Will 2023 Be the Year of Backfiring Sanctions for the Overstretched US Empire?
yewtu.be
The year 2022 was defined by the war in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, and continued encirclement of China as the U.S. prepares for “great power conflict.” But the US empire is so overstretched, that sanctions have become the favorite form of warfare— to disrupt and isolate many countries at once. Could they backfire in 2023? To discuss this and more Rania Khalek was joined by Bikrum Gill, who teaches at the department of political science at Virginia Tech. #BreakThroughNews

I know it’s a really long video (play it at 2x speed) but I thought it was fantastic and the part from 25:33-27:17 was particularly insightful:

“The impact of sanctions on Iran or Zimbabwe or Venezuela or Syria is something that those who may oppose western governments don’t really ever discuss. So imagine if instead there was a NATO attack on Iran, you would have immediate clarity of what’s happening. But the impact of sanctions on the Iranian people is not something that generates any sort of political mobilization in the core. Instead, actually, what it enables is a representation of imperialist states as humanitarian states.”

“It’s not like you’re bringing home people in body bags. It’s not like people in the US see the outcome of sanctions because it’s not like CNN is going to cover the fact that Iranians of dying of rare diseases because they can’t access certain pharmaceutical medications that they aren’t able to produce in their own country and can’t buy because of sanctions. That’s all out of sight out of mind … you’ll have almost no public backlash”