By Dalal Abu Diab (Y13)
Warning: If you are a state department official, a neoliberal apologist, or just a fragile patriot who gets the vapors when confronted with reality, you are advised to fuck off immediately. Reader discretion is not our problem.
Economic sanctions are not the sterile, surgical instruments of statecraft they are portrayed to be in the sanitized corridors of Western diplomacy. They are, in their most essential function, weapons of mass destruction, deployed not with thunderous explosions but with the quiet, bureaucratic cruelty of a frozen bank account. A sanction, stripped of its diplomatic jargon, is a government-imposed restriction on trade, finance, or movement, designed with the explicit purpose of inflicting sufficient economic pain on a target state to coerce its political leadership into compliance. It is the modern equivalent of a medieval siege, a strategy of attrition that targets not the defending army, but the civilian population within the walls, turning access to food, medicine, and the basic functions of civil society into leverage for foreign powers. The mechanics of this 21st-century siege rely not on catapults and blockades, but on the absolute, unassailable dominance of the United States over the global financial system—a hegemony so complete that it allows a single nation to globalize its domestic law, penalizing third-party countries and companies across the planet for daring to conduct legitimate trade with a state on Washington’s enemies list. This is the architecture of economic strangulation, where the US dollar is not merely a currency but a weapon, and payment systems like SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) are not neutral utilities but instruments of enforcement, allowing America to reach into sovereign economies worldwide and dictate the terms of their existence.
The cruelty of this system is compounded by the phenomenon of over-compliance, a chilling effect where banks and corporations, terrified of the astronomical penalties for breaching US sanctions, refuse to process even explicitly permitted transactions for humanitarian goods. This creates a de facto blockade that is often more comprehensive than the official sanctions regime itself. Humanitarian exemptions, the fig leaves offered by sanctioning states to placate international criticism, are rendered functionally meaningless. They exist on paper as legal loopholes but collapse in practice due to blocked payment channels, the withdrawal of insurance providers, and the simple fact that no international supplier is willing to risk its entire business for the sake of selling cancer medication to an Iranian hospital. The result is a predictable and mathematically certain cascade of economic collapse. By restricting a nation’s access to its foreign reserves and its primary sources of export revenue, sanctions trigger currency devaluation so severe that it becomes a form of national expropriation, wiping out the savings of the middle class and plunging the entire population into a vortex of hyperinflation. This inflationary spiral is not an unfortunate side effect; it is the intended mechanism of the weapon. It is the process by which the cost of a loaf of bread becomes an insurmountable barrier, and access to life-saving medicine transforms from a right into a luxury. This is economic warfare, waged one empty pharmacy shelf at a time.
The empirical evidence of this devastation is not hidden in classified archives; it is a bloody, documented history of state-sponsored suffering. The sanctions regime imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003 stands as the most chilling case study, a modern laboratory for testing the limits of civilian endurance. The result was a GDP contraction of approximately 60 percent, a figure that barely hints at the human cost beneath it. UNICEF and other UN bodies estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died during this period from malnutrition and preventable diseases, their lives sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical strategy. When confronted with these staggering figures, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a response that should stand as the moral epitaph for the entire sanctions project: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” The casual, monstrous calculus of this statement—the admission that the lives of half a million children were an acceptable price for pressuring a single dictator—is the unvarnished truth of sanctions as a tool of US foreign policy. This was not a failure of implementation; it was a roaring success in its true aim: the systemic immiseration of an entire population.
The same script, with minor regional variations, has been replayed across the globe. In Venezuela, sanctions from 2017 onwards targeted the lifeblood of the nation’s economy: its oil exports and financial transactions. The goal was explicitly to strangle the government’s revenue stream, and the consequences were predictably lethal. A 2019 study by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated that these US sanctions contributed to approximately 40,000 deaths in Venezuela between 2017 and 2018, a body count accrued through food shortages and the collapse of the public health system. The strategy was clear: engineer an economic crisis so profound that it would trigger popular revolt, a cynical wager that a starving populace would be more amenable to US-backed regime change. In Iran, decades of sanctions have systematically dismantled the nation’s access to international banking and its ability to sell oil on the open market, creating a permanent state of fiscal crisis. The medical shortages are not anecdotes; they are a well-documented feature of the sanctions landscape. Cancer drugs, specialized medical equipment, and even basic pharmaceuticals have become scarce, their procurement rendered impossible by the financial chasms created by US policy. This is the quiet, grinding attrition of a nation’s health, a slow-motion disaster deliberately engineered in Washington and executed through the global banking system.
