New research links unilateral economic sanctions to more than half a million deaths each year, with children under five disproportionately affected. Cuba shows how policies intended to punish governments can instead devastate civilian lives.

US unilateral sanctions, the kind being imposed on Cuba today, are deadlier for children than war, according to a major piece of research published in The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal. The report’s findings should call into question the use of sanctions to impose punishments on entire populations for the actions of their governments. A staggering half-million civilians die annually due to US and EU unilateral sanctions that many western countries help enforce.

The report by Professor Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot vividly underscores US president Woodrow Wilson’s comment that sanctions were “something more tremendous than war”.

Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis data-mined major studies covering the years 1971–2021. Its primary source was the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), internationally the most comprehensive aggregator of global datasets on sanctions.

Analysing research covering the years 1971–2021 across 152 countries, the researchers found that unilateral sanctions (such as those imposed on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Yemen and Iraq) were “associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths, similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict”.

Imagine that: every year, for decades, sanctions (primarily US and EU sanctions) have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians – and that........

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