U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blurted out an important truth at the Davos conference, January 20. He described the way Washington has wielded the weapon of economic sanctions against Iran as “economic statecraft” crowing that:
It’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the streets… Things are moving in a very positive way here.
Journalism prof Azadeh Moaveni gave a detailed account in this powerful piece in the Financial Times January 17, of how Bessent and the rest of Trump’s team had tightened the screws on the Iranian economy starting back last March:
The origin of what is unfolding today can be traced to spring of last year, when the already strained livelihoods of the country’s most vulnerable began to collapse… In March 2025, Trump imposed a “maximum pressure” economic onslaught, sanctioning Chinese refineries that bought Iranian crude oil, one of the country’s main sources of revenue. The rial trembled and then went into freefall.
This was the spring when I began noticing that people I knew in Tehran who lived austerely but always managed to get by were running out of rice in the middle of the month.
By then, Iran’s 92 million people had already been under tight, unilateral U.S. economic sanctions for more than 45 years– just one of tens of countries around the world subjected to these (as the UN calls them) Unilateral Coercive Measures, UCMs.
These are the countries marked in red or blue on this map. (Click to enlarge it.)
It has for many decades now been quite clear: Sanctions kill people– and in massive numbers.
Last August, the deeply respected medical journal The Lancet published a detailed analysis (PDF here) of the “excess mortality” attributable to the United States’ imposition of sanctions on various countries around the world between 1971 and 2021– the most recent year, I’m guessing, for which the researchers had data.
They reached these conclusions:
Our findings showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality. We found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, whereas we found no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions… We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564 258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677), similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.
(CI is a “Confidence Interval.”)
So let’s take that estimate of 560,000-plus people dying each year over those 40 years because of Washington’s unilateral sanctions. That adds up to Washington having killed 22.4 million over those years.
For a long time, I have thought of U.S. sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. But now, Bessent has underlined the real way that, in most cases, they have all along been intended to work: They have been intended to inflict such harsh pain and misery on entire populations of civilians that those civilians take action to change their government (or its policies.)
And doing that– that is, deliberately attacking or threatening to attack noncombatant persons in a struggle for political objectives– is the classic definition of “terrorism.”
I have a confession to make. Back in early 2023, I wrote quite a lot about the global effects of Washington’s widespread use of sanctions. One of the things I wrote about was the probable effect of Pres. Biden having imposed punishingly tight sanctions UCMs on Russia, a step I viewed as having added Russia with its undeniable economic heft to the growing list of members of “Team Sanctioned.” I also judged (February 2023) that the impact of U.S. sanctions worldwide was “declining.”
Yes, I called that one wrong. Over the two that followed Biden maintained most of the tight sanctions then in place. Then, nine months later he threw Washington’s full weight into supporting all aspects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one of which was to very tightly restrict the entry of food and other basic humanitarian goods into the Strip.
Then in January 2025, along came Trump and Bessent, who acted within weeks (as Azadeh Moaveni noted) to crank the U.S.’s already tight sanctions against Iran yet tighter by imposing “secondary sanctions” against Chinese refineries that processed Iranian oil…
And two days ago, Bessent was unabashedly gleeful when he looked at the devastating (and lethal) effects of that move and declared that, “Things are moving in a very positive way here.“
Washington’s use of Unilateral Coercive Measures is an abomination. Sanctions kill. Sanctions are Weapons of Mass Destruction. Sanctions are state terrorism. End Washington’s use of these deadly weapons.
