Tag Archives: Sanctions

Time for Washington To Stop Sanctioning the World: US Arrogance Leaves Trail of Innocent Victims Behind, by Doug Bandow

Posted on October 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

There is probably no more counterproductive foreign policy strategy than sanctions, and a lot of innocent people get caught in the crossfire. From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

The “Lift Sanctions, Save Lives” network is lobbying Congress to do what it should have done years ago: assess the impact of economic sanctions now routinely applied to ally as well as adversary. Such a review is long overdue.

Economic sanctions have become a new global battlefield. In July Beijing targeted several organizations and individuals, including former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in retaliation for earlier U.S. penalties. In January Beijing sanctioned 28 former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as the Biden administration took over. In March, after the European Union penalized Beijing for suppressing political liberty in Hong Kong, the Xi regime retaliated against a number of Europeans, including members of the European Parliament.

The Chinese actions had little practical impact – preventing Pompeo and Ross from traveling to Hong Kong is not much of an inconvenience. (Ironically, they deserve to be sanctioned by Americans for their awful performance in office!) Moreover, Beijing’s action, though popular at home, backfired internationally. For instance, the European Parliament effectively killed a pending investment agreement.

Nevertheless, the whining about China’s action is striking. Americans and Europeans declared economic war on the proud, nationalistic People’s Republic of China, and were surprised when it struck back. Who knew that the PRC would dare act like … America!?

Of course, Beijing remains but a babe when it comes to applying sanctions. The US is by far the world’s cruelest and most prolific practitioner of economic warfare, which these days mostly means starving desperate civilians under impoverished dictatorships. Congress appears to be constantly looking for foreign peoples to target, based on the bizarre assumption that if the US punishes civilians already ravaged by civil war, political oppression, and socialist economics, the reigning autocrats will immediately apologize, disarm, liberalize, democratize, and ally with America.

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A Sadistic Foreign Policy, by Fred Reed

Posted on July 25, 2021 | 1 comment

Sanctions hurt the ordinary people of a country, groaning under the oppression of their rulers, whom sanctions don’t hurt. From Fred Reed at unz.com:

Listening to the pronouncements on Cuba by our cardboard President I wonder what the hell the United States is trying to do in Latin America? Biden, a lifelong hack of little mind and that going south, runs on, or his ventriloquist does, about his support for the Cuban people. He cares deeply about the Cuban people. Yes he does. So why does this malignant drab want to ruin their lives? He is placing more sanctions against the island. Is he too stupid to realize that sanctions hurt only the people, not the leaders, who can get their prime rib and good bourbon anyway? Or does he simply not care?

If there is any place on this or any other planet that poses less danger to America than Cuba, except Venezuela or maybe some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian rainforest, I can’t imagine who. There are eleven million Cubans, and all but about five want to work, drink, play with their children, and make phenomenal music that would send the solemn horses’ asses of the thinktanks into therapy. For sixty years the goddam United States has tried to starve them, sanction them, make them as miserable as possible out of a weird sort of Nordic sadism. It is sickening.

Kamala might not stand for it. Of course, standing is not her primary talent.

What does this wind-up political toy know about Cuba? Joe presides, dimly, over a country that for over half a century has done everything it can to ensure the misery of those eleven million innocent people, doing everything it can to make their lives as hard as possible. But Joe, he of the forty-weight sincerity probably learned at Central Casting, feels for the Cuban people. Yes, he does. Where did we get this guy?

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Curated Discourse, Narrative Artists and the Coming Conflicts, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on June 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Iranian government now has little interest in making any kind of common cause with the West. It will do what it perceives as best for Iran, and the price is sanctions from the West, so be it. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

If sanctions are not lifted, Iran will hit back. And Israel will try to deter Iran from pursuing its nuclear programme. The two will clash.

Here we go again. The narrative is being set. President Assad’s name cannot not be uttered in the West, save with a ‘chemical weapons’, and a ‘killing his own people’ gibe. It is just not permitted – even though this truth is disputed by some of the West’s own investigators. One is obliged to repeat this taunt, simply as the entry price to mainstream, ‘curated’ discourse.

Now, courtesy of some highly jaundiced members of the exile Iranian community in the West, the President-elect of Iran is being branded as criminal, and a figure exemplifying the “banal nature of evil”, for his 1988 involvement in the execution of Iranian dissidents. Indeed, Raisi already is under U.S. sanction for this offence, when “according to anti-Iranian folklore, hundreds of detainees were executed. But few know what really happened”, notes former Ambassador Bhadrakumar in the Asia Times.

“It is no secret that Washington encouraged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to wage war on Iran”, notes Bhadrakumar. “But after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1988, members of the terrorist group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), based in Iraq – heavily armed by Saddam, and enjoying the backing of the CIA – stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack”. Bhadrakumar continues: “Iran smashed the MEK assault – and that set the stage for the so-called “death commissions” of prisoners, terrorists and others. Inevitably, those executed included agents of Western intelligence. The executions couldn’t have been carried out except on Khomeini’s orders. Raisi was a young man of 27 when reportedly, he served on a revolutionary panel involved in sentencing Iran’s enemies to death”.

