Why Sanctions? A Conversation With Gregory Wilpert
Venezuela is the target of a brutal economic blockade. VA’s founder helps us understand why.
By Gregory Wilpert, Cira Pascual Marquina June 17, 2023
Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy, a book recently published by Brill, offers a comprehensive account of economic sanctions as a US tool for exercising power on the global stage. The text, which should be required reading for those with sympathy for humanity, includes a chapter on Venezuela by Gregory Wilpert. Here Wilpert goes over some of his key findings.
There is a tendential generational divide amongst the left in the Global North: older folks who lived through the Vietnam and/or Iraq wars center imperialism, while younger generations tend to focus on other (also important) issues. Indeed, if you lived to hear Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz overtly identify the US project as imperialist or talking about turning Iraq into New Jersey, it would be difficult to not center imperialism. One could argue that the fact that US policy has changed over the past few years – now it’s more covert, deploying sanctions and proxy wars instead of outright invasions – has impacted the worldview of the younger generations in the Global North. I would argue that this is why books such as Sanctions as War, are all the more relevant. Could you explain why understanding sanctions policy is so important at the moment?
I think we need to see the application of sanctions in the larger context of two coinciding developments of the past few decades. First, there is the rise and weakening of US hegemony on the world stage. Second, there is the evolution of military technology and strategy toward what some military historians and strategists have called “fourth-generation warfare.”
Regarding the first development (the rise and weakening of US hegemony) the US probably reached the apex of its global hegemony around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The US was the only superpower at that time and enjoyed unrivaled ideological-cultural, economic, and military dominance over the entire planet. However, as neoliberalism became the pre-dominant economic policy in all countries of the world around this time, under US guidance or imposition, and welfare states were being dismantled, it was almost inevitable that resistance to neoliberalism would also come about. This is precisely what happened in the early 2000s, with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Latin America’s first so-called “Pink Tide.” In a way, this challenge signaled the beginning of the end of US ideological and economic hegemony. For a variety of reasons, the US could not impose its will, as it used to, solely with military might. It still did so in some countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, but could not do it everywhere. Luckily for the US, though, the second development that I mentioned, of fourth-generation warfare, came into its own around this time as well.
That is, historically speaking, warfare has become ever more encompassing in terms of the types of weapons deployed and in terms of its targets. Ever since the establishment of nation-states in the 17th century, armies would initially fight only each other in what amounted to hand-to-hand combat (1st generation warfare). Then, with the development of firearms and cannons, they could fight each other across greater distances, creating far larger battlefields and potentially involving and killing far more people (2nd generation). The development of fighter planes and bombers then allowed war planners to bypass front lines and target military infrastructure deep inside enemy territory and thus also kill civilian populations in the form of so-called “collateral damage” (3rd generation). Then, with 4th generation warfare, military and political leaders began using all available modern technology to target the entire enemy population since the distinction between enemy military and enemy civilian population had already become completely blurred in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of the weapons used, every available technology was deployed. In addition to traditional military equipment such as guns, bombers, and missiles, military and political leaders would also use cyber-warfare, psychological warfare, covert operations, and economic sanctions.
More:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/why-sanctions-a-conversation-with-gregory-wilpert/