The reach of this economic warfare extends even to nations already shattered by conflict. The Caesar Act sanctions on Syria do not merely target the current government; they are explicitly designed to prevent any and all reconstruction and foreign investment, effectively sentencing the Syrian people to live indefinitely in the ruins of their own country. Humanitarian operations are paralyzed, not by a lack of will, but by the labyrinthine and punitive compliance requirements that make delivering aid an act of legal jeopardy. In Afghanistan, the sanctions imposed after the 2021 withdrawal of US troops included the vindictive act of freezing approximately $7 billion in the country’s central bank reserves. This was not a targeted measure against the Taliban; it was a collective punishment of an entire population, an act of economic vandalism that triggered a partial collapse of the Afghan banking system and plunged millions into starvation and destitution. The message was unequivocal: if you defy American foreign policy, your nation’s life savings will be held hostage, and your people will be left to fend for themselves in a state of manufactured economic collapse. The 60-year embargo on Cuba, condemned year after year by overwhelming votes in the UN General Assembly, remains the gold standard of this punitive approach, a comprehensive and extraterritorial assault designed to inflict maximum suffering on an entire island nation for the crime of existing outside the American sphere of influence.
Even when applied to a large, diversified economy like Russia, the post-2022 sanctions reveal the true nature of the project. While Russia has demonstrated greater resilience than smaller states, the measures—including financial restrictions, asset freezes, and comprehensive export controls—are not designed merely as a response to a specific action but as a permanent campaign of economic degradation aimed at crippling a geopolitical rival. The goal is to make an example, to demonstrate the consequences of defying the US-led order. For smaller nations, the effect is infinitely more devastating. Decades of comprehensive sanctions on North Korea have failed to achieve their stated objective of regime change but have succeeded in entrenching a dynastic dictatorship that now blames all external suffering on the sanctions themselves, effectively using the siege as a tool for internal propaganda. In Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Libya, sanctions have contributed to decades of economic isolation, developmental stagnation, and the entrenchment of the very corruption and authoritarianism they purportedly seek to combat. The history of American intervention in Chile in the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon instructed his officials to “make the economy scream,” provides the ideological blueprint: economic warfare as a precursor to, and substitute for, overt military action.
The cynical honesty of American officials in this regard is often the only thing more shocking than the policies themselves. John Bolton, a man who has never met a war he didn’t like, stated in 2019 that US economic interests would be directly and significantly benefited by regime change in Venezuela’s oil sector, laying bare the mercenary motives behind the humanitarian rhetoric. Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State, openly outlined a strategy of “unrelenting pressure” against Iran, a campaign of sustained economic strangulation explicitly aimed at forcing the collapse of the Islamic Republic. These are not off-the-cuff remarks; they are public declarations of intent, admissions that sanctions are not a gentle nudge toward diplomacy but a sledgehammer designed to break a nation’s will and its economy. The entire framework is justified as a civilized alternative to military force, yet it produces a comparable, and often more protracted, form of civilian harm through the slow, grinding process of economic deprivation. It is a weapon that spares the aggressor state the political cost of body bags coming home while inflicting a death toll on the target population that is measured in malnutrition, preventable disease, and suicide.
