(C) Center for Economic & Policy Research This story was originally published by Center for Economic & Policy Research and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . US Sanctions Policy: Frequently Asked Questions [1] [] Date: 2025-02 Are the Civilian Impacts of Economic Sanctions Avoidable? Many, including US Congressman James McGovern (D-MA), when he served as chair of the House Rules Committee, have argued that broad sanctions are imposed with the intention of targeting civilians and with the implicit goal of inducing such widespread hardship as to lead affected populations to put pressure on, or overthrow, their governments: “The impact of sectoral and secondary sanctions is indiscriminate, and purposely so,” wrote McGovern in a letter to President Biden, calling for an end to the sanctions against Venezuela. “Although U.S. officials regularly say that the sanctions target the government and not the people, the whole point of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign is to increase the economic cost to Venezuela. … Economic pain is the means by which the sanctions are supposed to work. … It is not Venezuelan officials who suffer the costs. It is the Venezuelan people.” Such claims are evidenced by statements from then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regarding the Trump administration’s sanctions on Venezuela: We always wish things could go faster, but I’m very confident that the tide is moving in the direction of the Venezuelan people. … It doesn’t take much for you to see what’s really going on there. The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour. … You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from. And on Iran: “Things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we’re convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.” Biden administration officials have also touted the impact of US sanctions on the entire Iranian economy: If we weren’t enforcing sanctions on Iranian oil, Iran today would be back to where they were before sanctions, which is at about 2.5 million to 3 million barrels a day. … The reason they are not doing that is because they are under sanctions. … By and large they are under extreme sanctions; they are not able to develop their gas sector even though they’re one of the largest reserves in the world and they export nothing. So I think that we’re doing pretty well with that. A declassified 1960 State Department memo on the Cuba embargo suggested “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Similarly, former US Representative Robert Torricelli was reportedly quoted as stating that the goal of his 1992 Cuban Democracy Act was to “wreak havoc on that island.” And Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly told a number of European diplomats that the “maximum pressure” strategy was designed to “starve” Cuba in order to bring down the government. To the extent that this intentionality is the case, economic sanctions are inseparable from their widespread and devastating effects on civilian populations, especially in developing countries. The existence of “humanitarian exemptions” for some sanctions regimes can create the impression that civilians can be protected from the dire effects of economic sanctions, yet even when exemptions allow a limited amount of humanitarian assistance to flow into a sanctioned country, they do little to attenuate the human suffering caused by the broad economic damage that sanctions produce (see below). While not all sanctions are as broad as those imposed on Cuba or Iran, even “targeted” sanctions are known to have significant spillover effects, as described below. [END] --- [1] Url: https://cepr.net/publications/us-sanctions-policy-frequently-asked-questions/ Published and (C) by Center for Economic & Policy Research Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons 4.0 Int'l.. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/cepr/