Western Sanctions: War by Other Means—38 Million Killed Since the 1970s

Sanctions sound like bureaucratic tools. In reality, US and EU sanctions have killed an estimated 38 million people since the 1970s, according to The Lancet Global Health. Sanctions are not peaceful alternatives to war—they are weapons, often deadlier than bullets. 

 

» Over the past decade, we estimate that unilateral sanctions caused around 560,000 annual deaths worldwide. 

It is hard to think of other policy interventions with such adverse effects on human life that continue to be pervasively used. «
Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot, August 2025.

By the 1990s and 2000s, Western sanctions hit more than 60 countries. Iraq’s economy and water systems were destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands of children to die from preventable disease. Venezuela in 2017–2018 lost 40,000 lives in one year due to food and medicine shortages. Cuba in the 1960s faced similar tactics, with a US State Department Memo advocating for “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government.” 

Annual deaths caused by different sanctions by age range, 2012–21.

 

 

“The Food Weapon is mightier than missiles.” On December 10, 1974, the US National Security

Council, under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, completed the National Security Study 

Memorandum 200: “Control the food supply, and you control the people.”

Half a million deaths every year—not from bombs, but from hunger, poverty, and preventable disease caused by sanctions. Victims are not politicians or elites—they are women, children, and the elderly. Sanctions kill quietly, targeting the most vulnerable. They are enforced through control of currencies, SWIFT, and critical technology. Yet cracks are emerging: Russia has adapted, China has built alternatives, and the global south is strengthening trade, finance, and technology networks independent of the West.

Reference:
Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot (2025) - Effects of International Sanctions on Age-Specific Mortality.

Defeating the Enemy Without Fighting | Henry Kissinger

Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.

This contrast is reflected in the respective intellectual games favored by each civilization. China’s most enduring game is wei qi (圍棋, pronounced roughly “way chee,” and often known in the West by a variation of its Japanese name, go). Wei qi translates as “a game of surrounding pieces”; it implies a concept of strategic encirclement. 

The outcome of a Wei Qi game between two expert players.
Black has won by a slight margin.
David Lai (2004) - Learning from the Stones: A Go Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic Concept, Shi.

Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

The board, a grid of nineteen-by-nineteen lines, begins empty. Each player has 180 pieces, or stones, at his disposal, each of equal value with the others. The players take turns placing stones at any point on the board, building up positions of strength while working to encircle and capture the opponent’s stones. Multiple contests take place simultaneously in different regions of the board. The balance of forces shifts incrementally with each move, as the players implement strategic plans and react to each other’s initiatives. At the end of a well-played game, the board is filled by partially interlocking areas of strength. The margin of advantage is often slim, and to the untrained eye, the identity of the winner is not always immediately obvious.

Chess, on the other hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate, to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move without being destroyed. The vast majority of games end in total victory achieved by attrition or, more rarely, a dramatic, skillful maneuver. The only other possible outcome is a draw, meaning the abandonment of the hope for victory by both parties.

If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage. In chess, the player always has the capability of the adversary in front of him; all the pieces are always fully deployed.

» Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.

The highest form of warfare is to attack the enemy’s strategy itself. «

The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

The wei qi player needs to assess not only the pieces on the board but the reinforcements the adversary is in a position to deploy. Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of “center of gravity” and the “decisive point”—the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement. Where the skillful chess player aims to eliminate his opponent’s pieces in a series of head-on clashes, a talented wei qi player moves into “empty” spaces on the board, gradually mitigating the strategic potential of his opponent’s pieces. Chess produces single-mindedness; wei qi generates strategic flexibility.

A similar contrast exists in the case of China’s distinctive military theory (中国军事思想). Its foundations were laid during a period of upheaval, when ruthless struggles between rival kingdoms decimated China’s population. Reacting to this slaughter (and seeking to emerge victorious from it), Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

 

» US imperialism is a paper tiger. «
 Mao Zedong, July 14, 1956.

 

On his secret mission to establish a US-China alliance against the Soviet Union, US National Security

 Advisor Henry Kissinger meets with Zhou Enlai (Premier of the PRC since 1949) in Beijing on July 9, 1971.

