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Los bloqueos económicos de Estados Unidos y el derecho internacional

Jun 28, 2019 Jeffrey D. Sachs

NUEVA YORK – El presidente estadounidense Donald Trump ha basado su política exterior en una serie de duros bloqueos económicos, pensados para intimidar, presionar e incluso hambrear al país objetivo, y así obligarlo a someterse a las demandas de Estados Unidos. Si bien la práctica es menos violenta que un ataque militar, y se efectúa con medios financieros en vez de navales, las consecuencias para las poblaciones civiles suelen ser terribles. Por eso es necesario someter los bloqueos económicos estadounidenses al escrutinio del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas conforme al derecho internacional y a la Carta de la ONU.

Durante la campaña electoral de 2016, Trump criticó la frecuente apelación estadounidense a la guerra en Medio Oriente. Entre 1990 y 2016, Estados Unidos inició dos grandes guerras con Irak (1990 y 2003) y otras en Afganistán (2001), Libia (2011) y Siria (2012). También participó en muchas intervenciones militares de menor escala (en Mali, Somalia y Yemen, entre otros países). El conflicto en Siria suele describirse como una guerra civil, pero en realidad fue una guerra de cambio de régimen liderada por Estados Unidos y Arabia Saudita, bajo una directiva presidencial estadounidense llamada Timber Sycamore.

Con ninguna de estas guerras dirigidas por Estados Unidos (y otras en la historia reciente) se obtuvo el resultado político buscado, y los conflictos más importantes fueron seguidos por violencia e inestabilidad crónicas. El intento de sacar a Bashar al-Assad del poder por la fuerza en Siria llevó a una guerra por intermediarios (con participación de Estados Unidos, Siria, Rusia, Arabia Saudita, Qatar, Irán, Turquía, Israel y los Emiratos Árabes Unidos) que provocó el desplazamiento de más de diez millones de sirios y cerca de medio millón de muertes violentas.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Writing for PS since 1995
328 Commentaries

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, and most recently, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 18 in all 18 Comments on this article

Nico Lau Jul 8, 2019

As long as a country neither conducts a genocide, nor attacks other countries, nobody should interfere in its internal affairs. If a country like Venezuela or Cuba goes broke due to its incompetent leadership, it should get help from the IMF etc. in exchange for reforms as happens with any other country. Other than that it is their business whether they want to be socialist, capitalist or whatever. That whole ideological crusade against leftist countries has to stop, it has cost millions of lives already.

And there is a simple way to stop Iran's activities in the Middle East: let's finally solve the conflict there after decades during which the West simply looked the other way when land, water and oil were stolen from the Palestinians and others.

In my view the US has long turned into a rogue state. The rest of the world has to prune that country by working together and isolating it. For instance, let's create a new global currency for commodities, the Com, in order to drive the dollar out.

Let's move the UN out of the US to a neutral, peaceful country, Switzerland for instance.
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vivek iyer Jul 1, 2019

Sanctions are legal and based on national sovereignty and not a proper subject of scrutiny by an international body. Blockades are subject to international law. By calling something which is legal by another term which may involve illegality one is guilty of shedding false light. Sachs thinks that if sanctions have the same effect as a blockade then sanctions are blockades. This is foolish. It is like saying 'since a woman can get pregnant either through consensual sex or through rape, it follows that all fathers are rapists'.

Trump is carrying on policies previously applied. He has made no great innovation. It appears likely that no 'regime change' will occur. That is why there is no real 'geopolitical' risk here. The effect of sanctions is to create a widening chasm between regime 'insiders' and the great mass of the people. This has a demoralizing effect and reduces the ability of the regime to use its brain-washed subjects for an aggressive purpose. In other words, sanctions reduce, not increase, the threat potential of a bitter adversary.
- Petey Bee Jul 1, 2019
  
  Current sanctions attempt to effectively have jurisdiction over third parties, i.e. not the US, who would trade with Iran. ( that, in full compliance with international law and a binding prior agreement to which the US is a party.) I am curious how you square that with "national sovereignty", unless that is something over which the US has a higher priority than third parties.
  - vivek iyer Jul 1, 2019
    
    Other countries are welcome to forbid their citizens from complying with US attempts in this regard. The US itself has sovereign immunity for a 'tortious interference' type suit but other countries could assert their own sovereignty to retaliate.
    
