Sanctions: When 'Squeeze' Means Slow-Motion Starvation
The Financial Times meticulously documents (and gatekeeps behind a paywall) how 'Trump’s squeeze' impacted Venezuela, using satellite imagery to track oil infrastructure decline. This framing normalizes economic sanctions, ignoring decades of studies by organizations like the UN and CEPR detailing their devastating impact on civilian populations, especially on access to food and medicine. The US
isn't merely 'squeezing' a government; it's targeting an entire nation, reminiscent of the 1960s Cuba blockade or the 1990s Iraq sanctions that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (UNICEF, 1999). Is destroying a country's oil industry a 'policy success' when it drives millions into poverty and food insecurity? How many satellite images would it take for the FT to acknowledge the humanitarian
catastrophe created by these 'squeezes' as deliberate policy choices, rather than an unfortunate, unmentioned side effect? One might wonder if the same forensic analysis would apply to financial blockades on countries resisting US dominance.