Four successive US governments have increasingly relied on the US dollar as a weapon of war, forcing nations globally to create alternative financial systems and de-dollarise
According to a Washington Post analysis of the White House’s economic warfare policy, the US government is currently sanctioning a third of all nations in the world, disproportionately affecting low-income countries.
This trend has increased under the last four US administrations and peaked under President Joe Biden, who imposed more than 6,000 sanctions in just two years.
Sanctions “are the only thing between diplomacy and war, and as such have become the most important foreign policy tool in the US arsenal,” Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official, told the US news organisation: “Yet no one in the government is even sure that this strategy is working.”
Washington’s over-reliance on the US dollar as a weapon of war became apparent after the 11 September attacks in New York. Until then, economic sanctions had primarily targeted self-described ‘rogue states’ such as Cuba and Libya, preventing them from participating in the global financial system and promoting regime change.
It is more freely used after 2001
Since 2001, however, sanctions have been used more freely by successive US presidents to isolate countries around the world, and in particular to shift their strategy to West Asia and further east.
George Lopez, a sanctions expert at the University of Notre Dame, told the Washington Post: “Smart sanctions are supposed to be a menu of options where you adjust the sanction based on the offence and vulnerability of the country. Instead, policymakers went to the buffet and said, ‘I’m going to pile everything on my plate.”
According to the report, US Treasury Department staff drafted an internal proposal for the newly elected Biden administration to restructure the sanctions system in 2021, which could be “the most significant overhaul of sanctions policy in decades”. However, the White House refused to implement most of the changes and instead doubled thousands of sanctions against hundreds of countries and continued to impose even more.
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