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.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
