By Steve Bell
According to the author, we are in the “Age of Economic Warfare”. This covers the use of sanctions and allied financial/technological measures to force policy change in targeted states. Without accepting the grandiose slogan, it is certainly true that the world is witnessing an unprecedented increase in the use of coercive measures by the US and its European allies.
Fishman was in the US State Department teams responsible for Iranian sanctions before the nuclear agreement of 2015, and for Russian sanctions after the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. The book examines these events in detail. There is a study of US action against Chinese technological development, particularly the international campaign against Huawei. Finally, there is an examination of the second round of sanctions against Russia following the war in Ukraine after February 2022. Much can be learnt from the concrete development of policy in these historic cases.
However, the book is anything but a simple account of political history. It is, above all, a defence of US foreign policy, and a justification of measures against civilian populations who receive no attention in the telling. If they were given that attention, he would hardly have written this: “…the main reason policymakers are so tempted by economic warfare: its tactics are inherently nonviolent. What makes today’s economic wars novel is the highly interdependent world economy, which amplifies their impact and makes their aftershocks hard to contain.” (emphasis in original, P.5)
To sustain this claim, the author makes a distinction between “the Old Way” of economic warfare, and the new “Age” based on US financial and technological power, which opened with 2006 sanctions against Iran. This walls off the notorious catastrophe visited upon the Iraqi people in the 1990s as “the Old Way”. Famously, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when asked whether it was worth 500,000 Iraqi children dying for sanctions, replied, “I think this is a very hard choice. But we think the price is worth it.”
Fishman mentions this episode in passing as, “Hunger and infant mortality spiked…” and “…it caused undue harm to Iraqi civilians.” (both P.18) That is all he has to say, throughout the book there is virtually no examination of the impact of sanctions on the population – only references to regimes and industries.
This callousness is neither accidental, nor confined to assessing the “Old Way”. The new type of sanctions on Iran cut it off from international banking services and financial markets. Fishman notes the massive impact on the Iranian economy by 2012. The value of the Iranian rial declined by half against the dollar; food prices doubled; farms went out of production; inflation rose to 25%, and youth unemployment rose to 30%.
Assessing this, he writes: “Tragically, those hit hardest were among Iran’s most vulnerable. U.S. sanctions always exempted humanitarian goods such as food, medicine, and medical devices, and Obama officials did their best to ensure these products could flow uninterrupted into Iran. But as the value of the rial plunged, all imports, including medicine and raw materials used by pharmaceutical companies, grew scarcer and more expensive. Making matters worse, most foreign banks now refused to accept payments from Iran, regardless of their purpose. The hurt that U.S. policies inflicted on ordinary Iranians was unintentional, but that didn’t lessen the pain.” (P.108)
In over four hundred pages, this is the sole examination of sanctions impact upon civilians. It is impossible to take its handwringing seriously. The whole aim of sanctions was to wreck the Iranian economy – the pain inflicted was absolutely not “unintentional”. Labels such as “smart” or “targeted” are for domestic consumption.
Fishman and friends cannot plead ignorance. The impact of sanctions upon the population has been known since the experience of “Total War” upon civilians in the First World War.
“Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. Many sanctionists regretfully noted the devastating effects of pressure on civilians but nonetheless wholly accepted them. Woodrow Wilson held that if “thoughtful men have…thought, and thought truly, that war is barbarous…the boycott is an infinitely more terrible instrument of war.” William Arnold-Foster, a British blockade administrator…admitted that during the Great War “we tried, just as the Germans tried, to make our enemies unwilling that their children should be born; we tried to bring about such a state of destitution that those children, if born at all, should be born dead.” (1)
Nor is it the case that experience has led the US and allies to modify sanctions and increase civilian protections. The incident of foreign banks refusing all dealings with Iran, even where categories of trade were exempt, is called “overcompliance” in sanctions literature. It operates whenever firms are faced with a possible risk of losing access to the large US market. Hence it is a phenomenon frequently observed in all studies of country sanctions. Something which Fishman would surely have known.
In the case of Iran, far from experience making US policy more careful it has made it more systematic. Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear agreement negotiated with Iran, only to deepen sanctions. Biden never reversed the policy of Trump, merely wobbling around reopening negotiations for returning the US to compliance, while maintaining sanctions. Fishman authored the book before Trump’s 2nd term began but has no excuse for failing to examine the overwhelming evidence of civilian harm. The brilliant collection “How Sanctions Work” by Iranian-American scholars pull together this evidence on Iran. (2)
The most chilling evidence on the general impact of sanctions was the recent article published by the respected medical journal “The Lancet”. (3) It found that sanctions imposed by the US and EU were associated with 564,258 deaths annually from 1971 to 2021. The annual battle-related deaths for the same period were 106,000.
Ignoring the plight of civilians leads Fishman to wax enthusiastically about the success of particular campaigns. Yet there is an undercurrent which washes away the foundations of momentary success. Firstly, there is the well-established fact that target states learn quickly how to establish alternative trading and financial links to those controlled via US linked financial institutions.
“A review of all U.S., sanctions programs since 1970 shows that targeted countries altered their behaviour in the way that the United States hoped that they would only 13 percent of the time. In an additional 22 percent of the cases, the policies of sanctioned states became somewhat – but not fully – more palatable to Washington. Considering these figures, sanctions hardly represent a panacea; on average, they fail two-thirds of the time.” (4)
Secondly, some of the initiatives against sanctions involve securing payments using currencies other than the dollar. For the foreseeable future, these do not threaten the ascendency of the dollar in international financial markets. But it does encourage wider economic exchanges outside of US directed markets – thus promoting multi-polarity and undermining the very basis of sanctions as an effective weapon.
“Sanctions that target small states present far less of a threat to the dollar or the long-term effectiveness of financial sanctions. It is riskier to target larger, more developed economies that are situated closer to the core of the world economy – such as China – because they may have the capacity to act as “suppliers” of alternative currencies and financial networks. Similarly, secondary sanctions that adversely impact European interests pose high potential costs to the dollar.” (5)
These examples of Demarais and McDowell show how pro-US, pro-sanctions advocates are concerned that sanctions are becoming less effective and undermining the hegemony of US imperialism. But such sophistication is unnecessary anyway. US policy in the era of its economic decline is simply becoming more belligerent to stem its decline.
Thus, Fishman is forced to admit: “Sanctions are like antibiotics: they work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. In some cases, they’re simply the wrong approach: when Washington seeks regime change – as the Trump administration did in Iran and Venezuela – it’s a fool’s errand to expect sanctions to get the job done.” (P.421) As regime change has been the aim in using sanctions against Iran, Iraq, Libya, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen is it any surprise that US policy has resulted in war and military strikes in all instances? And, despite Fishman’s insistence otherwise, isn’t this just evidence that sanctions are a precursor or supplement to military action rather than an alternative?
Notes
- “The Economic Weapon – the rise of sanctions as a tool of modern war”, Nicholas Mulder, Yale University Press, 2022, P.4
2. “How Sanctions Work – Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare”, Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez, Stanford University Press, 2024
3. “The health toll of economic sanctions”, The Lancet, Vol13 August 2025
4.“Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests”, Agathe Demarais, Colombia University Press, 2022, P.38
5. “Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions & the International Backlash against the Dollar”, Daniel McDowell, Oxford University Press, 2023, P.159
Steve Bell is a member of Liberation and Treasurer of Stop the War Coalition
Chokepoints – How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War by Edward Fishman, published by Elliott and Thompson, 2025
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