https://geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com/p/economic-world-war-us-sanctions-countries
The US government has imposed sanctions on one-third of all countries, 60% of poor nations. This economic warfare has killed millions in the Global South. It is now fragmenting the financial system.
Ben Norton
Sep 06, 2024

Washington is waging an economic world war.

The US government has imposed sanctions on one-third of all countries on Earth, including more than 60% of poor nations, according to a comprehensive report in the Washington Post.

The United States had 15,373 active sanctions as of April 2024.

No other country comes even remotely close to the number of sanctions applied by the US. In second place is Switzerland with 5,062 sanctions; followed by the European Union with 4,808; the United Kingdom with 4,360; Canada with 4,292; and Australia with 3,023.

The United Nations only had 875 active sanctions as of April 2024.

For sanctions to be legal according to international law, they must be approved by the UN Security Council. This means that the vast majority of sanctions imposed by the United States and its Western allies are illegal.

Sanctions without UN approval are known as "unilateral coercive measures", and UN General Assembly resolutions have routinely denounced them as criminal.
US sanctions map 2024
A map of countries under US sanctions (as of August 2024)

In its report, the Washington Post acknowledged that illegal US sanctions have devastated the economies of relatively small countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and Iraq.

According to the newspaper, US sanctions on Venezuela "contributed to an economic contraction roughly three times as large as that caused by the Great Depression in the United States", and had the effect of "exacerbating one of the worst peacetime economic collapses in modern history".

A declassified State Department memo from 1960 exposes the sadistic intentions of US sanctions policy.

The document addressed the popularity of Fidel Castro's new leftist government in Cuba, following a revolution against a US-backed right-wing dictator in 1959. It reluctantly concluded that the "majority of Cubans support Castro".

"The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship", stated the memo.

Senior US State Department officials wrote that (emphasis added):

every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

A former US official who ran regime-change operations to try to overthrow Cuba's government admitted to the Washington Post in its 2024 report that the "abuse of this system is ridiculous", describing the US economic warfare scheme as a "relentless, never-ending, you-must-sanction-everybody-and-their-sister, sometimes literally, system".

Some US government officials sadistically taunt the countries they are trying to crush with sanctions.

The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is the body that oversees sanctions. OFAC's former Director Adam Szubin rewrote the lyrics of The Police's hit song “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and instead sang “Every Little Thing We Do Is Sanctions” at a holiday party in 2011, according to the Washington Post.

During the Donald Trump administration's coup attempt in Venezuela in 2019, a senior US official proudly compared Washington's suffocating sanctions to the death grip of Star Wars villain Darth Vader.

Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs published a research paper that estimated that illegal US sanctions caused the deaths of more than 40,000 Venezuelans from 2017 to 2018. This was a conservative figure.

Human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, who previously held the position of the UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, estimated in 2020 that more than 100,000 Venezuelans had died due to US sanctions.

US-led sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. A former UN assistant secretary-general, Denis Halliday, who had served as the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, resigned from his post in protest in 1998, calling Western sanctions "genocidal”.

Halliday estimated in 1999 that sanctions had caused the deaths of between 1 million and 1.5 million Iraqis. He warned that Western governments were "maintaining a program of economic sanctions deliberately, knowingly killing thousands of Iraqis each month. And that definition fits genocide".

Halliday made similar comments in a 2021 interview, asserting, "We kill people with sanctions. Sanctions are not a substitute for war—they are a form of warfare".

None of this was a surprise in Washington. US government officials knew in the 1990s that their sanctions were killing enormous numbers of Iraqi civilians.

In an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes in 1996, journalist Leslie Stahl told US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about reports that "a half a million children have died" in Iraq.

Stahl asked, "Is the price worth it?" Albright promptly justified the mass murder, insisting, "We think the price is worth it".

In 2022, the top UN expert on sanctions said the unilateral coercive measures that the West has imposed on countries like Syria are “outrageous”, cautioning that they are “suffocating” millions of civilians and “may amount to crimes against humanity”.

A group of UN experts sent a letter to the US government in 2022 requesting that it remove its illegal sanctions on Iran. The human rights experts said these unilateral coercive measures have a “negative impact” on “the enjoyment of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in the Islamic Republic of Iran and on the right to health and the right to life”.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk visited Venezuela in 2023 and criticized the sanctions that the US and Europe have illegally imposed on the South American nation. The UN human rights leader said these unilateral coercive measures must be lifted, warning that they “have exacerbated the economic crisis and hindered human rights”.

In November 2023, the vast majority of countries on Earth voted in the UN General Assembly to condemn unilateral coercive measures for violating human rights. With 128 in favor and 54 against, the vote was clearly divided: the formerly colonized nations of the Global South opposed sanctions, whereas the colonizers of the West defended them.
UN GA vote map sanctions unilateral coercive measures 2023

Votes have looked very similar in the UN Human Rights Council. In April 2024, the countries of the Global South voted to denounce the "negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights”, while the West once again defended the use of illegal sanctions.
UN vote map sanctions unilateral coercive measures West rest

Although Western sanctions have caused severe economic damage and extreme human suffering in relatively small countries, they may have reached their limit.

Large countries like China and Russia have proven to be "too big to sanction". Western sanctions have not been able to crush their economies, and instead have acted as reverse forms of protectionism, encouraging import substitution industrialization and helping China and Russia develop their own domestic technologies to become more self-sufficient.

Even some hawkish Western scholars have acknowledged that US economic warfare in Eurasia has "backfired”. They are concerned that Western hegemony is in decline, as Beijing and Moscow, in alliance with the Global South, are challenging the dominance of the dollar and developing alternatives to the US-controlled global financial system.