USA Sanctions Without a Conscience

The United States likes to speak the language of human rights. It invokes democracy, freedom, and moral leadership as justification for its power in the world. Yet when it comes to economic sanctions, deportation policy, and the funding of wars that devastate civilian populations, the evidence tells a harsher story. Again and again, U.S. policy reveals an indifference to ordinary human beings. Sanctions rarely punish the powerful. They punish the poor. They do not weaken dictators. They weaken children.

Photo: dezeen.com by Bjarke Ingels Group is licensed under Free More Info

Студенческий центр Университете Джонса Хопкинса в Мэриленде

Sanctions as Collective Punishment

Economic sanctions are often sold as a clean alternative to war. No bombs. No troops. Just pressure. But pressure does not fall evenly. Wealthy elites, political leaders, and military officials do not go hungry. They do not miss insulin, chemotherapy drugs, or baby formula. They do not stand in line for bread. They have offshore accounts, private supply chains, political connections, and the ability to shift pain downward.

Sanctions function less like a scalpel and more like a blunt instrument. Banking restrictions collapse currencies. Import barriers shrink food and medicine supplies. Inflation explodes. Wages evaporate. Health systems buckle. The predictable result is mass impoverishment of people who had no role in the policies the U.S. claims to oppose.

Children suffer first and most. Malnutrition rises. Preventable diseases return. Schools close when families can no longer afford transportation or supplies. A sanction regime may be announced in Washington as a moral stand, but on the ground it looks like empty pharmacies, dark hospitals, and parents forced to choose which child eats.

Venezuela and the Theft of a Nation’s Lifeline

Venezuela offers a stark example. U.S. sanctions targeting the oil sector did not remove leaders from power. They did remove revenue from the only economic engine capable of sustaining the population. Oil profits fund food imports, electricity, water treatment, and public wages. When those revenues are frozen, seized, or redirected, the consequences are immediate and brutal.

The United States did not simply sanction Venezuela. It effectively claimed control over Venezuelan oil profits while insisting that the resulting humanitarian collapse was the fault of Venezuelan leadership alone. This is a convenient moral maneuver. It allows the U.S. to deny responsibility for starvation while actively choking off the means by which people survive.

A child going hungry in Caracas is not harmed by abstract ideology. That child is harmed because food costs more than their parents earn, because medicine cannot be imported, because the economy has been deliberately strangled. No wealthy official skipped dinner. Millions of ordinary people did.

Gaza and the Moral Collapse of Selective Humanity

If sanctions reveal indifference, U.S. funding of Israel’s assault on Gaza reveals something worse. The United States is not a bystander. It is an enabler. Billions of dollars in weapons and diplomatic cover have flowed to a campaign that has flattened neighborhoods, destroyed hospitals, targeted journalists, and killed tens of thousands of civilians, many of them children.

This is not about self-defense rhetoric. This is about reality. When bombs fall on refugee camps and food aid is blocked, starvation becomes a weapon. When children are buried under rubble or die slowly from dehydration and infection, no amount of moral language can disguise complicity.

The United States claims to oppose genocide everywhere except where it is politically inconvenient. Palestinian lives are treated as expendable, their suffering reframed as unfortunate but necessary. There is no serious moral framework in which this can be defended.

ICE and the Criminalization of Survival

At home, the same disregard for humanity plays out through immigration enforcement. ICE routinely detains and deports people who have committed no crimes beyond existing without permission in an economy that depends on their labor. These are caregivers, construction workers, farm laborers, restaurant staff, and cleaners. They pay taxes. They raise children. They contribute.

Families are torn apart without warning. People are detained with little access to legal counsel and sent to detention centers or deported to countries they may not have seen in decades. Children lose parents. Communities lose stability. Trauma ripples outward, all in the name of a system that pretends cruelty is the same as law and order.

As with sanctions, punishment flows downward. Corporations that exploit undocumented labor face few consequences. Politicians posture. The people who scrub floors, pick food, and build houses pay the price.

A Pattern, Not a Series of Accidents

These policies are often discussed as separate issues. Sanctions abroad. Military aid overseas. Immigration enforcement at home. But they are expressions of the same worldview. A worldview that values power over people. Control over compassion. Optics over outcomes.

The United States routinely demands accountability from others while insulating itself from moral scrutiny. It insists its intentions are noble while ignoring predictable human consequences. When suffering follows, it blames foreign leaders, cultural failures, or chaos, never its own deliberate choices.

The Need for a Conscience

A nation that claims moral leadership cannot outsource suffering and call it strategy. It cannot starve children through sanctions, fund mass civilian death, and terrorize working families, then speak earnestly about human rights.

A conscience requires more than rhetoric. It requires policy grounded in human reality. It requires ending broad economic sanctions that function as collective punishment. It requires halting military funding that enables mass civilian death. It requires immigration policies rooted in dignity rather than fear.

The United States does not lack power. It lacks restraint. It lacks humility. And increasingly, it lacks a heart that borders on evil.   
Until that changes, talk of freedom and democracy will ring hollow to the people who know American policy not as an idea, but as hunger, grief, and loss.

Nancy O'Brien Simpson