    We may feel that economic sanctions ought to be illegal because they are tantamount to a blockade which would violate the Geneva convention. However, this is impossible to prove and in any case the thing is not justiciable. It is silly to pretend that sanctions are blockades or that there is an operational International Law in this respect. What on earth can the Security Council do? America has a veto there.
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Mauricio Duran-Loriga Jun 30, 2019

Pure anti-American propaganda.

Where were you when the USSR did exactly the same, for decades? Or China?
Were you then claiming for the restoration of "international law"?
- Linsen Li Jul 1, 2019
  
  Whataboutism at its finest.
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Elizabeth Pula Jun 30, 2019

The Security Council needs to establish a thorough examination of international law and human rights internationally. Sharia Law needs to be acknowledged as the largest detrimental system to human rights. If human rights and female rights to their own individual bodies are NOT acknowledged, with Sharia legal system condemnation, then gradually, 4 women will become equal to one man globally, Non-Muslims will have NO rights as human beings, and the majority of human beings will become enslaved internationally. I am NOT exaggerating here. The legal ramifications of the "female rights issue" is the essential pivot or balance point internationally that are above the issues that you very rightly and correctly are approaching for debate and examination of international laws and peacekeeping efforts globally. The varying extremes of the place and the role of the female is the critical issue that is being danced around globally with the varying positive and negative political posturing by worldwide good and bad actors.
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Elizabeth Pula Jun 30, 2019

WHO is REALLY doing WHAT??
The US is NOT "attempting to isolate the three countries from almost all international trade, causing shortages of food, medicines, energy, and spare parts for basic infrastructure, including the water supply and power grid."

Is the US as a nation really attempting to accomplish the TASK as defined? Not hardly! Only a few well connected politically powerful INDIVIDUALS and perhaps families are attempting to accomplish that task. How many individual citizens especially in the US have even voted or even support the quoted phrase, which is a specific political task to accomplish what results for WHO, WHAT, and WHERE?

I am most specifically suggesting that the results are most definitely NOT for the majority of the US citizens that are presently residing in the US and are earning less than 100,00 USD annually, which is the majority of US human beings, even the illegal ones in the US in 2019. I am also most specifically suggesting that the task has been supported by probably 4 or more US Federal Administrations during my lifetime.

If Trump can "like" North Korean and Saudi leaders, then he can just as easily "like" a few other nations quite similar leaders. Aren't they all VIRTUALLY dictators?
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Elizabeth Pula Jun 30, 2019

The US is acquiesing to dictatorship. There are direct costs to the US public and the US budget, most definitely with virtually no political accountability to any of the lifetime politically colluded Legislative bodies and Executive bodies within the state and Federal administrative systems. Presently, this focus on the international Economic Trade-War scenario is really distracting from the internal US trade-war that is occurring on US soil. A most significant aspect of the most significant US trade-war is the present awarding of bids on the municipal and state levels to the CRRC of passenger rail-car and associated systems, and infrastructure to the TOTAL DETRIMENT of US economy.
These bid awards across the US by major urban municipal transportation systems will be the last blow to the US transportation industry, and most probably US cyber-security operations to protect the US internally. These bids will allow further relinquishing of market and military power to an international political alliance between Saudi Arabia, China and Russia, with European alliances that will essentially constrain the US as a nation into an isolated collapsing US economy.

Unfortunately, for the American public, the internal US trade-war has occurred with the total cooperation of US legislative and executive leadership over more than the last two federal administrations. AND to quote you-"carried out by presidential decree, with almost no public debate and no systematic oversight by Congress." Just a little bit of reading, and anyone can notice the billions in contracts will COST the US economy and its workers with further draconian results.
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Elizabeth Pula Jun 30, 2019

Regardless of effects on other populations external to the US, attention must be paid to the draconian effects on the population of citizens that reside in the US, especially those with gross incomes below $100,000 USD annually.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/450084-advocates-push-ftc-crackdown-on-secret-consumer-scores

The effects of draconian strategies that are being utilized by the monopoly data-theft platforms primarily in the US that are strategized to destroy the most basic ethics of business and the concept of "social contract" is destroying all individual rights of US citizens, especially ANY right to privacy, and especially right-to-access anything for survival in a global economy based on the 'right-to-access any kind of monies" to allow any kind of self-motivated transactions to continue to survive.

