My Take | Sanctions imposed by the US are nothing but war by other means

US sanctions are supposed to punish wrongdoers and rogue states, and force warring parties to reach peace settlement. In reality, they often end up being collective punishment against entire populations, postpone peace talks and deter outside neutral parties from providing urgent humanitarian aid.

A 2021 internal review by the US Treasury department found that the use of sanctions jumped by nearly 1,000 per cent between 2000 and 2021. In his second year in office, President Joe Biden sanctioned 2,500 new groups and individuals, almost double those of the Trump administration at the peak in 2018 – at 1,474 – and four times as many as the Obama administration at its zenith in 2016 – at 695. Almost one in four countries are sanctioned by the US in one form or another, affecting almost a third of the global economy. “Wary of the costs of heavy military engagements, [Washington] still tended to view sanctions as a muscular but low-cost and low-risk means of crisis management,” the report wrote.

But their imposition has become so knee jerk they sometimes become almost comical. Washington has sanctioned the forensics institute of China’s public security bureau. But the institute is one of the country’s key authorities responsible for the customs control of chemicals. That means it has sanctioned the key Chinese agency whose cooperation it had depended on to halt the export of chemical precursors for the production of Fentanyl at the heart of the drug crisis in the United States.

Having helped Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with advanced weapons and logistical support to carry out their ruthless interventions in the civil war in Yemen – one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century – the US also penalised the Houthi insurgents as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO). As experts had warned, the rebel group ended cooperation with foreign aid workers.