The 'Fantasy Politics' Behind the Economic Wars

Impoverishing and starving the people will not deliver accountability and justice.

Thanassis Cambanis asks an important question about Syria and U.S. sanctions policy:

When an evil regime wins a bloody war that allows it stay in power, how can a liberal-democratic state express solidarity for victims of that regime’s brutality without engaging in fantasy politics?

By fantasy politics, I mean pursuing policies that continue a lost war through punitive acts that do little to limit the targeted regime’s capabilities, while hurting the innocent civilians those penalties are ostensibly intended to help; or pretending that the losing side of a conflict has leverage to pursue its objectives, when in fact it does not.

The fantasy politics Cambanis criticizes here is not just limited to Syria policy. We can see it in the stubborn refusal to face reality in Venezuela, and we are seeing it in Afghanistan as well. In all of these cases, there is a de facto government that the U.S. doesn’t recognize as the legitimate government of that country, and in each one the U.S. is applying broad sanctions in a vain bid to extract concessions from them. The concessions aren’t forthcoming, but the sanctions have had the effect of increasing the hardship suffered by the people that live under these governments.