How Sanctions Function As A Tool Of Regime Change.

The Sanctions Being Lifted On Syria Show That The Real Purpose Behind U.S. Sanctions Are A Tool Of Regime Change.

Trump Is Lifting Syria Sanctions Because They Achieved Their Regime Change Goal.

Donald Trump has recently lifted the U.S. economic sanctions on Syria- a positive move given that the sanctions, by design, only make life miserable for ordinary Syrians while having no real effect on the powerful.

But the lifting of the sanctions on Syria by Trump is not out of any concern for the well-being of Syrians, but because they already successfully achieved their regime change goal.

The harshest U.S. sanctions on Syria, signed into law by Trump in 2020, dubbed the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act” were implemented in the name of a “way to promote accountability for the (Assad) regime’s atrocities”.

Named after a tranche of leaked photos dubbed the “Caesar photos,” the U.S. government claimed that the photos showed “photographs documenting torture in Assad’s prisons”.

While true, half of the leaked photos did show that, the other half actually showed massacres committed by “rebel” groups in Syria, which were armed and trained by the CIA from 2012-2017.

According to Human Rights Watch, “Researchers reviewed the collection of 28,707 (caesar) photographs showing detainees who died in (Syrian government) detention, as well as some of the 24,568 photographs depicting dead government soldiers and crime scenes (including incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions, and car bombs).”

Bashar Al-Assad was certainly brutal towards political dissidents under his reign, but it would be hard to argue that the human rights situation has gotten any better under the country’s new Al Qaeda-linked dictator, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

A recent investigation by Reuters found that, “nearly 1,500 Syrian Alawites [the minority group that the Assad family belonged to] were killed” with the outlet finding a “chain of command leading from the attackers directly to men who serve alongside Syria’s new leaders in Damascus”.

The outlet found that “At least a dozen factions now under the new government’s command, including foreigners, took part in the March killings”.

Another investigation from the Spectator found that “between 50 and 60 (Alawite) women and girls” have been taken into sex slavery by jihadist militias now integrated with the new government’s forces.

The reality is that the sanctions on Syria never had anything to do with human rights abuses, and were actually designed to force regular Syrians into misery in hopes it would lead to regime change.

In 2019, the Pentagon official Dana Stroul admitted that the sanctions on Syria were designed to “prevent reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria” to keep the country in “rubble” in hopes that it would lead to regime change.

The truth is, as laid out by Dana Stroul, that the CIA’s regime change program in Syria called “Timber Sycamore,” which consisted of spending one billion dollars a year arming and training jihadist rebels fighting the Syrian government faced serious setbacks in 2015 when the Russian military intervened in the war on the government’s side, leading to the U.S. shutting the program in 2017.

In 2022, the UN’s top sanctions expert, Alena Douhan, said that because of the sanctions, “Syria’s population was currently living below the poverty line, with limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating fuel, transportation, and healthcare the country was facing a massive brain-drain due to growing economic hardship.”

She noted that “With more than half of the vital infrastructure either completely destroyed or severely damaged, the imposition of unilateral sanctions on key economic sectors, including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction, and engineering, has quashed national income, and undermines efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction”.

Reporting on the ground from Syria in 2023, journalist Charles Glass compared the effect of the sanctions on Syria to the brutal sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, writing, “Damascus reminded me of Baghdad on my many trips there between the war over Kuwait in 1991 and the American invasion in 2003. In those years, the US, the EU, and the UN were enforcing similar restrictions based on their conviction that economic hardship would destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime or compel a hungry populace to depose him. In Iraq, then, as in Syria now, the regime flourished and people starved.”

Glass even spoke to a friend of his in Syria who said, “We miss the rocket times. If we died, we died. It was a war. Now we don’t know”. Glass noted that “What he didn’t know was how he would feed his children”.

In the 90s, when then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about reports that sanctions on Iraq killed 500,000 children, Albright replied, saying, “We think the price is worth it”.

In the case of Syria, the United States believed the price of keeping Syrian civilians in rubble and starving was “worth it” to effect regime change.

While the mainstream media consistently covered up the reality of sanctions on Syria while Assad was in power, once he was deposed in late 2024, they began to admit that they targeted average civilians.

A report from the Washington Post after the fall of Assad wrote:

American and European Union sanctions aimed at punishing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have weakened the medical system that millions of Syrians rely on — preventing hospitals from maintaining or importing lifesaving diagnostic machines and making it more difficult to provide timely treatment to the wounded and the sick.

MRI and CT scanners have fallen out of service and are hard to replace. Laboratories lack equipment. The domestic pharmaceutical industry that once covered up to 90 percent of the local market has all but collapsed, leaving pharmacy shelves filled with imported, expensive, and sometimes poor-quality drugs.

In the days after Assad fled, Syrians finally learned how well the family had lived. Rooms were topped with crystal chandeliers, and basements were full of luxury cars. The powerful had found their way around the sanctions, it seemed; the public, meanwhile, had been left to suffer.

