They are the dead who do not appear on nightly newscasts. Their names are not etched on memorials, nor are their deaths tallied in the immediate casualty figures of war. They are the victims of a silent, slowmoving, and bureaucratically administered form of attack from the imperialist camp . They are the millions who have perished not because of bombs, missiles or bullets, but from sustained hunger, preventable disease, and the systematic collapse of health because for over half a century, the US and the European imperialist powers have waged a covert war on countries who refuse to genuflect before their dictates. This war is not launched with a primary weapon: unilateral economic sanction which range from comprehensive – deaths—a figure that dwarfs the direct casualties of most modern armed conflicts and constitutes one of the greatest, and most unacknowledged, humanitarian crimes of our time.
The US and European imperialist powers have long cloaked their unilateral sanctions in the language of diplomacy and human rights, presenting them as a peaceful alternative to military intervention. This is a pernicious fiction. In reality, these measures are a refined instrument of imperial power, designed to discipline and destroy ‘disobedient’ governments of the ‘’rogue’ countries who dare to challenge imperialist hegemony and chart an independent course.
The blueprint was perfected decades ago. In 1970, when the Chilean people democratically elected Salvador Allende, a socialist leader, as country’s president much to the chagrin of the Pentagon rulers, the then US President Richard Nixon commanded his officials to make Chile’s economy scream by imposing sanctions meaning trade embargoes or asset freezes. Sanctions aim to create economic hardship to force a change in the policies or actions of the targeted country. The result was brutal. Encashing on people’s misery and penury, Augusto Pinochet, a USbacked military dictator orchestrated a coup d’état with the help of the US imperialists, assassinated Salvador Allende and became president of the country in 1974. The method was proven effective: a government could be toppled by starving its people. From an average of 15 countries under sanction in the 1970s, the Western sanctioning machine has expanded with ruthless efficiency. By the 1990s and 2000s, that number had doubled to 30. Today, in 2025, more than 60 nations—a bulk of which are in the Global South—are ensnared in this web of economic warfare in the form of sanctions. What was once a targeted tool is now a blanket policy of punishment of the recalcitrant countries.
The human toll in specific cases has been well-documented, though often wilfully ignored. In 1990s Iraq, comprehensive UN sanctions, aggressively championed by the US and UK, led to a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. More recently, the US-led economic siege of Venezuela has been described by economists as a form of “collective punishment,” with one study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimating 40,000 excess deaths in 2017-2018 alone due to sanctions that crippled the country’s ability to import food and medicine.
Until now, the full global scale of this carnage has been obscured, relegated to case studies that allowed policymakers to treat each tragedy as an isolated incident. This has changed with a seismic shift in our understanding. A landmark study published this year in *The Lancet Global Health*, provides the first comprehensive, global assessment of the mortality associated with international sanctions from 1970 to 2021. The findings are a forensic indictment of staggering proportions. The central estimate is almost incomprehensible in its magnitude: “38 million deaths.” The primary killers are not explosions, but the slow, agonising consequences of economic strangulation: malnutrition, the collapse of water and sanitation systems, and the failure of healthcare infrastructure.
The logic of sanctions is the logic of engineered deprivation. A declassified US State Department memo from April 1960, outlining the strategy against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, lays bare the brutal calculus. It stated the objective was to “weaken the economic life of Cuba,” to “deny money and supplies,” and, with chilling clarity, to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Iraq, Iran, Palestine—all are subjected to sanctions.
Hunger is not an accidental by-product; it is the core mechanism. By controlling the global financial system—the dominance of the US dollar and Euro, the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a global messaging network that enables banks to securely send and receive information about financial transactions. It and access to critical technologies—the US and European imperialists can unilaterally sever a nation’s economic arteries. They can freeze its assets, block its trade, and paralyse its central bank. The result is hyperinflation, the evaporation of purchasing power, and the collapse of both public services and private markets. When a mother cannot find food for her child or medicine to treat dysentery, that is not an unforeseen consequence. It is the precise point of the exercise.
This system of coercion is the bedrock of modern imperialist machination. It allows for the projection of power avoiding the political cost of deploying troops. This is more than a geopolitical crisis; it is a profound moral imperative. Half a million people are sacrificed each year on the altar of imperialist hegemony. This cannot be allowed to continue unbridled. An international order that relies on the mass starvation of children to enforce its will is not a rules-based order; it is a criminal enterprise. The silence surrounding these millions of deaths must be broken by raising organized protest of voice against imperialist design of starving people to death through draconian sanctions.
