The Dulles Blueprint · Investigation · 1960–2025
Death by sanctions.
We call a government evil when it kills actively and on purpose. But a blockade that starves a country until its government falls produces the same graves — slowly, statistically, deniably. A 2025 Lancet study puts the toll of Western sanctions since 1970 in the tens of millions.
PROBABLY TRUE
§2 · Thesis
A bullet and a blockade can produce the same grave — only one gets called murder. Structural violence: killing by deprivation is still killing, but it's slow, statistical, and deniable, so it escapes the reckoning. The moral argument doesn't need the exact number; it needs two facts not in dispute.
That sanctions kill in large numbers, and that in the landmark cases (Cuba, Chile) the killing was the intended mechanism — written down in US memos.
§5 · Graded Claim
A 2025 Lancet Global Health study estimates US/EU sanctions are 'associated with' ~38 million deaths since 1970.
PROBABLY TRUE
Led by economist Francisco Rodríguez (University of Denver), published in The Lancet Global Health (2025): the first global estimate of sanctions mortality, 1970–2021. Central estimate — unilateral US/EU sanctions associated with ~38 million deaths, >half children and elderly; some 1990s years >1M; 2021 >800k. Graded PROBABLY TRUE (not FACT) on purpose: peer-reviewed and careful, but a modeled excess-mortality estimate ('associated with,' with a range, counterfactual-dependent). A serious estimate, presented as one.
§5 · Graded Claim
In the landmark cases, the hunger was the plan — written down.
FACT
Cuba: the Lester Mallory State Dept memo (April 6, 1960) argued that because Castro was popular, 'every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.' Chile: after Allende's 1970 election, Nixon ordered his team to 'make the economy scream' — Kornbluh's 'invisible blockade' preceding the US-backed 1973 coup and Pinochet. Deprivation wasn't a by-product; it was the stated objective. US government words, not modeling.
§5 · Graded Claim
The case-by-case record backs the direction: Venezuela ~40,000, Iraq's documented toll.
FACT
Venezuela: Weisbrot & Sachs (CEPR, 2019) estimated ~40,000 excess deaths 2017–2018 as sanctions cut access to food, medicine, and oil-sector inputs. Iraq (1990s): comprehensive sanctions produced documented malnutrition and shortages of clean water, medicine, and electricity (precise death counts contested; we adopt none). These are the data points the new global study aggregates — the direction isn't in dispute; the magnitude is what the research argues about.
§5 · Graded Claim
The case for sanctions — and what it doesn't answer.
SOME SMOKE
Defense: a coercive tool short of war; 'smart' sanctions target elites; humanitarian exemptions exist; suffering is the regime's fault. Methodology fight: excess-death models are counterfactual-dependent, 'associated with' ≠ 'caused,' and confounders (Venezuela's pre-2019 collapse, oil crash, mismanagement) are real — skeptics say 38M overstates it. What it doesn't answer: exemptions fail via bank/shipper overcompliance; confounders temper the number, not the direction — and not the intent, which is documented in US memos.
§7 · Why it matters now
The quiet part is a memo, not a conspiracy.
Tim's question — what about policies with the same effect as intentional killing? — has a sharper answer than expected: in the founding cases, the effect WAS the intent. The US didn't stumble into starving Cuba or strangling Chile; it wrote down that this was the goal. The 2025 study only tries to count the bodies the memos always implied. Sanctions are the Dulles Blueprint's rung between the bribe and the coup — cheaper than invasion, quieter than bombing, lethal at a scale that would be a scandal by any other method. A democracy should have to account for the deaths its policies cause — especially the ones it intended.
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