The fundamental lie of the sanctions regime is its supposed precision. It is, in practice, a weapon of mass targeting, disproportionately devastating civilian populations while the political elites, the intended targets, often retain access to resources through illicit networks and black markets. Sanctions can, and often do, strengthen the very authoritarian governments they seek to weaken by providing a convenient external scapegoat for economic hardship, allowing regimes to rally their populations against a foreign aggressor and consolidate their control. The scarcity created by sanctions breeds corruption on an industrial scale, as access to essential goods becomes a source of power and profit for those connected to the state. The entire system is politically low-cost for sanctioning states like the United States, which can inflict immense damage without risking a single soldier’s life, outsourcing the dirty work of enforcement to private actors like banks, insurers, and shipping corporations. This is state coercion by proxy, a system where the threat of financial penalties and shipping corporations does the dirty work of enforcement. This privatization of coercion represents a critical evolution in the architecture of empire, creating a new class of economic colonizers whose loyalty is not to a flag but to the profitability of punishment. As researcher Navid Farnia highlights in the work of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism, this system of economic warfare is fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of free trade, a hypocrisy laid bare by America’s simultaneous promotion of initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) while imposing sanctions on most African nations—all except for a paltry nine. This is not a contradiction; it is the central logic of neocolonial control. The United States maintains 58 active military bases across the African continent, has intervened in countless national elections, and conducted some 20 regime-change operations, yet has the audacity to preach the virtues of economic sovereignty and open markets. The message is clear: you may have “free trade” on the condition that it aligns with Washington’s strategic interests, and you may have “sovereignty” so long as it is exercised within the confines of a system designed to keep you perpetually dependent and subservient.
The modern imperial project has shed the clumsy boots-on-the-ground colonialism of the 19th century for a far more efficient and insidious form of control: financial imperialism. This is the dominant brand of empire since World War II, and the United States is its undisputed master. As legal scholar Maryam Jamshidi articulates, this form of imperialism focuses on economically coercing and controlling state and non-state actors, with sanctions programs of unparalleled scope and impact being its primary weapon. The goal is simple and brutal: to impose widespread financial distress on entire populations, sending a clear message to foreign governments that if they refuse US directives, they will be left unable to provide the basics for their citizens. This is not diplomacy; it is hostage-taking on a national scale. And like all empires, this one has generated an army of new colonizers, private actors who enrich themselves by enforcing and expanding the imperial reach. These modern-day vultures include private plaintiffs holding unsatisfied civil judgments against countries designated by the US State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. Through federal statutes like the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) and the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act, these private actors are empowered to leverage US sanctions to line their own pockets—and those of their attorneys—by siphoning off the financial resources of sanctioned nations. Just as the colonizers of yesteryear used imperial policies to destroy and deplete the resources of the colonized, these new legal predators pillage in their own way, leveraging the full force of the US government’s imperial reach to attach and liquidate the sanctioned assets of foreign states, often from the Global South. It is a system where the mechanisms of international law are perverted into instruments of theft, sanctioned by the world’s most powerful democracy.
This financial imperialism is not an aberration but a direct continuation of the capitalist motives that drove European territorial imperialism, merely stripped of the need for messy and expensive direct military occupation. The old empire restructured the social, political, and economic relations of the colonized to create a dependent flow of resources to the metropole. The new empire achieves the same result by manipulating and controlling international financial markets, investments, and trade. For the United States, economic sanctions are the perfect tool for maintaining this finance-driven capitalist imperium and disciplining any actor that dares to operate outside the US-dominated global order. By leveraging the US dollar’s hegemonic role, America can isolate and deplete the resources of any state or entity that threatens its interests without firing a single shot. The legal foundations for this system are chilling in their breadth and executive power. The Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA), a World War I-era law, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), passed in 1977, grant the US president near-dictatorial authority to sanction other countries, entities, or individuals in times of a declared national emergency—a condition that, conveniently, now seems to be permanent. These statutes form the bedrock of modern US sanctions policy, providing the legal pretext for the economic strangulation of entire nations.
The new colonizers empowered by this legal framework reinforce and bolster US financial imperialism in two critical ways. First, they amplify the devastating impact of sanctions by actively participating in the financial punishment of sanctioned states. When plaintiffs bring enforcement actions under TRIA or the Iran Threat Reduction Act, they are not merely seeking compensation; they are acting as private agents of US foreign policy, further crippling the ability of sanctioned entities to function in a globalized economy. These actions directly target the assets of foreign states, central banks, and businesses, subjecting critical resources to attachment and execution to satisfy judgements issued in US courts, often without the participation or representation of the sanctioned entity. The recent TRIA cases brought against Afghanistan’s central bank are a grotesque illustration of this process, depriving the Afghan state and its starving people of access to desperately needed US dollar reserves. This is not justice; it is legalized plunder, the seizure of a nation’s lifeblood to satisfy private claims, all under the sanctimonious guise of fighting terrorism.
