An Economic Weapon of Mass Destruction

The economic weapon is a very deadly weapon, and it kills innocent people in huge numbers.

Francisco Rodriguez sums up the findings of a new study that he co-authored on the destructive effects of sanctions:

We found 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. We used this framework to quantify the number of deaths attributable to sanctions in targeted countries. We estimate that, over the past decade, sanctions were associated with approximately 564,000 excess deaths annually [bold mine-DL]. This death toll is comparable to current estimates of civilian and battle deaths from armed conflict during those years.

The findings confirm what opponents of economic sanctions have been saying for decades. The economic weapon is a very deadly weapon, and it kills innocent people in huge numbers. The victims of economic warfare from just the last ten years are numbered in the millions. We have known for a long time that sanctions kill, and now we have a better idea of just how many people they have killed.

Sanctions are not an alternative to war. Governments that use them are launching attacks on other countries. Sanctions are lethal. They are arguably more dangerous than military action because their human costs are more easily ignored or blamed on something else. I suspect that is why they are so often the weapon of choice to be used against other countries. That makes it much easier for governments to use this weapon against other countries, and that makes the use of the weapon much more common.

Sanctions seem less extreme than using force, but they inflict greater and more indiscriminate harm than most military interventions. Policymakers can pretend they are rejecting violence when they endorse sanctions, and at the same time they get to inflict severe pain on the population. Sanctions provide the cruelty and destruction that many policymakers desire with less political risk.

Some sanctions are worse than others. Rodriguez notes that unilateral U.S. sanctions are more destructive than the rest: “The deadliest sanctions are those imposed outside the multilateral UN framework — and particularly those imposed by the US.” It may be that U.S. sanctions cause more harm because they are intended “to cause a deterioration in living standards in target countries under the assumption that worsening socio-economic conditions will cause regime change.”

That sounds right to me. Sanctions advocates in the U.S. want to make the target populations suffer, and they frequently define success in terms of how much suffering they have caused. When they say that their sanctions are “working,” they point to the damage they have done to the target economy and the standard of living. When the people in a targeted country are immiserated, sanctionists celebrate.

While the destructive effects of sanctions are reasonably well-known among analysts that work on these issues, they are not that familiar to the wider public. Polling typically finds broad support for economic sanctions on various governments, but I assume that support is premised on the false belief that sanctions are a more moderate, less destructive option. If it were more widely understood that “slapping” sanctions on another country meant that there would be a significant increase in the deaths of young children, I would like to think that would make most policymakers and most citizens reject using sanctions.

Sanctions are a ghastly weapon that hurts the most vulnerable and innocent in a society. As Rodriguez writes, “it is difficult to think of any other policy instrument with such severe adverse effects on human life that is used so pervasively.” They are an “an economic weapon of mass destruction,” and they should be treated as such. Sanctions cause far too much harm, and they should not be used. The U.S. should lift its existing sanctions and repudiate their use in the future.