That little link back to that article in THE HILL, is not just about the FTC and secret consumer scores.....
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Robert Wolff Jun 30, 2019

As in all other times that are precursors to War, the laws of disparate nations mean nothing. We all have our own laws, to rule our own geopolitical nations, which disserve the interests of other geopolitical nations.

Most recently, the WTO admits it is insufficient to resolve trade disputes among nations, and must change its hypotheses. This is only another precursor admission that binding international laws are becoming irrelevant, and that we must "Start all over again", i.e. the rule of the strongest, which means one state must conquer another before we can reestablish "Common Rule."

That reneging on PAX America means we need a new World War, to establish which Nation is the winner, and can provide military/economic security for the other compliant nations.

China believes it is that nation, as leader of the Orient society/economy/politics.

The US still believes it is that nation, as leader of the West.
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Paul Daley Jun 29, 2019

Economic sanctions are not tantamount to acts of war and should not be treated that way at the UN Security Council or anywhere else. To do that would just leave acts of war as the only alternative in the case of serious disputes. But neither should nations necessarily cooperate with sanctions they see as poorly motivated or poorly designed. In those cases, the best response is usually technical -- new institutional arrangements that raise the costs or limit the effects of poorly justified unilateral sanctions.
- Robert Wolff Jun 30, 2019
  
  But you must admit that, if no agreements among nations, that preserve their sovereignty, financially as well as politically and also suffice to enlist the support of their religious and military components, as well as their commercial and financial superiors, that in lieu of a universal order under the New World Order banking system, and its Elites, supported by their nationalistic hoi-polloi, will fail to maintain international peace.
  
  The US, with many murders at the lower levels of society, has already redressed the current international order.
  
  Perhaps the Chinese and Russian systems, intolerant to the complaints of the "Losers" is the harbinger of the future of the rule of future of nation-states.
  
  Seems the world of the future will be intolerant of "Losers", and if you want to survive you had better behave in line with the requirements of "The State".
  
  Any errant "Gods" and their followers in contest with the Power of the State are doomed to be eliminated.
  
  "I love you, Big Brother!"
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Christopher williams Jun 29, 2019

I agree the situation is serious, not least because Trump has found a way to force his US-dominant position (without Congress' involvement) on many parts of the world. His 'success' is giving him the confidence (something he is not short of anyway!) to widen out his policy to all areas of the world.
In the immediate future, Vietnam seems to be in the flow through from the Chinese trade war; how far he follows this across to other Asian countries we will see.
The EU stands out as the 2020 target; how the new EU administration prepares for this, not least in how it deals with EU companies which ignore EU rules in fear of US threats, is going to be important.
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Petey Bee Jun 28, 2019

The Trump administration is using sanctions like a resource that will soon expire.
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Mirek Fatyga Jun 28, 2019

it is the beginning of the end for the special role of the US$ in the world economy. Dethroning the US$ has now become a matter of national security for 95% of the planet. Not that this would not have happened anyway, nothing lasts forever, but present events accelerate the process.

This can be good for the US in the long run, if painful at first. One sometimes quips about the curse of natural resources. US suffers from the similar curse of the Dollar, which is a natural resource of sorts, as it can be printed out of thin air, seemingly without consequences. The dethroning of the US$ will cause a pretty significant, perhaps shocking, drop in living standards given US social inequalities, but it may be beneficial in the long run by imposing some sobriety and discipline upon the political system. Then, it could also break up the country for good. May you live in interesting times, as the saying goes.
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Paul Friesen Jun 28, 2019

Fortunately, the ability of the U.S. to do this is fading fast, as it loses its economic domination to China. So far, China has shown rather less tendency to meddle in the affairs of other countries, with the notable exceptions of certain territories which it regards as part of its territory. The world is slowly becoming fairer.
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