The new arsenal of punitive sanctions

WMD should be legally redefined to include sanctions and tariffs. Their fallout is too big to ignore

Have you ever considered economic sanctions or tariffs to be weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? How about drones and social media? Wikipedia describes a WMD as a biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear, or any other weapon that can kill or significantly harm many people or cause great damage to artificial structures, natural structures, or the biosphere. However, this definition is by no means officially accepted since most governments limit their definition of WMD to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons (CBRN) capable of a high order of destruction or causing mass casualties. By including the word 'biosphere', the Wikipedia definition takes into account the damage caused to the environment when CBRN weapons are used.

In any case, neither of the two definitions specifies what constitutes significant harm to people or structures and how this is to be measured. In the 9/11 terrorist attacks, commercial aircraft carrying full tanks of jet fuel were used. Accepted definitions of WMD certainly do not include commercial aircraft as weapons, do they?

Calls for including certain classes of cyberweapons (e.g., drones and malware) have been rejected because they cannot directly injure or kill human beings as efficiently as guns or bombs, and they do not meet the legal and historical definitions of WMD. History cannot be altered, but surely, the laws surrounding WMD can be changed.

The origin of the term 'weapon of mass destruction' can be traced back to 1937 when William Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas address, spoke of the appalling slaughter and suffering inflicted on Spain and China and remarked, "Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?" He was acutely aware of the 1937 bombings of cities by the fascists in Spain and by the Japanese in China as well as the chemical attacks on Abyssinia by Italy in 1936.

An updated legal definition of WMD, one that takes into account different contexts in which what constitutes a weapon, the nature of the destruction (kinetic, economic, psychological etc.), and the scale of destruction, is called for. This difficult task should be entrusted to the United Nations and not left to individual governments, no matter how powerful, or select organisations such as NATO, which hardly represent much of the world.

I would suggest that the current WMD interpretation of the word 'weapon' go beyond its conventional CBRN meaning and be made flexible to include sanctions, tariffs, drones, and social media, all of which have proven themselves capable of producing a great deal of harm, be it physical, economic, or psychological, across the globe. When applied to social media, WMD stands for weapon of mass destruction as well as weapon of mass delusion.

Sanctions serve as a foreign policy tool used by the US, EU, and others to influence the behaviour of other countries. The US has imposed two-thirds of the world's sanctions since the 1990s. According to The Washington Post, in 2024, it imposed "three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body,” and 60% of low-income countries (e.g., Somalia, Darfur, and Libya) were under some form of US financial sanction. Comprehensive sanctions are currently in place for all of Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Syria. Sanctions prohibit US citizens from engaging in financial transactions with individuals, entities, or governments on the sanctions list, except by licence from the US Government, and require the US to oppose loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions. The sanctions on Cuba and Iran date back to 1962 and 1979, respectively. If a country is sanctioned by the US, a third country wishing to conduct business with the sanctioned country is itself subject to US sanctions.

Selective and destructive

Targeted sanctions are directed at individuals (e.g., Putin) or entities (International Criminal Court) that engage in activities contrary to US foreign policy or national security goals. The ICC has been sanctioned because it dared to brand the genocidal leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a war criminal and issued a global warrant for his arrest. There are currently 37 active sanctions programmes – not one of them is directed at Israel despite its genocidal activities in Palestine.

So why should sanctions be made part of any redefinition of WMD? Consider this. US sanctions on Venezuela have resulted in over 100,000 deaths since the country was prevented from access to medicine and medical devices. In May 1996, Madeleine Albright, the US Ambassador to the UN, when asked to comment on the fact that over 500,000 Iraqi children died from the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990, and whether the price was worth it, had this to say, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." She was rewarded for her callousness by being appointed US Secretary of State.

In a 2020 interview, the same Albright remarked, "We learned in many ways that comprehensive sanctions often hurt the people of the country and don't really accomplish what is wanted in order to change the behaviour of the country being sanctioned. So we began to look at something called 'smart sanctions' or 'targeted sanctions.'" This use of the word 'smart' came long before AI entered the common man's vocabulary. Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, Iraq, resigned in October 1998 after a 34-year career with the UN to have the freedom to criticise the sanctions regime, saying he didn’t want to administer a programme "that satisfies the definition of genocide."

The 1941 siege of Leningrad has now been replaced by the 2025 sanctions on Saint Petersburg. Not much has changed in the intervening 84 years, has it?

(The writer is a retired professor; he has written extensively and presented lectures on the societal and geo-political implications of technology)