Sanctions Are US Economic Warfare
by John Lawrence
No less than a military strike, the US uses sanctions to try and effect regime change in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere. The US forbids third parties from doing business with countries it has targeted and tries to ruin their economies. This may or may not work, but it sure hurts the lives of the common people, the very people the US hopes to "save" from the supposed tyranny of its leaders. It represents warfare by another means. Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Well, sanctions are the continuation of war by other means. Forget politics or diplomacy. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JPCOA was the deal with Iran participated in by the US, China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, Germany) and the European Union. This is the deal that Trump took the US out of and immediately applied sanctions not only to Iran but to every country doing business with Iran.
So force not diplomacy is the trend for the US in international relations. No wonder we're at the brink of war with Iran. First withdraw from diplomacy conducted by numerous nations, then apply economic warfare, then set up the military for provocations by sending numerous ships and aircraft to the region, then strike after some provocation. As Trump said, we will "obliterate" Iran. As if the US hasn't learned its lesson in the middle east after conducting numerous tragic fiascoes in that region involving the killing of hundreds of thousands of locals and thousands of Americans. Those not being killed come home with PTSD and are committing suicide at the rate of 20 a day. Trump, himself, never went to war. Neither did his chief warmonger, John Bolton. Bolton wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book: "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." But these guys are just itching for war, if not with Venezuela, than with Iran.
The Guardian reported:
The US is now engaged in three major confrontations around the world that have the potential to degrade into war. And in the driving seat on all three fronts is John Bolton, one of the most fervent believers in American military power ever to work in the White House.
Donald Trump’s 70-year-old national security adviser has been a fixture in US foreign policy over the past four decades, and has spent that time, whether in or out of government, mostly arguing for the most hawkish position on any issue put in front of him.
“He actually believes when America leads, the world is a safer and better place – not just for us but for the world,” said Mark Groombridge, who worked for Bolton for more than 10 years. ...
These days, Bolton looks considerably more cheerful, having reached the peak of the policymaking establishment that had once seemed out of his reach.
Bolton seems to have played a key role in the collapse of the second Trump summit with Kim Jong-un in February, when he appeared to have drafted a maximalist list of demands for all-or-nothing disarmament that was presented to the North Korean dictator in Hanoi. A year of diplomacy ground to a halt, and Kim, who had been expecting a more gradualist approach, has now started goading the US with a return to missile tests.
In the standoff in Venezuela, Bolton was again centre stage, making himself the lead US voice for a failed effort at regime change in Venezuela in late April, producing a personal video appeal calling – in vain – on Nicolás Maduro’s top aides to defect. Behind the scenes he has urged a reluctant US Southern Command to come up with ever more aggressive solutions to Maduro’s hold on power.
And in the fast-moving escalation of tensions with Iran, it is Bolton who has seized the initiative, spun military deployments in the Gulf that were already in the pipeline as confrontational steps against Tehran, and reportedly irritated some in the Pentagon and intelligence agencies by putting a sensationalist spin on intelligence about Iranian military movements.
Bolton is a dangerous man. He wants war so badly just like Dick Cheney and Bush Junior did that he will lie us into it like they did. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail at least till we can get this crew out of there in the next election. Tulsi Gabbard, a war vet, was the only Democrat to challenge the military-industrial complex in the Democratic debates although Bernie had a few choice words as well. America under Trump and Bolton and the other neocon hawks is a war mongering nation. It is dead set on destroying a nation's economy with sanctions until it can get the war it lusts after. Sanctions only presage military involvement.