The Absurdity of Western Sanctions on States

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Western states, led by the United States, have long made a habit of imposing various sanctions, economic sanctions especially, on states that do not fall in line with their policies, or that adopt policies inconsistent with Western wishes and interests at the global level.

Cuba was the first state to face American sanctions, embodied in a blockade lasting decades. Vietnam faced harsh measures, including war, the destruction that accompanied it, and bloodshed. The Western states continue tightening their measures and sanctions against North Korea.

Perhaps the Arabs’ and Muslims’ share of sanctions and measures has been the greatest of all.

Several Arab and Islamic states have faced Western dominance and sanctions. Syria long suffered American and European measures because of its policies toward the Zionist entity, its support for Arab factions resisting the Zionists, and its closeness to Iran. Iraq faced an airtight siege, to the point that the United Nations adopted the Oil-for-Food program because Iraq could not purchase its own food needs. Iraqi oil was seized, the military siege remained tight upon it, and the measures ended in a war that led to the collapse of the political system, the destruction of the state’s infrastructure, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, if not millions.

Sudan faced sanctions too, and so did Libya, Iran, Gaza, and, recently, Russia, while the Zionist entity has remained far removed from these sanctions — the very entity that defies international law and occupies the land of others by armed force, violence, killing, and destruction. Instead of the world punishing this entity, the Western states continue supporting it militarily, financially, diplomatically, and so on.

Western Goals

The Western states have declared, and continue declaring, that their punitive measures against certain states aim to achieve political goals these states, subject to sanctions, refuse to accept. This goal aligns entirely with the United States’ own definition, across its various institutions, of terrorism.

American institutions say terrorism is the use of organized violence against civilians to achieve political ends — and this is precisely what the Western states do, because a siege is violence, and sanctions are violence too, differing only in one respect: their definition speaks of organizations, while their own violence is the violence of states. In other words, the Western states aim to bring certain states that deviate from their policies to their knees, seeking to achieve their goals through the suffering of these states’ peoples.

The Western states use siege and sanctions to inflict harm and damage on people generally, so that they rise up against the ruling regime and change political conditions. The Western states wanted to prevent Sudan from providing assistance to Arab resistance forces, whether Lebanese or Palestinian, and wanted to subjugate Syria so that it would distance itself from Iran and from the Arab resistance factions. They wanted to pressure Russia into making concessions on the Ukrainian matter. And they are now pressuring Gaza through a siege imposed by Arab states and the Zionists, hoping the people of Gaza might rise up against Hamas and the resistance, so that matters would settle in the way the Zionist entity wants. The sanctions were never without a specific purpose, and every case had its own reasons.

But the problem for those imposing sanctions is that we have never heard of a state brought to its knees by sanctions, begging mercy from the Western states, and we have never heard of a people rising up against its own government in submission to sanctions. The states subjected to sanctions have remained steadfast, capable of enduring, and a number of them have shown courage and strong defiance, and a capacity for creativity and compensating for what was lost because of the sanctions. It is also noteworthy that the Western states have compensated for their failure to achieve political goals with wars waged against some of the states subject to sanctions — they waged a war on Iraq, another on Syria, were forced to use force to remove Gaddafi, and have repeatedly brandished the use of military force against Iran.

The Opposite Results

The matter is that the Western states could not achieve their goals through sanctions alone — the sanctions sometimes produced the opposite results. They punished Cuba across long years, and America was ultimately forced to declare its failure and lift the blockade on the Caribbean island. Instead of Cuba kneeling, its leadership resolved to develop its scientific, technical, and productive capabilities to achieve a self-sufficiency that would free it from its need for American products.

Cuba achieved two things at the global level: leadership in cigar production and in sugar production. It always proved itself at the Olympic Games, as a message to the whole world that sanctions and blockade would not prevent it from creativity and achieving world-class accomplishments. Cuba remained a strong competitor for gold medals worldwide, achieving results far superior to those of Western states, and to those of Arab states blessed with enormous wealth. North Korea, for its part, produced exactly what the Western states worked to prevent: the nuclear bomb.