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Escalate to Deescalate… Then Biden Takes Escalator Sideways, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on April 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

One thing can certainly be said about the Biden administration’s foreign policy—it’s not consistent. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Washington must surely know that its escalations will be met with equal force from Russia and China, Finian Cunningham writes.

President Joe Biden wasn’t expecting Russia’s rapid slap back. He assumed, wrongly, that he could hit Moscow with a new round of sanctions (based on slanderous claims) and look as if he were chewing gum and acting the hard man.

Then slap. Russian responded immediately and firmly. Ten U.S. diplomats are to be expelled in a reciprocal response to Biden’s executive order last week to expel Russian diplomats.

Laughably, the Biden administration was aghast at the Russian sanctions. A State Department spokesman decried the Russian move as an “escalation” – unlike the American sanctions which, he said, were “proportionate”.

Proportionate to what? Well, to unfounded claims by the Biden administration that Russia had interfered in the 2020 presidential election, had launched cyberattacks on government and private companies, and was threatening Ukraine with aggression. But what if all these claims are baseless, which they are?

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The Modern US War Machine Kills More Like A Python Than A Tiger, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on September 1, 2020 | Leave a comment

Direct war is so twentieth century. Sanctions are slow strangulation and don’t have the optics problem of direct war. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Forbes has published two back-to-back articles about the analysis of retired Navy captain and political scientist Bradford Dismukes titled “To Defeat China In War, Strangle Its Economy” and “If Russia Invades Europe, NATO Could Sweep The Seas Of Russian Merchant Ships“.

The articles were authored by a man named David Axe, who is my new favorite small-time war propagandist because he’s so desperate to be recognized for his imperialist stenography that he often approaches his spin jobs in an informatively unskillful and ham-fisted way. The best one I’ve found so far is this 2013 piece about the time he spent with the “rebels” of Syria, who he takes great pains to assure us are not terrorists or extremists but brave freedom fighters who’d successfully “liberated” large swathes of Syrian territory.

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The Trump Administration’s Economic War on the World: Hitting Adversaries, Punishing Innocents, Angering Allies, by Doug Bandow

Posted on August 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

The Chinese government is going in for the US government’s game of madcap sanctioning, and the US government is mortally offended. From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

As if viewing gambling at Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca, Washington policymakers are shocked, shocked to discover that China, too, can apply economic pressure. Complained the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano: “the Chinese Communist government slapped sanctions on members of Congress as well as a U.S. ambassador. This action is intended to send the world a message: Fear us.”

Of course, the penalties Carafano complained of were retaliation for Washington’s imposition of similar sanctions on Chinese officials over the crackdown in Hong Kong. The bilateral pissing match will have no impact on Beijing’s policies.

Carafano is not the first person to complain about China’s economic sanctions. Mathew Ha of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies was upset by South Korea’s refusal to follow Washington’s criticism of the People’s Republic of China, which he blamed on fear of PRC economic retaliation. Washington Examiner columnist Tom Rogan voiced similar irritation with Beijing’s threatened economic retaliation after Canberra moved to counteract increased Chinese repression in Hong Kong.

Imagine. China is acting like … the US!

It’s almost charming to see such anger over Beijing’s behavior when America continues to be the global leader in using its economic power to penalize governments which refuse to heed its commands. In January the president said he would punish Iraq if it acted like a sovereign state and insisted on the withdrawal of American troops.

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America’s Supernational Sovereignty, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on June 17, 2020 | 2 comments

Supernational Sovereignty is a fancy way of saying the US government thinks it has the right to tell the whole world what to do. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

One of the most disturbing aspects of American foreign policy since 9/11 has been the assumption that decisions made by the United States are binding on the rest of the world, best exemplified by President George W. Bush’s warning that “there was a new sheriff in town.” Apart from time of war, no other nation has ever sought to prevent other nations from trading with each other, nor has any government sought to punish foreigners using sanctions with the cynical arrogance demonstrated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The United States uniquely seeks to penalize other sovereign countries for alleged crimes that did not occur in the U.S. and that did not involve American citizens, while also insisting that all nations must comply with whatever penalties are meted out by Washington. At the same time, it demonstrates its own hypocrisy by claiming sovereign immunity whenever foreigners or even American citizens seek to use the courts to hold it accountable for its many crimes.

The conceit by the United States that it is the acknowledged judge, jury and executioner in policing the international community began in the post-World War 2 environment, when hubristic American presidents began referring to themselves as “leaders of the free world.” This pretense received legislative and judicial backing with passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 (ATA) as amended in 1992 plus subsequent related legislation, to include the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act of 2016 (JASTA). The body of legislation can be used to obtain civil judgments against alleged terrorists for attacks carried out anywhere in the world and can be employed to punish governments, international organizations and even corporations that are perceived to be supportive of terrorists, even indirectly or unknowingly. Plaintiffs are able to sue for injuries to their “person, property, or business” and have ten years to bring a claim.

