Sanctions as war: anti-imperialist perspectives on American geo-economic strategy, edited by Stuart Davis and Immanuel Ness, Brill Publishers 2022
Sanctions as war is a collection of articles written from various anti-imperialist perspectives about a specific form of imperialist war – one that portrays itself as not being war at all but a civilian-friendly, humanitarian alternative to it. This notion is demolished brilliantly by every one of these case studies, which clearly show that anyone who regards imperialist sanctions as the answer must have asked a really stupid question. The pick of the bunch is by Helen Yaffe, with whom readers of this paper will be familiar.
Yaffe’s article about Cuba introduces us to Lester Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, who on 6 April 1960 wrote a secret memo admitting that most Cubans supported their revolutionary government. He then urged a strategy based on economic strangulation aimed at overthrowing it anyway. ‘Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’ This effort was totally bipartisan, culminating in the imposition of a total US economic blockade by the Kennedy administration at the beginning of 1962, was developed in tandem with military aggression including the US-backed mercenary invasion at Playa Giron (Bay of Pigs) in April 1961, defeated by the Cuban people in less than 72 hours.
Some of the case studies are probably less well known. Gregory Elich was part of a team that visited Yugoslavia in 1999 to investigate NATO war crimes. From his chapter on Yugoslavia, we learn that a key western demand was for the Yugoslav Federal presidency to be given to the Croatian prime minister Stjepan ‘Stipe’ Mesic. Mesic had made no secret of his intent to use the position to break the country up, vowing to be ‘the last president of Yugoslavia’, and was arranging illegal arms imports into Croatia (p192). When they couldn’t get their way, the imperialists imposed sanctions. To give them their due, ‘US and western European leaders were anxious about the impact sanctions were having on the Yugoslavian people. Their abiding concern was that sanctions were not causing enough pain. To rectify that problem, they imposed a naval blockade in the Adriatic against Yugoslavia’ (p198, emphasis added). By the end of 1992, GDP had declined nearly 32% and the annual inflation rate was nearly 9,000% (p139).
Nima Nakhaei’s chapter on Iraq is equally harrowing. The author describes how the lifting of UN economic sanctions after Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait in 1991 was tied to restructuring on a scale that was ‘virtually unquantifiable’ (p232). The impact on the country’s health services and basic infrastructure resulted in epidemic outbreaks and the death of over half a million children as a result of sanctions (p236).
It would be quite impossible to do adequate justice to this collection in this review, but some space must be given to the book’s treatment of sanctions of a different – indeed, the very opposite – kind whose purpose is not to serve the purposes of imperialism but as an auxiliary form of struggle in defence of oppressed people. [Case by case? Illegible] Stuart Davis and Corinna Mullin outline the history of people’s ‘sanctions as solidarity’ with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in solidarity with Palestinians against the Zionist incarnation of apartheid (pp345-74). Needless to say the response of imperialism to these sanctions is very different. The BDS campaign has faced a steady barrage of legislation seeking to outlaw it under the provisions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism, which precludes all but the most timid criticism of Zionism.
In conclusion, it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that, as the book’s title makes clear, sanctions in the hands of imperialism are not an alternative to war but an auxiliary method of waging it. The anti-imperialist academic Tim Beal makes the point forcefully in relation to Iran:
‘Short of an invasion as in Iraq in 2003, the regime change may be carried out by the people, or in reality a powerful section of the society. For that to happen they must increasingly suffer and blame their suffering on the regime that needs changing. The suffering part is easily arranged but getting people to blame their government rather than the foreigners waging economic war is rather more difficult, although not impossible… you still have to drop the bombs, fire the missiles and send in the troops before the nations have the good sense to produce a government of your choosing’ (p42). The task of anti-imperialist forces everywhere is to expose and demand an end to imperialist aggression whether economic, military or both.
Mike Webber
