Countries that formerly made up the Soviet Union. Map: Library of Congress
As we post this article, the tense standoff around Ukraine between the U.S. and its allies on one side and Russia on the other continues.1 At this point it appears that the U.S. strategy is mainly to counter Russia’s moves through economic sanctions. The essential struggle is over which imperialist power—the U.S. or Russia—is going to dominate key territories and countries of Eastern Europe.
Republican-fascist Lindsey Graham told Fox Fascist “News” that the U.S. should impose sanctions on Russia “for the disruption to the world order by the military buildup, not invasion.” (Note: not just in the event of an invasion, but simply to punish Russia for a military buildup—and U.S. domination is now euphemistically termed “world order.”) The Democrats take a back seat to no one in demanding sanctions even as there are differences over exactly when and how to impose them. Democratic senator Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said if Russia attacks Ukraine it would face “the mother of all sanctions.”2
What Are Sanctions?
The mainstream (ruling class) media presents sanctions as a humane, finely tuned, and discriminate way of punishing Russia’s leader Putin and Russia’s military. And, very harmfully, so do influential voices in the “liberal/progressive” media. Democracy Now! opened its coverage on January 26 with “President Biden said Tuesday he would consider personal sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin amid mounting tensions over Ukraine” (emphasis added) without anywhere in their article noting the actual nature of sanctions or the massive suffering sanctions would impose on the Russian people. A piece at the Center for American Progress, a high-powered liberal think tank and “influencer” site, portrayed the target of sanctions as “high-profile oligarchs” and “enablers of kleptocracy.” And it emphasized that it is critical to “Make clear that sanctions are about Putin” along with defusing the danger of war.
But behind all the obfuscation, here’s the short story: Because of the dominating role the U.S. plays in the world economically and militarily, the rulers of the U.S. are in a position to impose sanctions that choke off a target nation’s ability to buy and sell on the world market. And in today’s tightly integrated world, that means making the lives of people in the targeted nation unlivable.
Sanctions Kill
For decades, to take one example, the U.S. has used sanctions against Iran3—to devastating consequences. As revcom.us has reported, U.S. sanctions have crippled Iran’s economy by blocking it from importing and exporting goods and punishing other countries who wished to invest in or trade with Iran. Unemployment and inflation in Iran have skyrocketed, and Iran has been blocked from making or importing needed medicines and medical equipment. The horrible impact of sanctions intensified with the COVID pandemic when rather than easing sanctions, the New York Times reported, “If anything, the United States has doubled down, imposing fresh sanctions,” preventing access to medicine and medical devices including ventilators which at the time were the difference between life and death for many people with COVID.4
Another piece of the reality of sanctions came through in a January 29 piece in the New York Times5 which warned that sanctions “could cause severe inflation, a stock market crash and other forms of financial panic that would inflict pain on [Russia’s] people—from billionaires to government officials to middle-class families.” The article added that “For an average Russian, the harshest U.S. measures could mean higher prices for food and clothing, or, more dramatically, they could cause pensions and savings accounts to be severely devalued by a crash in the ruble [Russia’s currency, where a crash would wipe out people’s life savings] or Russian markets.”
For an average Russian, the harshest U.S. measures could mean higher prices for food and clothing, or, more dramatically, they could cause pensions and savings accounts to be severely devalued by a crash that could wipe out people’s life savings. Photo: AP
To be clear, the Times was not raising these warnings because of concerns about the lives of masses of people in Russia. They were raising them to point to ways in which sanctions could backfire on the interests of the U.S. But the reality that comes through is that sanctions would intentionally cause massive hunger, lack of access to medical care, and societal disaster for vast numbers of non-combatants—civilians, ordinary people—including Russians who are currently living “middle class” lives.
The Mafia Logic of Sanctions Against Russia
The rulers of this country and their operatives know very well that the humanitarian, “anti-kleptocracy” rhetoric they promote to describe sanctions against Russia is bullshit. This came out, for example, in a Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on Russia Ukraine Economic Deterrence Measures, where Biden’s spokesperson laid out his agenda for invited mainstream media mouthpieces:
[T]he gradualism of the past6 is out, and this time we’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there. We’ve made efforts to signal this intention very clearly. And I would say the deepening selloff in Russian markets, its borrowing costs, the value of its currency, market-implied default risk reflect the severity of the economic consequences we can and will impose on the Russian economy in the event of a further invasion.7
… the reason [sanctions] work is: If you step back and look at the global dominance of U.S.-origin software, technology, and tooling, the export control options we’re considering alongside our allies and partners would hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard. … All options are very much on the table, and we’re united with Allies and partners to decisively impose severe consequences on Russia if it further invades Ukraine.
This is Mafia talk. This is the logic of gangsters who are leveraging their violently imposed chokehold on the global economy, who are calculating how they can drive a rival to its knees with their “global dominance” of technology and the economic circuits that bind the world together. This is them saying they will use their dominant position in the capitalist-imperialist world to shut off access to food, medicine, transportation, communication, and the very ability to have a functional economy in today’s world.
Terrorism, objectively defined, is consciously targeting innocent civilians with violence and suffering to achieve a political objective. U.S. sanctions are terrorist war crimes. And they are just one item in a resume of crimes against humanity that no force on earth can match.8
