An analysis published by the US Stratfor Institute for Security and Political Research revealed that economic sanctions are not an American invention, but rather date back to the ancient Greek civilization. Greek leader Pericles prevented the inhabitants of Megara from entering the ports and markets of Athens. At the time, controversy arose about the effects of this siege, of course, and caused the ignition of the tragic Peloponnesian War, which ended with the defeat of Athens and the victory of the Spartan alliance, which dominated Greece.
Washington’s first major use of economic sanctions was Thomas Jefferson’s embargo—ruled from March 1801 to March 1809—in which the United States halted all exports to France and the United Kingdom in the hope of pressuring them to stop their attacks on neutral American merchant ships during the Napoleonic Wars.
In the end, economic sanctions are only a potential tool for achieving a strategic goal. Undoubtedly, France and the United Kingdom felt some kind of economic impact as a result of the economic embargo imposed by Jefferson, but it caused very little economic pain for the United States; To achieve its strategic objective.
Experience has proven that any amount of economic sanctions and any other accompanying measures represent a challenge to the United States, and even to any other country that resorts to this type of weapon, not only to the besieged country. Nearly a century ago, US President Woodrow Wilson raised the issue of economic sanctions, defending the League of Nations, and said: The nation we boycott is a nation on the verge of surrender.
For Wilson, it was the economic aspect of World War I that helped defeat Germany. Ironically, of course, Wilson’s country never joined the League of Nations; It was not yet ready to play an active role on the world stage, but after World War II the United States began to engage with the world and take advantage of its status as a global superpower to impose economic sanctions instead of armed conflict, thus achieving its foreign policy goals.
The sure result is that the sanctions weapon may not represent a real crisis for the countries on which those sanctions are imposed, as the impact of that crisis varies depending on the state’s capacity. For example, when the US economic sanctions were imposed on Cuba in the mid-sixties of the last century, it caused deep economic disasters for it, and the same sanctions when they were applied to North Korea did not work. Indeed, under those sanctions, Pyongyang became a sovereign nuclear state. On the contrary, we see that when Iraq was subjected to severe economic sanctions, their effects were very severe, especially on the humanitarian and social aspects. Therefore, the impact of the sanctions remains directly linked to the strengthening of the state.
This is exactly what we can see in the Russian model. The state here is politically classified as an integrated state, as it represents the largest state in terms of area in the world, more than 17 million square kilometers, almost twice the size of the United States, and its population is 144 million, or half the population of its rival. Moreover, it occupies the first or second ranks at the latest in its possession of all the most important water and mineral resources in the world, in addition to being a nuclear country that possesses one of the largest armies in the world.
A country with such specifications can coexist with any sanctions, especially since, of course, and according to the requirements of the nature of American tyranny, it has been suffering for nearly 70 years under those sanctions in one way or another, something that enabled it and its people to coexist with any situation, whether it is imposed on it internally or externally.
The use of economic sanctions by the United States can have a deadly effect on a country like Iraq, because of which 70,000 Iraqi children were killed during 10 years of siege aimed at toppling the late President Saddam Hussein. Sanctions imposed on it in the 1990s destroyed Baghdad’s economy and, with it, the health of the country’s citizens. But it also failed to achieve its desired political goal, which is to force the late President Saddam Hussein to change his behavior, but more than that, these measures caused popular resentment within the United States that continues throughout the country until today. But this result will not be feasible with a rival in the size of Russia and its unlimited potential.
Dr. Hatem Sadek: Professor at Helwan University