Now that the United States has achieved its regime change goal, they are lifting the sanctions.

But Syria is just one example of the United States using sanctions supposedly over human rights abuses to starve a civilian population in hopes that it will lead to regime change.

In this article, I will review the United States’ weaponizing sanctions against Russia, Ukraine, South America, and Iran in order to achieve regime change.

Sanctions As A Tool In The New Cold War With Russia.

One of the earliest stages of direct post-Cold War hostilities towards Russia from the United States was the signing of the 2012 Magnitsky Act sanctions on Russia, a bill brought forward by Russia hawks like John McCain.

The sanctions were supposedly over the murder of Sergei Magnitsky, who the American billionaire Bill Browder, previously working in Russia, alleged was a lawyer who was murdered by the Russian government in prison for blowing the whistle on Russian government corruption.

Browder’s story, as exposed in the documentary “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes” and an investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel, was a complete fabrication.

While in Russia, Bill Browder was busted for tax fraud and was taken to court.

Magnitsky was Browder’s accountant, not a lawyer, and he was taken to court over Browder’s tax fraud, where he made no allegation of Russian government corruption, contrary to Browder’s claim that he was a lawyer hired by Browder who testified to Russian government corruption in court.

Magnitsky did die in prison, but he died from a heart attack due to medical neglect, not an intentional beating like Browder claimed.

Despite the fact that this story was an obvious fabrication, Russia hawks in the United States used it to sanction Russia, thus launching a new Cold War.

Sanctions also played a big role in the 2014 Maidan coup, where the United States helped overthrow the Ukrainian government led by Viktor Yanukovych and installed a puppet government loyal to U.S. corporate interests and hawkish towards Russia.

Explaining the motive behind the coup, the Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko wrote, “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”

While Yanukovych was being threatened by far-right militias backed by the United States to leave power, the U.S. Senator Chris Murphy admitted that the threat of U.S. sanctions on Ukraine was the final nail in the coffin that caused him to flee.

Murphy admitted on C-Span that “sanctions and threats of sanctions, forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

The official justification for the U.S. sanctions on Ukraine was another fabrication, the claim that Yanukovych ordered a massacre against protesters in Maidan Square.

It has since been revealed that the sniper massacre was actually committed by the U.S.-backed far-right group, “Right Sector”, which was trying to overthrow Yanukovych.

Regime Change Sanctions In South America.

The United States has also weaponized sanctions extensively in an attempt at regime change in South America, specifically in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the three countries, which neocon John Bolton dubbed the “troika of tyranny” in a recycling of the “axis of evil” trope from the Iraq war.

Infamously, the United States has kept a brutal sanctions blockade on Cuba since the 1960s, despite repeated near-unanimous (save for the U.S. and its proxy states of Israel and Ukraine) UN General Assembly votes to remove the blockade.

Similarly, in Venezuela, the United States imposed harsh economic sanctions as part of its plot to install its puppet, Juan Guaidó, in power.

A study put out by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot found that the sanctions against Venezuela from 2017-2019 caused 40,000 deaths.

Expanding on this study, the former UN official and Human Rights expert Alfred de Zayas found that overall, the sanctions have caused over 100,000 deaths due to “the impossibility of timely access to medicines” as a result of U.S. sanctions.

Backing up the findings of the two studies, the Venezuelan opposition economist Francisco Rodríguez found that every time Venezuela’s oil production began to recover, the United States imposed sanctions, causing it to crash again.

His study concluded that “economic sanctions and other actions of economic statecraft aimed at the Venezuelan government have strongly impacted the country’s economic and humanitarian conditions,” and he noted that “it is hard to deny that they have had a sizable negative impact on living conditions in the country”.

Similarly, the aforementioned Alena Douhan at the United Nations found that “the economic blockade of Venezuela and the freezing of Central Bank assets have exacerbated pre-existing economic and humanitarian situation by preventing the earning of revenues and the use of resources to develop and maintain infrastructure and for social support programs, which has a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population”.

The United States for a long time has put forward a similar regime change strategy in Nicaragua.

As “LA Progressive” writer Rick Sterling noted, “In 1985, an economic embargo was applied by the US against Nicaragua. US products could no longer be exported to Nicaragua, and Nicaraguan products were barred from entering the US. The goal was clearly to hurt the Nicaraguan economy and pressure the Nicaraguan people to turn against the (Sandinista) government.”

The sanctions were only lifted in 1990 when the Sandinista government, led by Daniel Ortega, was voted out and a more U.S.-friendly government came to power.

As Sterling noted, “Neoliberal policies reigned for the next 16 years. While they were good for the wealthy and elites, they were a disaster for the majority of Nicaraguans. Health care and education was again privatized. Land reform measures and the literacy campaign were ended. Illiteracy again became widespread. State-controlled infrastructure, including roads, water, and electricity, was not improved; it was in disrepair and decline”.

When Ortega was voted back into power again in 2006, the United States restarted its regime change campaign.

