There’s much to despise about economic sanctions. Aside from the fundamental immorality of making innocent individuals suffer for the sins of governments, sanctions almost universally fail to achieve the goals of those who inflict them.

Nonetheless, sanctions have become the knee-jerk U.S. government response to any real or claimed foreign misdeed. According to the U.S. Treasury department, the number of U.S.-imposed sanctions soared 933% between 2000 and 2021.

Where today’s Ukraine invasion-prompted sanctions are concerned, civilians in Russia and all around the world are already feeling the effects, via increasingly expensive and scarce food, fuel and other goods.

In the end, however, the greatest damage may be inflicted on the United States government and its citizens: By incentivizing Russia and other countries to stop using U.S. dollars for trade, the sanctions regime threatens to topple the dollar from its position of global preeminence. That could spell disaster for the American economy and hasten the end of the U.S. empire.

You can read the rest of this article at Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey