{"id":312535,"date":"2026-01-26T12:02:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T12:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=312535"},"modified":"2026-01-26T07:18:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T07:18:51","slug":"economic-statecraft-exposed-a-key-pillar-of-us-hybrid-warfare-for-all-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/economic-statecraft-exposed-a-key-pillar-of-us-hybrid-warfare-for-all-to-see\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Economic Statecraft\u2019 Exposed: A Key Pillar of US Hybrid Warfare for All to See"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Jan 2026 – <\/em>John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Economic Consequences of the Peace<\/em>\u00a0(1919):<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0United States<\/a>\u00a0mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic\u00a0sanctions<\/a>\u00a0and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On January 19, we published\u00a0\u201cThe US\u2013Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,\u201d<\/em><\/a>\u00a0describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on\u00a0Venezuela<\/a>\u00a0and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.<\/p>\n

On January 20, just one day after our article, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official US policy.<\/p>\n

In an\u00a0interview at Davos<\/a>, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how US Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran\u2019s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran\u2019s population into the streets. This is the \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign to deny Iran access to international finance,\u00a0trade<\/a>, and payment systems. Bessent explained:<\/p>\n

” President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it\u2019s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.”<\/p>\n

This is the explicit causal chain whereby US sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail. This monetary instability led to import shortages and economic suffering, causing the unrest. Bessent concluded by characterizing the US\u2019 actions as \u201ceconomic statecraft,\u201d and Iran\u2019s economic collapse as a \u201cpositive\u201d development:<\/p>\n

“So, this is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.”<\/p>\n

What Secretary Bessent describes is of course not \u201ceconomic statecraft\u201d in a traditional sense. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government. This is proudly hailed as \u201ceconomic statecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n

The human suffering caused by outright war and crushing economic sanctions is not so different as one might think. Economic collapse produces shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, while also destroying savings, pensions, wages, and public services. Deliberate economic collapse drives people into\u00a0poverty<\/a>, malnutrition, and premature death, just as outright war does.<\/p>\n

This pattern of suffering as the result of US sanctions is well documented. A\u00a0landmark study<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Lancet<\/em>\u00a0by Francisco Rodr\u00edguez and colleagues shows that sanctions are significantly associated with sharp increases in mortality, with the strongest effects found for unilateral, economic US sanctions, and an overall death toll comparable to that of armed conflict.<\/p>\n

Economic warfare of this kind violates the foundational principles of\u00a0international law<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0UN Charter<\/a>. Unilateral sanctions imposed outside the authority of the UN Security Council, especially when designed to cause civilian hardship, are illegal. Hybrid warfare does not evade international law by avoiding bombing (though the US and Israel have also illegally bombed Iran, of course.) The illegality of US \u201ceconomic statecraft\u201d applies not only to Iran and Venezuela, but to dozens more countries being harmed by US sanctions.<\/p>\n

Europe has perhaps begun to learn that being complicit in America\u2019s economic crimes is no salvation, since Trump\u2019s government is now turning on Europe in the same way, albeit with\u00a0tariffs<\/a>\u00a0rather than sanctions. Trump has threatened Europe with tariffs for not turning over\u00a0Greenland<\/a>\u00a0to the US, though he\u00a0rescinded<\/a>\u00a0that threat at least temporarily. When Trump \u201cinvited\u201d\u00a0France<\/a>\u00a0to join Trump\u2019s Board of Peace, he threatened to impose a 200%\u00a0tariff<\/a>\u00a0on French wine if France declined the invitation. And on and on.<\/p>\n

The United States can wage this kind of comprehensive economic warfare because the dollar is the key currency in the global financial system. If third countries don\u2019t comply with US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, the US threatens to impose sanctions on the banks of those third countries, specifically to cut them out of dollar-based settlements (known as the SWIFT system). In this way, the US enforces its sanctions on countries that otherwise would be happy to continue trading with the countries that the US is trying to drive to economic collapse.<\/p>\n

While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold. The BRICS nations, and many others, are expanding the conduct of international trade in their own currencies, thereby building alternatives to the use of the US dollar and thus avoiding these sanctions. The US ability to impose its financial and trade sanctions on other countries will decline soon, probably precipitously in the coming years.<\/p>\n

It is high time that the world\u2019s nations face up to America\u2019s rogue economic behavior. The US has been waging economic warfare with increasing intensity, all the while calling it \u201ceconomic statecraft.\u201d This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America\u2019s own goals, much less global objectives. Europe has been looking the other way until now. Perhaps now that Europe too is under threat, it will wake up and join the rest of the world to put a stop to America\u2019s brazen and illegal behavior.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General [Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. His books include <\/em>The End of Poverty<\/a>, Common Wealth<\/a>, The Age of Sustainable Development<\/a>, Building the New American Economy<\/a>, and most recently,<\/em> A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism<\/a>. Sachs was also an advisor to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Jan 2026 – It\u2019s certainly not diplomacy and it\u2019s not coercion. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":263598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[923,70,481],"class_list":["post-312535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-sanctions","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312536,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312535\/revisions\/312536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}