Russia, China, and Iran, have a right to protect their nations against America’s constant illegal aggressions.

Published by Eric Zuesse on , October 4, 2023

Aggressions can occur in many different forms; and, though Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — which was Russia’s response to the U.S. and NATO having refused to negotiate with Russia about Russia’s demand that America not be allowed to place its missiles in Ukraine a mere 317 miles away from The Kremlin (close enough for a surprise blitz-annihilation of Russia’s central command) — is hypocritically called by the U.S. and its allies “Russian aggression,” it was instead required (by that U.S.-and-allied aggression against Russia by trying to get Ukraine into NATO). It was necessary self-defense by Russia against U.S.-&-NATO aggression (of trying to get Ukraine into NATO). Then, the U.S. sanctions against Russia, after Russia did that necessary invasion of that nearest-of-all countries, are an excellent example of yet more U.S.-&-allied aggression against Russia. Russia has not only a right, but a national-defense duty, to do what it did, to prevent there 'ever being U.S. missiles stationed on the nearest border to Moscow. Furthermore, the U.S.-and-allied sanctions are, themselves illegal* aggression — U.S.-NATO aggression on top of U.S.-NATO aggression.

As Nicholas Mulder’s 2022 THE ECONOMIC WEAPON: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, says in its Introduction:

“The original impulse for a system of economic sanctions came at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference from the British delegate, Lord Robert Cecil, and his French counterpart, Leon Bourgeois. … Both Cecil and Bourgeois agreed that the League [of Nations] could and should be equipped with a powerful enforcement instrument. They envisioned deploying the same techniques of economic pressure used on the Central Powers [their now-vanquished enemies] against future challengers of the Versailles [U.S.-and-allied imposed] Versailles [Treaty] order. Such recalcitrant countries [the victims of WW I’s victors] *would be labelled ‘aggressors’ — a new, morally loaded, legal category — and be subjected to economic isolation by the entire League. The methods of economic warfare were thus repurposed and refined for use outside a formally declared state of war. … This coercive exclusion would take place in peacetime.”

In other words: Wilson’s League of Nations, working in conjunction with imperialistic England, legitimized such “coercive exclusion … in peacetime” — NOT as being a defensive response, but as a legalized aggression in a time of peace — but the United Nations (which is the basis of all international laws) never did any such thing — it instead OUTLAWED “aggressive war.” These sanctions by the U.S. and its allies (being NOT sanctions by the U.N.) are “warfare,” and they are NOT defensive, but instead aggressive; and they therefore fail to meet the legal requirement for international sanctions, which is that they first be approved by the U.N. Security Council and by a majority vote of the U.N. General Assembly.

For example: the U.S. Constitution’s declaration-of-war clause became essentially irrelevant starting in 1919. One leg of the Founders’ Constitutional superstructure to prevent there ever being any American empire was then just yanked off and into the trash. This Anglo-American international subterfuge ripped asunder America’s Constitution.

In other words: America’s economic sanctions are instruments of aggressive war that are used by hypocrites to fool their own publics to believe that those hypocrites are NOT, themselves, “aggressors.” Then, if and when the given victim-nation strikes back against those hypocrites (against the nations that started the war, by means of illegal sanctions) — then the hypocritically-ruled aggressor countries call their victim-country (now become an actual attacker) an “aggressor”-nation (though it’s actually the defending nation); and the cycle, of endlessly repeating revenges by the hypocrites, can then head toward yet-another round of war, perhaps now WW III even more horrific than all of those which had preceded it.

Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations was born from such hypocrisies as that; and, so, it (by blaming WW I on ONLY the vanquished nation, Germany, when in that instance, WW I, both sides exhibited approximately the same amount of evil) produced the injustices, and the rages, and the outrages, that subsequently brought to power, in Germany, Adolf Hitler, and, finally, World War II, which was the most barbaric war that ever-yet has been, though not so barbaric as a WW III, which might yet come as a result of America’s actions.

U.S. President FDR was determined — ever since the summer of 1941, before America officially joined WW II — to terminate that psychopathic insanity of revenge-upon-revenge (which had been perpetrated by Wilson, and brought Hitler in its train), and to put into place in the world, something that FDR referred to as the United Nations, which was to be empowered with a monopoly on all strategic weaponry, and to possess the sole authority to create and enforce international laws (the laws between nations instead of within nations). FDR’s immediate successor, Harry S. Truman, became convinced, by his hero, Dwight Eisenhower, to trash FDR’s dream, and to replace it, with America itself, instead, becoming the world’s first-ever globally hegemonic empire, above all other nations, the empire to end all competing empires, the empire that would dictatorially impose peace, upon the entire world — the first-ever all-encompassing global dictatorship — the supreme supremacy, allegedly so as to prevent a WW III, but heading things actually into the next World War.

And, so, here we are, today, reaching more perilously close to a hot WW III than ever before, even than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (when the issue was whether the Soviet Union might become enabled to blitz-nuke Washington DC within just 15 minutes from Cuba) to today’s Ukraine-in-NATO (when the issue is whether America might become enabled to blitz-nuke Moscow within just 5 minutes from Ukraine).