Second, these new colonizers actively expand the reach of US financial imperialism by facilitating the permanent confiscation of sanctioned assets, a practice generally disfavored in the modern sanctions regime but entirely in line with the logic of older, territorial forms of empire. Under IEEPA and TWEA, the permanent confiscation of sanctioned properties by the government is tightly circumscribed, typically allowed only in times of war or through forfeiture proceedings against those violating sanctions. The default position is that assets are “blocked” or “frozen,” not seized outright. But the actions of private plaintiffs under TRIA and the Iran Threat Reduction Act upend this delicate legal fiction. They allow private parties to participate in confiscation efforts and to do so even in the absence of armed conflict, dramatically expanding the volume of efforts to permanently seize blocked assets and the circumstances under which such seizure can occur. This is a profound and dangerous development. It effectively privatizes the power of eminent domain on an international scale, allowing US citizens and corporations to lay claim to the property of foreign states. Whichever way one analyzes it, the result is the same: sanctions’ new colonizers profit directly and handsomely at the expense of the colonized, turning the entire apparatus of American economic warfare into a for-profit enterprise.
The structural violence of this system is reinforced by the phenomenon of “de-risking,” a chilling term that describes how businesses, especially financial institutions, choose to cease operating in regions or with clients subject to sanctions restrictions due to the increased financial cost and legal risk. This self-imposed quarantine goes far beyond the official scope of the sanctions, creating a wider circle of economic isolation that slows growth and deepens poverty. It is the system’s own shadow, a consequence so predictable that it must be considered an intended feature. The entire architecture of sanctions, from the primary legislation to the secondary enforcement by private actors, is designed to create a world where compliance with US foreign policy is not just a choice for international banks and corporations but a prerequisite for survival. This is the true meaning of the “rules-based international order” that Western leaders so often champion: a world where the rules are written in Washington, and the price of disobedience is economic annihilation.
The legal and moral contortions required to sustain this system are breathtaking. Sanctions regimes routinely violate principles of state sovereignty enshrined in the United Nations Charter when imposed unilaterally by the United States without Security Council authorization. They function as a form of collective punishment, a tactic explicitly prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, yet inflicted upon entire populations with impunity. The comparison to siege warfare is not a mere analogy; it is a functional description of the strategy. Where ancient armies surrounded cities with walls and soldiers, the US surrounds nations with financial restrictions and asset freezes. The objective is identical: to starve the population into submission. The structural similarities to colonial economic control systems are undeniable. Just as European empires restricted trade and enforced dependency to extract wealth, the US uses its financial dominance to enforce a new form of economic colonialism, one that restricts policy autonomy and perpetuates global hierarchies. Sanctions can function like blockades, limiting access to essential goods and financial systems, and they produce long-term developmental setbacks by crippling infrastructure investment and economic growth for generations. They delay post-conflict reconstruction by strangling access to materials, financing, and foreign expertise, ensuring that nations shattered by war or sanctions can never truly heal. This is the ultimate expression of imperial power: not just to defeat an enemy, but to condemn them and their descendants to a state of permanent recovery, forever beholden to the whims of the victor.
The human cost of this permanent economic warfare is quantifiable and horrifying, as the academic study you provided confirms. Economists who analyzed the effect of economic sanctions on 98 countries over 35 years found that UN sanctions reduce life expectancy by 1.2–1.4 years, while sanctions imposed by the United States reduce life expectancy by 0.4–0.5 years. The primary drivers of this premature death are chillingly familiar: an increase in child mortality, deaths due to preventable diseases like cholera, and a catastrophic decrease in public health spending. The study also identified a devastating gender disparity, concluding that women are more severely affected by sanctions, a finding that aligns with broader research showing that economic crises disproportionately harm women and children. This is not collateral damage; it is the predictable and intended outcome of a policy designed to inflict maximum societal pressure. The study further demonstrated that US sanctions increase poverty among the poorest people, reinforcing the reality that sanctions are a weapon of the rich, deployed by rich countries against poorer countries, to increase global inequalities.