 

Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong (founding leader of the PRC since 1949)

welcomes President of the United States Richard Nixon (1969-1974) in Beijing on February 21, 1972.

 

Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China (since 2013), invites

94-year-old former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Beijing on July 19, 2017. 

 

The seminal figure in this tradition is known to history as Sun Tzu (or “Master Sun”), author of the famed treatise The Art of War. Intriguingly, no one is sure exactly who he was. Since ancient times, scholars have debated the identity of The Art of War’s author and the date of its composition. The book presents itself as a collection of sayings by one Sun Wu, a general and wandering military advisor from the  Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (770–476 B.C. ), as recorded by his disciples.

[…] Well over two thousand years after its composition, this volume of epigrammatic observations on strategy, diplomacy, and war—written in classical Chinese, halfway between poetry and prose—remains a central text of military thought. Its maxims found vivid expression in the twentieth-century Chinese civil war (人民战争) at the hands of Sun Tzu’s student Mao Zedong, and in the Vietnam wars, as Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap employed Sun Tzu’s principles of indirect attack and psychological combat (以逸待劳) against France and then the United States.

Quoted from:
Henry Kissinger (2012) - On China.

 

» And this is something you never understood, you Americans. « 

The Khomeini Revolution | Henry Kissinger

When, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris and Iraq to claim the role of the revolution's "Supreme Leader," he did so in the name of an assault against the entire regional order and indeed the institutional arrangements of modernity. The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle.

 

 » The First Day of God's Government. «

 Imam Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

 

The twentieth-century map of the Middle East, Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of "imperialists" and "tyrannical self-seeking rulers" who had "separated the various segments of the Islamic umma [community] from each other and artificially created separate nations." All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were "illegitimate" because they "do not base themselves on divine law." 

 

Modern international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false foundation because "the relations between nations should be based on spiritual grounds" and not on principles of national interest. In Khomeini's view - paralleling that of Qutb - an ideologically expansionist reading of the Quran pointed the way from these blasphemies and toward the creation of a genuinely legitimate world order. 

 

The first step would be the overthrow of all the governments in the Muslim world and their replacement by "an Islamic government." Traditional national loyalties would be overridden because "it is the duty of all of us to overthrow the taghut; i.e., the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire Islamic world." The founding of a truly Islamic political system in Iran would mark, as Khomeini declared upon the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979, "the First Day of God's Government."

 

Quoted from:
Henry Kissinger (2014) - World Order.

 

» I say frankly to the American statesmen, who are now managing the genocide in Palestine, they will not be spared from this fire . The entire land of Palestine, from the sea to the river, belongs only to the original Palestinians, 

including Christians, Jews and the Muslims. « 

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian during the emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly 

on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas at UN headquarters in New York City, October 26, 2023. 

Lost in Translation: 50 Years After Leaving Vietnam | Matthieu Buge

In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie ‘Apocalypse Now’, the character Hubert de Marais has this very important line which he delivers with a typical French accent: “The Vietnamese are very intelligent. You never know what they think. The Russian ones who help them – ‘come and give us their money. We are all communists. Chinese give us guns. We are all brothers.’ They hate the Chinese! Maybe they hate the American less than the Russian and the Chinese. I mean, if tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists they will be Vietnamese communists. And this is something you never understood, you Americans.”

Coppola had, in the ‘70’s, understood something that former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara only came to understand in the ‘90’s when he met with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. With astonishment, he suddenly realized that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of independence, not an ideological war. The 20-year conflict in Vietnam had never been about the spread of communism in the world. 

 

Concerning US foreign policy, the elderly and experienced politician went on to say: “We don’t understand the Bosnians, we don’t understand the Chinese, and we don’t really understand the Iranians.” With the exception of colonized Western Europe, it seems to be a good summary of Washington’s policy towards countries all over the world.

Quoted from:

Matthieu Buge (February 14, 2023) - 50 years after leaving Vietnam, the US keeps getting involved in wars without understanding them. In 1973, the Paris Peace Accords saw American troops abandon their partners. It wouldn’t be the last time.