A total blockade of war-torn Syria is the desired effect of sweeping new sanctions imposed this week by the United States. The purpose is to prevent the Arab nation from achieving reconstruction and international normalization after suffering nearly a decade of war.
Washington's objective is to make regime change in Damascus inevitable by making social conditions in the country as unbearable for the population as it possibly can.
With cruel Orwellian irony, the American sanctions implemented this week bear the words "Syria Civilian Protection Act".
The U.S. legislation was passed by both parties in the Congress last year and signed off by President Donald Trump. Syria was already under American sanctions, but the latest round of restrictions aim to choke off all international investment and trade with the country.
It should be remarked too that the European Union renewed its own sanctions on Syria last month. Such partnering with the U.S. is a reprehensible sign of the EU's political and moral bankruptcy.
Kelly Craft, America's ambassador to the UN, informed the Security Council that the sanctions would prevent the Syrian government from "securing military victory".
The move was denounced by Russia, China and Iran as "inhumane". Syria's envoy to the UN, Bashar al-Ja'afari, said the American plan for embargo showed a "new face of terrorism".
Washington's admission that the restrictions are aimed at preventing military victory are telling. It shows that the U.S. is livid from the failure of its regime-change campaign over the past decade in which Washington and other NATO powers covertly sponsored foreign aggression against Syria. That nefarious plot was defeated by the courage of the Syrian people and their armed forces, along with the crucial support of Russia, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Having failed on the battle field, Washington is now pursuing its criminal regime-change war objective through economic aggression.
All of this, it should be said, is in flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter. The U.S. conduct is tantamount to the Nuremberg-standard designating crimes of state-sponsored terrorism.
The sanctions unveiled this week are but the opening of a new front for assault on Syria.
"We anticipate many more sanctions," stated U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who went on to say for risible propaganda effect, "and we will not stop until Assad and his regime stop their needless, brutal war against the Syrian people and the Syrian government agrees to a political solution to the conflict."
The "political solution" that Pompeo is referring to is the one dictated by Washington which means Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepping down, to be replaced by an American puppet regime.
It is notable that the new sanctions also target the Assad family, including the president's wife, Asma, as well as the wider national economy. Pompeo vilified Asma al-Assad as a "notorious war profiteer". Such personal attack on a foreign leader and his family shows a new low in Washington's gutter tactics. It is no doubt a sign of the frustration and vindictiveness seething in the waning U.S. imperium that it is resorting to such sordid gouging.
The latest U.S. sanctions are a despicable act of barbarity by Washington. If there was any prevailing justice, Washington should be paying massive reparations to Syria for orchestrating a war of aggression. Not only the U.S., but all those other accomplices in the criminality: Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.
However, the renewed aggression will backfire. America's international image is descending rapidly into a cesspool of its own making. At a time of global pandemic from the coronavirus, Washington is seen as an unrelenting degenerate ramping up sanctions against several nations, including Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China, as well as Cuba and North Korea.
Whatever moral and political authority the U.S. may have had in the past, it is now squandering at a startling pace. The corrosive effect from this degeneracy on U.S. power and its financial privileges from the dollar as international reserve currency is very real and underway.
The attempts to block Syria's reconstruction will only galvanize other nations to redouble their efforts to solidify an alternative to the U.S.-dominated financial system. Iran has vowed to ignore American sanctions on Syria. So too will Russia, China, Venezuela and others.
Washington failed to subjugate the Syrian nation despite inflicting unspeakable terrorism on it by enlisting jihadi gangs from all over the world to do its dirty work. The war's death toll stands at near 400,000 with millions of more lives ruined through displacement. Reconstruction costs may run into trillions of dollars. But the new phase of American economic aggression will also fail. Because of international solidarity with Syria.
Washington's tyranny is inadvertently creating a portal to a new global geopolitical realignment, one which will see the final demise of U.S. imperial power.