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The Real Reason Russia Teamed up with China…Here’s What Comes Next for American Preeminence and the Dollar, by Vladimir Pozner

Posted on April 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The US essentially drove Russia into China’s loving arms. From Vladimir Pozner at internationalman.com:

russia and china

Editor’s Note: Vladimir Pozner is Russia’s most influential political TV talk-show host, journalist and broadcaster.

Pozner has hosted several shows on Russian television, where he has interviewed famous figures such as Hillary Clinton, Alain Delon, President Dimitri Medvedev and Sting.

Pozner has appeared on a wide range of networks, including NBC, CBS, CNN and the BBC. He has worked as a journalist, editor (Soviet Life Magazine and Sputnik Magazine) and TV and radio commentator in a long career covering many major events in Russia.

Pozner has appeared on The Phil Donahue Show and Ted Koppel’s Nightline. He has also worked for the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, a Soviet think tank.

He co-hosted a show with Phil Donahue called Pozner/Donahue. It was the first televised bi-lateral discussion (or “spacebridge”) between audiences in the Soviet Union and the US, carried via satellite.

In 1997, he returned to Moscow as an independent journalist.

Doug Casey’s friend Mark Gould sat down with Pozner in Moscow to help us better understand the relationship between the US and Russia.

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International Man: Do you see a resurging Russia and a restoration of Russian Empire, or simply a national state resurgence?

Vladimir Pozner: Certainly not. Russia is not a resurging empire. There is no way it’s ever going to be an empire again.

Empires have this universal feature of disappearing forever, whether it’s ancient Rome or whether it’s the UK or whatever. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

It’s not going to come back, and people have to come to terms with that. Russia has been an empire since the days of Peter the Great— we’re talking about the 18th century. It is used to being an empire. The Soviet Union was an empire.

The loss of an empire is painful. It’s like when you lose a leg but have phantom pains—the leg isn’t there, but it still hurts.

Well, that’s what’s going on. Psychologically, it’s difficult to accept. So, you have a certain degree of nationalism, chauvinism—and it’s part of growing out of what you were once upon a time and becoming something else.

Is that happening in Russia? Yes.

Is it painful? Yes, it’s painful. Is there a deep divide between the older generation and the younger generation? There’s always a divide, but in this case, a very deep divide.

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The Real Reason for the New Cold War with Russia… What it Means for the Markets and World Peace, by International Man

Posted on April 4, 2020 | 2 comments

A knowledgable Russian’s view of the US-Russian relationship. From internationalman.com:

New Cold War

Editor’s Note: Vladimir Pozner is Russia’s most influential TV political-talk-show host, journalist and broadcaster.

Pozner has hosted several shows on Russian television, where he has interviewed famous figures such as Hillary Clinton, Alain Delon, President Dimitri Medvedev and Sting.

Pozner has appeared on a wide range of networks, including NBC, CBS, CNN and the BBC. In his long career, he has been a journalist, editor (Soviet Life Magazine and Sputnik Magazine) and TV and radio commentator, covering all major events in Russia.

Pozner has appeared on The Phil Donahue Show and Ted Koppel’s Nightline.

He co-hosted a show with Phil Donahue called Pozner/Donahue. It was the first televised bi-lateral discussion (or “spacebridge”) between audiences in the Soviet Union and the US, carried via satellite.

In 1997, he returned to Moscow as an independent journalist.

Doug Casey’s friend Mark Gould sat down with Pozner in Moscow to help us better understand the relationship between the US and Russia.

 —

International Man: Naturally, Americans have a lot of misconceptions about Russia. The US government and media offer an overly simplistic and unfavorable view of the country.

What does the US government and media get wrong?

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Dual Paths in Dark Times: Despair or Hope for Antiwar Dreamers, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on March 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

One benefit of the coronavirus panic: the US is leaving some of its smaller military bases in foreign lands because of the virus. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

“Red” (Morgan Freeman): “Hope is a dangerous thing my friend, it can kill a man…”

Andy (Tim Robbins): “Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

~ The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Two futures lie before us. Like the classic visions of late-Old Testament prophets, contemporary observers – perhaps voyeurs – of U.S. national security policy can, at this precipice of pandemic, discern, however vaguely, as dual, dichotomous prospective paths unfurl. The first, and Washington’s long-preferred, course is one of militarist escalation. It’s contours are there for us to see.

In the past couple of weeks, the Pentagon has unapologetically ramped up its proxy war with Iran – on the soil of an unmistakably unwilling “sovereign” state which has politely, if futilely, asked the US military to leave – by bombing, and killing, third-party “allies” of the Islamic Republic.

Then, though it was hardly covered or noticed, Washington killed a Somali child and an elderly disabled man in an airstrike: the 31st such US attack-from-the-sky in a Trump-accelerated campaign upon yet another country we are not at war with. US Africa Command announced, of course, that five “terrorists” had been killed in the strike with zero reports of civilian casualties. Well, naturally, it helps to have folks on the ground (hardly the norm for America’s techno-killers) to accurately access victim-status. Which is probably one reason – besides flagrant duplicity – that a UK-based airstrike monitoring group’s relevant report estimates Somali civilian casualties in US attacks since 2007 may be 73 times higher than official Pentagon claims.

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