The case of Iraq remains the most damning indictment. Following the imposition
of comprehensive economic sanctions in 1990, infant mortality in Iraq more than doubled, skyrocketing from 47 to 108 per 1,000 live births. Under-five mortality followed the same horrific trajectory, increasing from 56 to 131 per 1,000 live births. One group of researchers, attempting to quantify the unimaginable, estimated that 567,000 children died as a direct result of the economic sanctions. These are not statistics; they are a mass grave, dug by policy and filled with the bodies of the innocent. The suffering was documented in excruciating detail: widespread nutritional problems, a surge in infectious diseases, and an increase in low birth weight infants, all hallmarks of a society whose public health infrastructure had been systematically demolished. The case of Iran tells a similar, though less extreme, story. Systematic reviews have identified over 55 papers documenting the adverse health effects on the Iranian population, with the availability of essential medicines significantly reduced during periods of intense sanctions. The cruelty of the system reached such absurd depths that publishers of medical journals began refusing to consider papers from Iranian researchers, fearing they might be in breach of US sanctions laws. This is the intellectual equivalent of a blockade, an attempt to wall off an entire nation’s scientific community from the global exchange of knowledge. The impact on the most disadvantaged is starkly illustrated by a review of 71 countries from 1990 to 2012, which found that sanctions increased AIDS-related death rates in children with HIV by approximately 1% and new infection rates by 2.5%. These are the hidden casualties of economic warfare, the children whose lives are written off as acceptable losses in the great game of geopolitical coercion.
The United States, with its 60-year embargo on Cuba, has perfected the art of the long-term siege. The sanctions are comprehensive, targeting food, medicines, and medical equipment, and their extraterritorial components effectively make it impossible for other countries to trade with Cuba without facing US retaliation. This aspect of the sanctions is so egregious that it has been declared illegal by the British government under the UK Protection of Trading Interests Act 1980, which states that “it is illegal for UK companies to comply with extraterritorial legislation such as the US embargo.” The European Union has similarly declared the extraterritorial aspects of US sanctions illegal. Yet, every year, the UN General Assembly votes overwhelmingly for the sanctions on Cuba to be lifted, a testament to the near-universal global condemnation of this policy. A comprehensive Oxfam report details the devastating impact, highlighting the profound difficulties Cuba faces in obtaining basic medical supplies like syringes, masks, ventilators, and medicines, as well as the raw materials needed to produce its own vaccines and sanitary products. The sanctions have increased inequalities within Cuba and have even blocked scientific collaboration between Cuban and American researchers, a level of petty vindictiveness that underscores the policy’s true nature as an instrument of punishment rather than a tool for constructive change. The fact that American presidents from Obama to Biden have expanded, rather than lifted, these sanctions, despite their proven ineffectiveness and humanitarian cost, reveals the extent to which the policy is driven by domestic political inertia and a refusal to admit failure.
Beyond the immense human suffering lies a stark legal reality: the widespread use of comprehensive economic sanctions against countries is, in many cases, illegal under the very framework of international law that the United States claims to uphold. The legality of these measures has been increasingly and vociferously questioned by legal scholars, human rights organizations, and health professionals. The core legal principle at stake is the prohibition against the use of indiscriminate weapons on a civilian population, a concept universally recognized as unlawful. Economic sanctions, particularly the comprehensive ones imposed by the United States, function precisely as such a weapon. They are blunt instruments of mass disruption that cannot distinguish between a military installation and a children’s hospital, between a government official and a diabetic grandmother. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, a landmark document born from the ashes of World War II, was a monumental attempt to establish legal protections for civilians during times of war. Its subsequent protocols, adopted in 1977, sought to strengthen these protections and explicitly codified the prohibitions against collective punishment and starvation as a method of warfare. Sanctions regimes, which deliberately target a nation’s economy to deprive its population of food, medicine, and the means of survival, stand in direct violation of these foundational principles of international humanitarian law. They are, in effect, a form of siege warfare prosecuted through banking systems rather than armies, and their indiscriminate impact on civilians should render them legally untenable.