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. Congress formally declared war against Germany on 2 April 1917. Sanctions started as America’s ‘peaceful’ tool for America’s coming imperialism after the U.S.-and-allied victory against Germany when Wilson, in his 4 September 1919 “Address at the Coliseum at the State Fair Grounds in Indianapolis, Indiana”, blossomed forth with the outrageously counterfactual assertion that: “I want you to realize that this war was won not only by the armies of the world. It was won by economic means as well. Without the economic means the war would have been much longer continued. What happened was that Germany was shut off from the economic resources of the rest of the globe and she could not stand it. A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force [Could he really have been so stupid as to believe that this wasn’t “force”?]. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon that nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”

Of course, once that war, WW I, had started, both sides were “boycotting” each other. But that didn’t make them right, or legal. Anyone who asserts that a given nation’s imposing sanctions against another nation is not a tacit declaration of war against them is either an ignoramus (like Wilson) or else a liar. Wilson was saying that some “boycott” against Germany had significantly precipitated Germany’s defeat in World War I. “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force.” It’s just that easy, is it? Really? Boycotts by means of enforced legal sanctions are instruments for maintaining peace? Hardly. In fact, imposing sanctions constitutes a lot more than merely “fighting words,” or mere insults. But it’s done because the given nation’s aristocracy wants to stir hatred and war against the nation that they are targeting for conquest, and so want to boycott it, and perhaps economically exploit it, by legally enforced sanctions (which actually aren’t legal).

Furthermore: boycotts may be imposed for authentically ethical reasons, but sanctions never can be ethical, because sanctions are ONLY boycotts that have been imposed by means of laws. For example, any person who opposes what Israel routinely does to Palestinians has a right to impose his/her OWN boycott against everything that Israel produces — but that IS NOT a SANCTION. The ONLY form of a boycott that IS a sanction is one which is being imposed by law, and it is an inducement to war, if not the initial step toward a hot war. ONLY if the U.N. is the source of the sanction can it be legal in international law (regardless of its being imposed in accord with a given nation’s law — which has force only within that nation).

On 23 October 1997, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) addressed the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee with “Evidence on the Costs and Benefits of Economic Sanctions”, and opened with an attack upon that statement by Wilson, as having been false:

The reality, alas, has been far different from what President Wilson envisioned. The global, comprehensive, and vigorously enforced sanctions against Iraq and the former Yugoslavia have produced at best limited and tenuous results. Unilateral sanctions — even when imposed by the largest economy in the world — face far more difficult challenges, especially in an increasingly integrated international economy. Even against such small and vulnerable targets as Haiti and Panama, military force eventually was required to achieve American goals.

Extensive empirical research on the effectiveness of economic sanctions throughout this century suggests that these two cases are not unusual. Since 1970, unilateral US sanctions have achieved foreign policy goals in only 13 percent of the cases where they have been imposed. In addition to whatever effect repeated failure may have on the credibility of US leadership, other recent research suggests that economic sanctions are costing the United States $15 billion to $19 billion annually in potential exports. This, in turn, translates into 200,000 or more jobs lost in the relatively highly compensated export sector.2

This PIIE speech ignored the costs that sanctions imposed upon the targeted country — and upon countries which were trading with it. Is such psychopathy universal amongst America’s aristocracy?

In November 2020, the European Union issued a study, “Extraterritorial sanctions on trade and investments and European responses”653618_EN.pdf), which considered retaliatory measures against U.S. sanctions, and which also included a survey of the actual effects that sanctions had had, as-of around 2016, against the targeted countries: “Trade sanctions have a larger and more long-lasting effect with the drop in GDP growth rate peaking at on average at minus 12 pp in the second year after sanctions introduction and fading away towards the fifth year. In both cases, there is a slight recovery of GDP around the sixth year following the imposition of the sanctions but it is a fraction of the GDP lost over the sanction years.” Furthermore: “Next, we check if sanctions improve the probability of regime change towards democracy. The results show that, on average, sanctions lower that probability of shifting towards democracy, albeit to a limited extent (-2 pp).” The study avoided discussing, or even mentioning, the costs that America’s sanctions had imposed upon non-target countries such as, especially, nations in the EU. In other words: though they nominally considered sanctioning the U.S. for its sanctions — which U.S. sanctions the study called “illegal” — they studiously avoided even to mention the costs that those sanctions indirectly imposed upon European nations. Nominally, the report said that such costs might be a basis for taking international legal actions against the United States; but, actually, the report ignored what those costs were. It was typical EU double-speak. And, thus, U.S. President Wilson’s dubious assertion that “It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted” continued being officially uncontested. (Certainly, it costs billions to the countries that violate the sanctions and continue trading with the target-country, but no study has been done on whether, or the extent to which, those economic costs entail any added deaths in any of those countries. Does nobody even care?)

Sanctions that have not been imposed by the United Nations are acts of war, illegal aggressions against the sanctioned countries. Sanctions are allowed in international law only if imposed by the U.N. Security Council. The reason for this is that ONLY when agreement exists amongst the major powers (which are represented there) can sanctions be actions by the U.N. (the sole authenticator of international laws), instead of being merely actions by whichever nation(s) impose those sanctions — which then are aggressions against the targeted country. The U.N. exists in order to prevent another World War, another war BETWEEN MAJOR WORLD POWERS. This is the reason why sanctions that are not being imposed by the U.N. are aggressive sanctions, NEVER defensive. Sanctions are the sanctimonious form of aggression to precipitate an ensuing hot war.

Because non-members of the U.N. Security Council became disturbed by deceits which the U.S. and its allies had employed in order to obtain international support for their sanctions against Iraq in 1991, especially the “Nayirah testimony” that the U.S. regime had presented on 10 October 1990 in order to ‘justify’ its war for Kuwait in the Iraq-Kuwait war, and because “The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies”, the U.N. General Assembly became more skittish about cooperating with sanctions than formerly had been the case, prior to the regime of the odious George W. Bush (son of the lying GHW Bush) in the U.S.

Such hypocrisies led to the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize going to Barack Obama, who then sanctioned Russia and couped Ukraine, both actions being perhaps the triggers to a WW III. And the Nobel Committee never apologized for that.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.