths
from terminal illnesses that go untreated, and to worsening health of
vulnerable sections of the population, the young and elderly. Less perceptibly,
but no less real, is increased mortality from general deprivation caused by
sanctions-hit economies.
Remember
how former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously admitted on national TV that
American sanctions killed 500,000 children in Iraq during the 1990s, and with
monstrous callousness added, “it was worth it”.
Steve
Mnuchin claims with barefaced lies that US sanctions do not impinge on
humanitarian supplies to targeted countries. That is contradicted by
independent international observers who have visited Syria, Iraq, Iran,
Venezuela and North Korea where US sanctions have decimated public health
services. See this article by independent
journalist Eva Bartlett who visited several of the aforementioned countries.
Indeed,
the whole purpose of sanctions is to deliberately ravage populations in order
to provoke widespread social instability and ultimately regime change.
The
practice of unilateral sanctions by the US should be banned under international
law as a form of aggression against nations. It is an act of war and, without
just cause of self-defense, is therefore a war crime.
Mnuchin’s
cynicism pretends that sanctions are a valid legal instrument of foreign policy
which are qualitatively different from military warfare. His nauseating attempt
to claim that the US is acting with restraint by using sanctions “instead of
war” is absurd.
Sanctions
are part of the US arsenal to harass and subjugate other nations which
Washington deems to be recalcitrant to achieving its geopolitical objectives.
Historically
it is seen that economic assault on countries is often the prelude to all-out war.
The good “alternative” that Mnuchin talks of is delusional.
Recall
how US sanctions against Japan in the 1930s aimed at cutting off the latter’s
oil imports led to Japan precipitating the Pacific War with the attacks on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Arguably, the war’s inception was not at
Pearl Harbor, but rather found in the prior US policy of strangulating Japan
economically.
That’s
what makes the current sanctions on Iran by the Trump administration a matter
of grave concern. The US economic blockade seems aimed at forcing Iran to make
a retaliatory move which would then be cited by Washington as “justifying”
American military action. But let’s put those sanctions in proper context. They
were imposed unilaterally by the Trump administration when it tore up its
signature in May 2018 to the treaty-binding international nuclear accord. Bad
faith has been followed by economic aggression, which may, in turn, lead to
open military aggression. Thus, sanctions are part of a sliding scale of war,
not some abstract benign alternative to war, as the US Treasury Secretary likes
to pretend.
What is
more disturbing is the increasing use of sanctions as a normal foreign policy
by the Trump administration.
The
list of nations under US sanctions continues to grow. In addition to countries
mentioned above are several others, primarily Russia and China. Countless
layers of sanctions originated by the Obama administration have been added on
to Moscow by the Trump presidency. The vague and unverified nature of US claims
invoked to implement these sanctions against Russia are in themselves
provocative.
The
threat of American sanctions against Russia’s Nord Stream-2 mega project for
increasing gas exports to Europe is perhaps the most egregious example of using
economic instruments gratuitously to pursue geopolitical interests. Not only
Russia but also European “allies” of the US are being threatened with sanctions
over Nord Stream-2.
Nord
Stream-2 clearly illustrates how US sanctions are another instrument of
unlawful aggression and coercion for achieving American interests.
The
complacency of Mnuchin’s virtue-signaling belies a brutal truth. Far from
avoiding war, Washington is more and more at war with the rest of the planet by
using economic aggression, terrorism and bullying.
The
would-be US hegemon is increasingly out of control, no longer restrained by the
superficial need for appearance of legal niceties. The international tensions
it is stoking by its wanton tyranny are creating a dangerous threshold. US
economic warfare through sanctions has ensured that catastrophic military war
is but one fatal slip away.
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