The Washington Post has finally discovered the insanity of the U.S. sanctions policy. In a https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/us-sanction-countries-work/">long article last week, the Post describes the absurd extent to which the U.S. has come to rely on sanctions as a means of achieving its foreign policy aims—a policy which has accelerated since the Bush administration, was further increased under Trump, and then skyrocketed under Biden. A third of the world is now sanctioned by the U.S., and over 60% of the world’s low-income countries.
Much of the article is couched in the notion that the sanctions no longer “work” as well as they used to, primarily exemplified by Russia’s economic evolution over the past two and a half years, evading Western sanctions. But largely left unsaid is that, even under a “working” sanctions policy, the death and destruction of the general public in that country has been considered “acceptable.” One example was the sanctions imposed against Saddam Hussein in the 1990s by H.W. Bush. Despite these sanctions, Saddam remained in power for another decade, but civilians died by the thousands due to the restrictions on the import of simple spare parts to repair the water and sewage systems in Iraq following the first Gulf War, triggering outbreaks of deadly cholera and typhoid.
Nonetheless, the article quotes a number of current and former officials who now have “concern about their impact.” Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official said: “It is the only thing between diplomacy and war and as such has become the most important foreign policy tool in the U.S. arsenal. And yet, nobody in government is sure this whole strategy is even working.” And Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser: “The mentality, almost a weird reflex, in Washington has just become: If something bad happens, anywhere in the world, the U.S. is going to sanction some people. And that doesn’t make sense. We don’t think about the collateral damage of sanctions the same way we think about the collateral damage of war. But we should.”
But there is another curious trend that has developed over years of using sanctions. As bureaucrats have become overwhelmed at the sheer magnitude of applied sanctions, they have exported key decision-making processes about the who, what, where, and how sanctions should be applied to the private sector and nonprofits. This has led to a multibillion-dollar sanctions industry comprised of law firms, lobbyists, and consultants that deal exclusively with sanctions—sometimes they are experts in imposing sanctions, or repealing sanctions, avoiding sanctions, or enforcing sanctions, but often it is all of the above.
The U.S. establishment, in its current state of collapse, has taken the role of the hammer that sees all problems as nails—even if those nails are entire nations and peoples.