This illegality is further underscored by the systematic violation of international human rights law. Economic sanctions on countries are fundamentally inconsistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly Articles 24, 26, and 28, which explicitly concern the rights of children to access healthcare, social welfare, and education. The destruction of a nation’s economy through sanctions inevitably leads to the degradation of the public services necessary to fulfill these rights. When a government’s revenue is decimated and its access to international finance is cut off, its ability to provide healthcare, education, and social support collapses. Every nation on Earth has ratified this convention, with the singular, glaring exception of the United States. This fact alone is a damning indictment, suggesting a deliberate American policy to place itself outside the legal and moral consensus on the protection of the world’s most vulnerable citizens. The hypocrisy is breathtaking: a nation that positions itself as the global champion of human rights is the sole holdout on the convention protecting children, while simultaneously deploying economic weapons that disproportionately harm those very children across the globe. It is a position of such profound moral and legal contradiction that it can only be sustained through the raw exercise of power, not through any claim to ethical or legal authority.
The call from health professionals and legal experts for a fundamental change is growing louder. They argue that paediatric professional organizations in the member states of the UN Security Council have a moral duty to lobby their governments, forcing them to acknowledge the undeniable truth that economic sanctions cause vastly more harm than good to children in impoverished countries. Institutions like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (UK) are urged to take the lead, issuing formal statements calling on their governments and the UN to cease the use of economic sanctions on countries. More profoundly, there is a growing movement to amend the Geneva Convention itself by adopting a new protocol that explicitly addresses this modern form of warfare. Such a protocol would enshrine in international law two crucial principles: first, that extraterritorial economic sanctions are illegal and should be banned immediately; and second, that comprehensive economic sanctions on a country are inherently inhumane and should be banned as soon as possible. This represents a recognition that the existing legal framework, designed in the aftermath of conventional wars, is insufficient to address the realities of 21st-century economic warfare. The world needs a new legal instrument to classify and prohibit the silent siege, to recognize that starving a nation with a financial blockade is no different from starving it with a military one.
The refusal to confront this illegality is rooted in the immense political and economic power of the sanctioning state, primarily the United States. The entire global financial system is structured to facilitate and enforce America’s sanctions policy, giving it a leverage that no other nation possesses. This allows the US to act with a degree of impunity that fundamentally undermines the principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the UN Charter. When a single nation can unilaterally decide to cripple another country’s economy without UN Security Council authorization, it is not enforcing international law; it is supplanting it with its own will. This is the behavior not of a global leader, but of a hegemon enforcing its own dominion. The argument that sanctions are a necessary alternative to military force collapses under the weight of evidence showing they often produce comparable, and sometimes worse, civilian harm. A bomb kills quickly and visibly; sanctions kill slowly and invisibly, but the end result is the same. The moral and legal distinction between the two is one of style, not substance. Both are weapons deployed to achieve political objectives, and both inflict unacceptable suffering on civilian populations. The fact that one is marketed as a “peaceful” tool of statecraft is a triumph of public relations over moral clarity, a lie so pervasive it has become accepted truth in the corridors of Western power.
Ultimately, the sanctions regime is a testament to the enduring power of colonial logic in a post-colonial world. It reinforces global economic hierarchies by limiting the policy autonomy of weaker states, ensuring they remain dependent and compliant. It functions as a tool of geopolitical competition, used to weaken rivals and enforce the dominance of the US-led order. It creates and exacerbates corruption by fostering black markets and empowering elites who control access to scarce resources. And it lasts for decades, regardless of its effectiveness in achieving its stated objectives, because it serves the unstated goal of maintaining a world order skewed in favor of the powerful. The history of sanctions, from Iraq to Cuba, from Iran to Venezuela, is a history of failure, if success is measured by achieving positive political change. But if success is measured by inflicting pain, demonstrating dominance, and reinforcing a global system of economic control, then it has been a resounding, horrifying success. The challenge for the international community is to move beyond the hollow condemnations and UN votes that have no power to compel the United States. It requires the development of alternative financial systems outside of Western control, the strengthening of regional trade agreements that defy US diktats, and the courage to legally challenge the very foundations of this economic warfare. Until then, the silent siege will continue, and the body count will rise, one empty pharmacy shelf and one devalued currency at a time, all in the name of a rules-based international order where the United States alone gets to write the rules.