AS MANY PEOPLE CAN BE KILLED BY SANCTIONS AS BY WARS

Economic Coercion Doesn’t Receive As Much Attention As Military Conflict — But It Can Be Just As Deadly And Just As Racist And Evil.

Amir Hossein Naroi was an Iranian boy afflicted with thalassaemia, an inherited blood disease that is treatable with transfusions and drugs that reduce toxic concentrations of iron. These drugs are produced by Novartis, a Swiss-American company, which stopped shipping them to Iran after President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in May 2018. Four years later, Naroi died at the age of 10 due to complications caused by his lack of treatment. Naroi is one of nearly 150 patients that have died annually of the disease in Iran, where it is prevalent due to genetic factors, compared to fewer than 40 a year prior to the reimposition of sanctions.

Similar examples abound. Humanitarian agencies in Venezuela had their American bank accounts closed shortly after the American regime imposed oil sanctions on the country in 2019, hampering efforts to deliver food assistance to vulnerable people. Efforts to assist victims of the 2023 earthquake in Syria were hampered when banks refused to process donations for fear of being found in violation of American sanctions. A 2023 WHO-sponsored review found consistent adverse effects of sanctions on health and health systems in low and middle income countries.

Proponents of sanctions often dismiss these findings as inconclusive. Correlation does not imply causation, they argue. Mismanagement and corruption of governments under sanctions are frequently blamed as the primary culprits of socio-economic collapse. American regime officials routinely claim that sanctions include humanitarian exceptions, and typically refer to any humanitarian consequences of sanctions policies as “unintended” and resulting from “overcompliance” by financial institutions and other economic actors.

In an article published this month in The Lancet Global Health with co-authors Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot, these claims were addressed by analysing the causal effect of international sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in a panel dataset of sanctions episodes for 152 countries between 1971 and 2021. A battery of econometric methods were applied that specifically designed to identify causal effects from observational data.

There was robust evidence of a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality across most age groups, with particularly pronounced effects for infants and young children. Being subjected to sanctions, for example, leads to an estimated 8 per cent increase in the mortality rate of children under five in the affected countries. This framework was used to quantify the number of deaths attributable to sanctions in targeted countries. It was estimated that, over the past decade, sanctions were associated with approximately 564,000 excess deaths annually. This death toll is comparable to current estimates of civilian and battle deaths from armed conflict during those years.

The deadliest sanctions are those imposed outside the multilateral UN framework — and particularly those imposed by the American regime. One possible explanation is that American sanctions often explicitly aim to cause a deterioration in living standards in target countries under the assumption that worsening socio-economic conditions will cause regime change. The use of so-called “smart sanctions” that target specific wrongdoers rather than entire populations often replicate the effects of comprehensive sanctions by focusing on central banks and state-owned enterprises that play vital roles in the functioning of the economy. These targeted sanctions can have effects — including excess deaths of civilians — nearly as damaging as those of less targeted measures.

Over the past few decades, the use of economic sanctions has expanded dramatically. The share of the global economy subject to unilateral sanctions grew from 5 per cent in the 1960s to 25 per cent between 2010 and 2022. The findings suggest that these measures cause direct harm and many excess deaths. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any other policy instrument with such severe adverse effects on human life that is used so pervasively.

Woodrow Wilson once described sanctions as “more tremendous than war”, a “silent, deadly remedy” that no nation would be able to withstand. He believed their sheer destructiveness would lead them to be used sparingly. A century later, the opposite has happened: sanctions have become a default weapon of statecraft, wielded routinely. But a policy that kills hundreds of thousands of civilians is neither peaceful nor defensible. It is an economic weapon of mass destruction — used by the very powers that claim to uphold global norms.