A new paper published in The Lancet — one of the world’s most respected health journals — finds that sanctions imposed by the West on developing countries have caused 38 million deaths since 1971.
Honestly, these types of methodology sections go over my head. How do they distinguish between “deaths caused by sanctions” and “deaths caused by sanctioned regimes?”
I skimmed the paper; it doesn’t look like they did.
Further, it doesn’t look like they studied changes in mortality when sanctions were lifted, nor in neighboring unsanctioned regions. They jumped right from correlation to causation. This seems to be “post hoc, the paper”.
“the west”? huge tell there regarding OP. That wording doesn’t appear in the paper.
Confirms something I’ve strongly suspected about you.
25% of all countries were subject to some type of sanctions by either the USA, the EU, or the UN in the 2010–22 period
It’s right in the intro, though it doesn’t specify “The West” specifically, it is an apt summary.
Also this was a .ml crosspost, but I did not find the title to be misrepresentative, so I left it
Confirms something I’ve strongly suspected about you.
If what I think you’re hinting about is what you’re hinting about, you might not have come across my work yet
It’s right in the intro
It very clearly isn’t
this was a .ml crosspost
There it is
Very obviously, the problem is that you posted an article to a science community with an editorialized headline rather than the article’s original headline. Whether you feel it is or is not accurately representative is beside the point.
I see your point, I have adjusted the post to the paper title and moved the original title to the body
I’m not OP, but I read the article. It states
We focus on sanctions imposed by three countries or organisations that can be expected to have substantial effects: the USA, the EU, and the UN. […] We found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, whereas we found no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions.
If sanctions by the UN had no effect, the sanctions they studied that caused the deaths were imposed by the US and the EU. While calling the combined US+EU “the West” may not be entirely accurate (it leaves out Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other “Western” nations), I don’t think their wording is overly misleading either.
Now count how many deaths were prevented.
Also, fun fact, but according to his own public statements Osama Bin Laden was radicalized by the Reagan’s sanctions and their effects on Iraq. (ie, mass starvation)
In other words, Reaganomics contributed to Islamic terrorism.
Or, to make it clickbaity-ish, “caused”.
We should also be critical of the term ‘terrorism’: it is often a buzzword used to shut down criticism of protest groups. In this case it does hold up, though.
Did Reagan administration sanction Iraq while providing them with weapons for their war against Iran?
IfaIk, the sanctions were established later, after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, under George H. W. Bush.