Through the CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States funneled 4.1 million dollars to opposition groups in the country from 2014-2017, which culminated in a violent coup attempt in 2018, which failed to remove Ortega.

When this coup attempt failed, the United States then moved to impose a series of crushing sanctions on Nicaragua, in hopes this would lead to regime change.

As Rick Sterling noted, “The goal (of the sanctions) seems to be to undermine the economy and encourage ‘brain drain’ where youth with skills and ambition will be tempted to leave the country. After all, despite the positive gains and accomplishments, including free health care and education, most Nicaraguans are still poor.”

Sanctions On Iran As A Tool Of Regime Change.

The 2015 Iran deal put forward by Barack Obama made Iran limit its nuclear enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief from the United States.

Given that Benjamin Netanyahu claims to want to prevent Iran from obtaining a Nuclear Weapon, one would think he would support the deal, but he strongly opposed it, even directly interfering in American politics and giving a speech to Congress that year in an attempt to stop it.

The deal worked, and the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly found after inspections that “Iran committed no violations” of the deal.

Nonetheless, Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to pull out of the deal in 2018.

This is because the deal limited sanctions, which were a main tool in Netanyahu’s real goal in Iran- regime change.

After pulling out of the deal, Trump placed harsh sanctions on Iran.

His Secretary of State at the time, Mike Pompeo, bragged that the sanctions were an attempt to force regime change, saying “Things are much worse for the Iranian people [with the US sanctions], and we are convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.”

An investigation from Human Rights Watch found that “economic sanctions on Iran, despite the humanitarian exemptions, are causing unnecessary suffering to Iranian citizens afflicted with a range of diseases and medical conditions. Some of the worst-affected are Iranians who have rare diseases and/or conditions that require specialized treatment and are unable to acquire previously available medicines or supplies. This includes patients with leukemia, epidermolysis bullosa (EB, a type of disease that causes fragile, blistering skin), epilepsy, and chronic eye injuries from exposure to chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. [When the United States supported Saddam Hussein as he used chemical weapons on Iranians]”

The sanctions on Iran prior to the JCPOA had a similar effect.

As journalist Max Blumenthal uncovered, the deputy coordinator of sanctions policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Richard Nephew, wrote a book titled “The Art of Sanctions,” where he bragged about tanking Iran’s economy through sanctions.

He bragged in the book that as a result of U.S. sanctions, “Iranian unemployment and inflation remained in the double digits” and “Iran’s currency depreciated threefold in a matter of weeks”.

Nephew bragged in the book about tripling the price of Chicken during Iranian holidays and preventing car repairs, with the explicit goal of forcing regime change.

As Blumenthal noted, reporting on his book:

Nephew also patted himself on the back for tripling the price of chicken ‘during important Iranian holiday periods,’ thereby ‘contribut[ing] to more popular frustration in one bank shot than years of financial restrictions.’

Next, he boasted of more sanctions targeting civilians to prevent Iranians from obtaining the assistance they needed to repair their cars. ‘Iran’s manufacturing jobs and export revenue were the targets of this sanction,’ Nephew wrote.

There were some goods that Nephew wanted Iran to import, however. In hopes of fomenting social unrest, he said Washington ‘expanded the ability of US and foreign companies to sell Iranians technology used for personal communications’ so they could ‘learn more about the dire straits of their country’s economy…’

He even bragged in the book about depriving Iranians of medical equipment through sanctions by making it unaffordable, writing, “In Iran, for instance, there were reports throughout 2012 and 2013 that medicine and medical devices were unavailable, not because their trade was prohibited but rather because they cost too much for the average Iranian due to shortages and the depreciation of the Iranian currency. The United States and its partners, through sanctions, directly contributed to the depreciation of the Iranian rial and played some part, even if unintentional, in the creation of this problem”.

Above: Richard Nephew bragging about depriving Iranians of medical equipment through U.S. sanctions, via journalist Max Blumenthal in the Grayzone .

Regime Change Goals Achieved.

The only reason Trump is lifting the sadistic sanctions on Syria is that the regime change goal has been achieved, and the new Syrian government, while massacring minorities at home, is willing to normalize relations with the United States and Israel abroad.

As the Syrian journalist Kevork Almassian put it, “The Trump administration didn’t lift sanctions out of concern for starving Syrian children. It did so to facilitate Julani’s cooperation with Israeli and American demands: normalize ties with Israel, kick out Palestinian factions, and pretend the past decade of chaos was all part of Syria’s inevitable ‘transition.’”

Nonetheless, the barbaric nature of the Syria sanctions means lifting them is the right decision, even if it is only for cynical reasons.

That said, Almassian is correct that this is the only reason they are being lifted.

This is why Trump is not lifting sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, or any of the other long list of enemy countries where sanctions remain - because the regime change goal of the sanctions has not yet happened.

While it was obvious before, the lifting of the Syria sanctions now is the perfect example to show what the effect of sanctions actually is, and what their real purpose is.

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