On September 15, 1970, Richard Nixon infamously instructed the CIA to “make the economy [of Chile] scream” (CIA Director Richard Helms actual note of the conversation can be seen here).
But “the economy” is an abstraction; the reality of economic warfare is a starving population. Sanctions and embargoes are euphemisms for blackmail and hunger. In 1960, Eisenhower said of his proposed Cuba quarantine, “If they are hungry, they will throw Castro out.” More than half a century later, explaining Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Iran will yield to U.S. demands if “they want their people to eat.” The U.S. is still aggressively following that same policy today in Cuba and Iran.
The Trump administration has abandoned diplomacy. Marco Rubio is not behaving as the Secretary of State. If Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of War, a more appropriate title for Rubio is the Secretary of Economic War.
For three quarters of a century, the U.S. has attempted all manner of assassinations and coups to overthrow the government of Cuba. All of them have failed. No popular uprising has been forged. No disloyal government insider has been found to flip the government. No malleable replacement would break the line of succession in a decapitation operation. No one, neither Trump nor his base, want boots on the ground in a lengthy occupation.
But with an end of the year deadline set for regime change in Cuba, some plan has to be put in play. All that remains is the same plan that has failed for three-quarters of a century. All that Trump’s planners can do is intensify it. And that is exactly what they are doing: attempting to deliberately bring about conditions of starvation in Cuba.
In Cuba, there is already not enough oil to guarantee your car, generator or hot water will run. There is not enough electricity to keep the lights on. As a result, tourism, the economic lifeblood of Cuba, is drying up. Canada, the leading source of tourism to Cuba, recently issued a travel advisory for the island, advising “a high degree of caution… due to worsening shortages of electricity, fuel and basic necessities including food, water, and medicine.” On January 9, Cuba announced that international airlines could no longer refuel there due to fuel shortages. Air Canada then announced that it is suspending flights to Cuba, since fuel will not be available at airports.
But if the still standing regime is to fall, the embargo must be tighter. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Trump stormed. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” Seeking “a total blockade on oil imports” to Cuba, at the end of January, Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. In the tradition of Eisenhower and Nixon, the U.S. Charge d’Affairs in the U.S. Embassy in Havana told his staff that “now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming.”
No oil or money going to Cuba is a policy of deliberate starvation. On February 4, the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General of the United Nations stated that “the Secretary-General is extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, which will worsen, if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” He then offered the reminder that “for more than three decades, the General Assembly has consistently called for an end to the embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba.”
America’s policy toward Cuba is economic warfare, which is no less illegal or lethal than a conventional war. A landmark study by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot that was recently published in The Lancet found that unilateral U.S. sanctions caused death tolls similar to armed conflict.
U.S. policy in Iran is no different. It is intended to create hunger and suffering, not in the regime but in the population, with the hope that the public will rise up against the regime.
American sanctions played a lead role in creating the cost-of-living crisis that drove Iranians into the streets in the recent protests. But the Iranian government is powerless to address the economic reforms demanded by the protestors without being freed from the sanctions. The United States, however, refuses to end the sanctions without the surrender of Iran’s defense capacity and the overthrow of the government.
The Iranian government is not blameless in the suffering and economic hardship of its people. While they are partially responsible, the U.S. bears the largest share of the blame for the collapse of the economy. Recent research concludes that U.S. sanctions have decimated the Iranian economy and shrunk the middle class by 28%.
And that outcome was not an accident: it was U.S. policy. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that “the Iranian currency [was] on the verge of collapse. President Trump ordered the Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And 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 street…. This is economic statecraft… Things are moving in a very positive direction.”
On February 5, Bessent again boasted of this accomplishment. He told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country…. It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. There was a run on the bank. The central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.” This was deliberate policy.
Bessent evaluated these events as “good news” and said that they are “a good sign that the end may be near.”
There would be far fewer sanctions on Iran if the U.S. had not voided the JCPOA nuclear agreement. While the government of Iran did what it promised to do to end the sanctions, the U.S. government did not. The return of, and the later increase, in sanctions was a calculated strategy of economic warfare, which has been shown to be no less than a foreign policy of starvation.
In the absence of any desire or talent for diplomacy, economic warfare, and its policy of imposed famine, has taken its place beside conventional warfare in American foreign policy.
