Across borders, cultures and faiths, most ordinary people want the same things: the ability to earn a living, put a roof over their heads, feed their families and watch their children grow up with a future. These are not radical ideas, but they are today routinely sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics.

When power and profit take precedence, governments abandon the everyday realities of those they claim to protect and serve, especially when domination of another country’s resources, markets or political direction is at stake.

In 2026, the pattern is unmistakable. War is not only waged with bombs and soldiers, but through its quieter sibling: sanctions. These encompass a broad range of coercive measures, including trade and investment restrictions, financial controls, banking blacklists, asset freezes, and visa and travel restrictions.

Deployed under the language of democracy, they are routinely weaponised against weaker states that fall outside the western orthodoxy of governance and market capitalism, with devastating consequences for societies that often pose no threat but refuse political subordination. Sanctions are not benevolent tools for guardians of human rights; they are a means of economic warfare, with civilians as collateral damage.

Sanctions are sold as “targeted” – aimed at elites, corrupt officials or illicit industries. In practice, they function as broad blocks on trade and finance that ripple through populations. Empirical research confirms that sanctions in Latin America and the Caribbean significantly reduce economic growth, worsen income inequality and amplify poverty, with financial and trade restrictions among the most damaging.

For more than four decades, governments from Washington to London and Brussels have wielded sanctions as instruments of pressure, presented as principled diplomacy. The lived reality across the Caribbean and Latin America is stark. In Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and beyond, sanctions have become mechanisms of sustained economic strangulation – deepening poverty, stalling development and entrenching dependency.

It is tempting to see US foreign policy as oscillating between hawks and doves – from Reagan to Trump. Yet from Managua in 1985 to Caracas this year, the pattern is one of sanctions as strategic leverage, justified alternately by anticommunism, the “war on drugs”, the “war on terror”, human rights or, more recently, geopolitical competition with Russia and China.

The Reagan administration’s embargo on Nicaragua in 1985 laid this bare. By prohibiting trade and transport, it severed economic lifelines, bringing recession and hardship. The measures were so sweeping that the international court of justice ruled they breached bilateral treaty obligations. In Nicaragua, the legacy of embargo and isolation under successive sanction regimes has contributed to economic stagnation and dependency on remittances – which today make up a quarter of GDP – while political repression has only deepened.

If Nicaragua reveals how sanctions operate as overt confrontation, Cuba shows what permanent economic siege looks like. The US has maintained its embargo since 1962, tightening it further through the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton legislation. Estimates suggest the cumulative cost to Cuba reaches to hundreds of billions of dollars.

The consequences are visceral: Cuba’s prolonged economic contraction – with its chronic blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, and declining tourism revenue – have all been tied to sanctions.

Venezuela, once one of the wealthiest oil exporters in Latin America, illustrates how sanctions compound suffering. Assets worth billions have been frozen in western banks, curtailing the government’s ability to pay for imports, fuel and services. In January 2026, this coercion culminated in the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and his wife, escalating economic siege into extraterritorial force.

The impact is most perverse in Haiti. Crippled by centuries of debt and external interference, Haiti exposes the moral incoherence of sanctions. Framed as driven by humanitarian or security concerns, the imposition of financial restrictions, banking de-risking, diplomatic isolation and travel advisories have further severed Haiti from global trade. Sanctions deepened poverty, decimated state capacity and accelerated displacement. Haiti has been punished not for defying global order, but for being too weak to comply.

The rubbish-strewn streets in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in 1994, when the US intensified sanctions in a bid to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Photograph: T Belizaire/AFP/Getty

Outside the Caribbean, sanctions on Iran confirm a parallel. Sweeping restrictions on oil, banking and trade have slashed export revenues, driven chronic inflation and sharply reduced living standards while failing to deliver the political outcomes promised by their architects. As in Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti, sanctions have functioned less as precision tools against elites than as blunt instruments of economic attrition.

The rationale for sanctions has shifted over time. During the cold war they were tools to counter Soviet influence; today they are wielded to deter states in the global south forming ties with China and Russia. As Washington attempts to reassert hemispheric dominance by resurrecting the colonial Monroe doctrine, countries have responded by diversifying their foreign relations and deepening exchanges with China, Russia and others – a move that sanctions seek to punish.

This has real economic consequences: sanctions can create a chilling effect on investment, dissuading international banks from engaging with small economies for fear of secondary sanctions, thereby driving up costs, and widening financial exclusion. In the Caribbean, where oil and gas, mining and other industries depend on foreign capital and global supply chains, this de-risking has measurable impacts.

Rather than pressure elites into political reform, it is ordinary citizens who pay the heaviest price – through rising poverty and forced migration. Economic sanctions are a key driver of migratory flows from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. When economies are throttled and survival becomes untenable, people vote with their feet. Visa restrictions and freezing of assets are often portrayed as peripheral, but in aggregate they compound exclusion. They limit tourism – a lifeblood for many Caribbean states – and deter diaspora engagement via remittances and investment.

Sanctions are frequently defended as a humane alternative to war – a moral instrument for advancing democracy and human rights. History suggests otherwise. In US interventions, from Grenada to Panama, coercion has repeatedly been cloaked in the language of liberation while leaving long-term instability in its wake. From Reagan’s cold war interventions to Trump’s naval seizures in the Caribbean targeting Venezuelan oil, the machinery of force and economic coercion has barely paused.

The US has been the most interventionist power in modern history. Research shows that from the start of the 19th century, when Haiti became the second country in the Americas to gain independence, until 2022 the US carried out approximately 477 military and political interventions, with 114** **of these after 1989.

From the Caribbean and Latin America to the Middle East and Africa, where dozens of interventions have taken place, regime-change efforts have followed a grimly consistent pattern: short-term coercion, long-term sanctions and destabilisation, and decades of economic and institutional damage. When this cumulative record is considered, the question emerges: who are the real terrorists in the modern international order?

If the aim were genuine human security, expanding humanitarian exemptions, financial access for food and medicine, and supporting multilateral global development would be more effective than prolonged embargos. Instead, sanctions remain tools of geopolitical leverage, wielded disproportionately by powerful states.

For millions across the Caribbean and Latin America, the real war is not against terrorism or doctrines and ideology, but against the slow attrition of economic opportunity and dignity that accompanies sanctions. If western powers truly seek stable, democratic and prosperous neighbours, they must pursue engagement grounded in shared prosperity rather than domination and greed.