Francisco Rodríguez writes in the Financial Times about a major new study on the deadly impact of economic sanctions. Rodríguez, CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot, and economist Silvio Rendón wrote in The Lancet Global Health that sanctions are associated with an estimated 564,000 excess deaths per year, a toll comparable to that of armed conflicts in the same period of time. The study finds strong evidence of a causal link between sanctions and increased mortality, particularly among infants and young children.

Rodríguez writes that the most lethal sanctions are implemented unilaterally, especially by the United States. This may be because US sanctions frequently target a country’s economy directly, operating on the assumption that declining living conditions will lead to political upheaval or regime change.

He notes that the use of sanctions has expanded sharply in recent decades, now affecting a quarter of the global economy. “Indeed, it is difficult to think of any other policy instrument with such severe adverse effects on human life that is used so pervasively,” he warns.

“Woodrow Wilson once described sanctions as ‘more tremendous than war,’ a ‘silent, deadly remedy’ that no nation would be able to withstand. He believed their sheer destructiveness would lead them to be used sparingly. A century later, the opposite has happened: sanctions have become a default weapon of statecraft, wielded routinely. But a policy that kills hundreds of thousands of civilians is neither peaceful nor defensible. It is an economic weapon of mass destruction — used by the very powers that claim to uphold global norms,” Rodríguez writes.