…Yet There is Almost No Opposition or Outcry —
Even When Sanctions Have a Boomerang Effect
Jeremy Kuzmarov / Covert Action
(January 02, 2023) — The US may try piously to defend sanctions as a ‘response to foreign tyranny,’ but they are really a pretext to steal foreign bank accounts and cripple commercial rivals of US corporations.
On November 14, the Biden administration announced yet another round of sanctions on Russia, targeting this time Russia’s military supply chains by imposing sanctions on 14 individuals and 28 entities that it said were part of a transnational network that procured technology to support Moscow in its invasion of Ukraine.
One of the companies blacklisted was Milandr, a Russian microelectronics company that Washington says is part of Moscow’s military research and development structure.
The sanctions additionally targeted several aviation-related companies and two individuals — Abbas Djuma and Tigran Khristoforovich Srabionov — who facilitated the Russian mercenary Wagner Group’s acquisition of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from Iran, which have been used in the Ukraine War.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that “the United States will continue to disrupt Russia’s military supply chains and impose high costs on President Putin’s enablers, as well as all those who support Russia’s brutality against its neighbor.”
According to Statistica.com, the US has imposed 1,683 separate sanctions on Russia since the war with Ukraine broke out in February 2022, and 2,634 since February 2014, when the US supported the Maidan coup overthrowing the democratically elected pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych. Canada has followed suit by imposing 1,418 sanctions on Russia since February 2022, and 1,872 since February 2014, while the UK has imposed 1,381 since February 2022, and 1,617 since February 2014. […]
Other countries that are dependent on trade with Russia have adapted to the sanctions by opening new forms of currency exchange to carry out trade, contributing to an erosion of US dollar supremacy — a bedrock of US global economic supremacy.
President Joe Biden admitted on March 24 that the price of the sanctions was being borne increasingly by European countries facing food and energy shortages resulting from diminished trade capacity with Russia.
Sanctions were also causing supply chain disruptions that was one of the key factors driving crippling inflation, which was undermining Western economies, whereas the conservative Economist magazine had admitted that Russian had gotten back on its feet.
An Economic Wrecking Ball
A new anthology edited by CAM contributor Sara Flounders entitled Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball of the Global Economy (New York: World View Forum, 2022) shows the deleterious consequences of Washington’s sanctions, which have targeted 44 countries representing one-third of the global population.
Flounders wrote, in the introduction, that “US government strategists are using sanctions as a wrecking ball to demolish the globalized economy. It is a desperate struggle to preserve their global hegemony and a unipolar world. The policy of consciously demolishing supply chains of essential products amounts to a reckless war on defenseless civilian populations. Sanctions disrupt trade worldwide and send shockwaves far beyond the countries directly impacted, [which is] well understood by financial planners.” […]
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