ECONOMIC WARFARE

Governments today deploy trade sanctions, blockades and financal restrictions as their political weapons of choice to curb aggression and to enforce international morality. But is economic warfare an effective foreign policy instrument? In this investigative history, R. Thomas Naylor demonstrates repeatedly that punitive measures almost always fail to achieve their stated goals and often cause unintentional harm, especially to the innocent populations of the embargoed countries. In reality, he argues, economic warfare breeds corruption, creates thriving black market economies, criminalizes legitimate businesses, and helps turn limited conflicts into global ones. Naylor illustrates the futility of forcing political change through economic pressure by describing in intricate detail the poor record of lateral and multilateral sanctions aimed at the former Soviet Union, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Panama and other "pariah" governments. In virtually every case, he shows how embargoes, trade restrictions and asset freezes are successfully circumvented through an interdependent sanctions-busting network of shell companies, offshore banks, professional money laundering operations, and "flags of convenience" shipping centres. In meticulously documented stories wrapped in deception and denial, secrecy and subterfuge, Naylor reveals that economic warfare inevitably promotes economic crime or gangster capitalism. As corrupt profiteers who are in league with the political elite of targeted states gain power and influence, they reinforce the regime's commitment to the very policies that led to the imposition of sanctions. And, as in the case of Iraq, where 200,000 children died of a malnutrition-related disease while Saddam Hussein and his ruling class prospered, the human cost invariably falls on the poorest elements of the rogue state's society. Naylor's eye-opening account of the dire consequences of economic warfare takes the reader on a journey through an underworld of corrupt leaders, privateers, gun-runners, drug traffickers, gangsters and spies.

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