Despite all the measures and the siege, despite threats, warnings, and shows of force by America and South Korea, North Korea managed to develop its technical capabilities and produce the bomb, and to develop the means of delivering it — ballistic missiles. This extremely poor state, with limited resources, managed to defy the siege, developing what it wanted despite Western bluster, keeping Japan, a partner in the siege, on edge, terrified of Korea’s military development.

The West, together with the Zionists and some Arab countries, believed Iran would kneel before the weight of intensive, successive Western measures, but their expectation was not fulfilled, and Iran remained steadfast, with its people, its leaders, and its scientists, resolved to nullify the effect of all the sanctions. Iran was greatly troubled by the sanctions, money grew scarce, and consumer goods shrank, but its resolve remained firm. Iran decided, since 1979 and the first Gulf War, to rely on itself across the various fields of life, summoning scholars, establishing scientific research centers and academically and scientifically advanced universities, using the money that could have gone to consumption for development instead, and forging its path toward scientific advancement and technical development. At the same time, Iran was careful to pursue corruption and the corrupt, so that its wealth would not be wasted in vain. In the end, it achieved great agricultural growth, enormous industrial development, and military capabilities feared on land, in the air, and at sea.

The sanctions were a genuine, powerful incentive for Iran to rely on itself and advance along the path of discovery and invention, and it has become a strong state, feared at both the regional and global levels. Most important of all, its nuclear capabilities leapt into the ranks of the nuclear states, and it could have developed a nuclear bomb had it not signed the nuclear agreement with the Western states. The Western states failed to achieve any goal, ultimately leaning toward negotiating with Iran in the six-states-versus-one equation.

Among the opposite results produced by the sanctions is that the Western states lost their trade with wealthy states that had relied on imports from the West for their own growth. Iran and Iraq used to allocate billions of dollars annually to buy weapons and food from the Western states, and the sanctions deprived the Western economies of this money. America suffered great losses, financially, and in terms of military equipment and lives. Following the failure of the sanctions, America was forced into costly wars, and this may be what affected the mood of the American people and prevented the American president from igniting a war against Iran.

Most of the sanctions ended in wars that consumed everything green and dry in the states subject to them, and led to shaking the security of the Western states generally. And if the Western states aimed, at some point, to defend their own security, their sanctions instead drowned them in fear and terror of organizations whose rapid spread was never expected.

Arrogance and Thuggery

The Western states understand, after the experiences they have been through, that they cannot achieve political goals through policies of siege and sanctions, yet they insist on them anyway, which points to an arrogant policy these states pursue, as though they were the guardians of the world, and, at the same time, a reckless, thuggish policy meant to flex muscle and show strength, but to no avail.

This irrational bent is clear in the imposition of sanctions on Russia — Russia could wipe the European states off the face of the earth because of its military strength, and despite this, the European states dared to follow in America’s footsteps in trying to subjugate Russia. Russia is a vast state with enormous economic capabilities and a large population, and could, on its own, constitute a global market with no pressing need for Western products — and despite this, Western arrogance drove its own proponents to take punitive measures against Russia. This matter has not escaped Western writers, some of whom believe the sanctions on Russia have harmed the Western states themselves.

Russia has enough for itself, is not isolated from the world, and has the means to inflict harm on Western economies. When Russia stopped importing food, vegetables especially, from the West, it achieved two goals: striking Western agricultural economies, and pushing Russian farmers toward greater agricultural production. Finally, Russia showed favor to Greece and Hungary, deciding to allow the import of agricultural goods from them.

Because of the Syrian situation, the Western states have recently begun brandishing further sanctions against Russia and Syria. It appears the Western states are overtaken by the arrogance of sin, learning nothing from the past. The Syrian regime has remained steadfast despite repeated sanctions across the decades, and measures against Russia rebound in reverse, harming those carrying them out. Western politicians let their heads swell, imagining themselves masters of the world, but through their own conduct they are, in fact, gradually approaching the abyss.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “عبثية العقوبات الغربية على الدول” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.