America’s Gangster-Empire Destroying the U.N.

16 December 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Virtually all of the U.S. Government’s economic sanctions violate the U.N.’s Charter — and do it with impunity.

No legal case exists justifying America’s hundreds of economic sanctions laws that have been passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the U.S. President but not authorized by the U.N. — which latter entity is the sole organization that writes and issues international laws. The U.S. International Trade Commission’s August 1998 “Overview and Analysis of Current U.S. Unilateral Economic Sanctions” lists, on its “Table ES-1” 51 such sanctions-laws imposed by the U.S. Government during 1987-1998, which legally have validity only in the United States but which that Government enforces as-if these are international laws, though its doing so constitutes international aggression, which likewise violates international law — from the U.N. (which has no enforcement-power; Harry Truman made it that way). Among the countries that are named there to be controlled or punished are Palestine, Burma (Myanmar), Cuba, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Laos, North Korea, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Serbia, Montenegro, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and others. Russia wasn’t added to the list until 2012, but, after that time, there have been so many anti-Russia sanctions laws passed by the U.S. Government so that when the Global Investigations Review issued on 13 November 2024 a study “Sanctions: the US Perspective”, they ignored the 2012 one, the Magnitsky Act, and started their list against Russia with Exec. Order 13662 issued by Obama on 20 March 2014, just a month after the U.S. coup that had installed a rabidly anti-Russian government in Ukraine, which started the long list of anti-Russia U.S. sanctions laws since.

On December 16th, RT News headlined “Serbia announces talks with US and Russia on sanctions against oil major: The country’s president says the key goal of the upcoming talks will be to ensure energy security for his people”, and reported that,

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has announced plans to hold talks with the US and Russia this week to dispute Washington’s proposed sanctions against his country’s main oil and gas company, Naftne Industrije Srbije (NIS).

NIS is predominantly owned by Russian state energy major Gazprom. In an interview with Serbian broadcaster Informer TV on Saturday, Vucic revealed that the US was set to slap sanctions on NIS due to its Russian ownership. He said Belgrade had received confirmation of these plans from Washington, and that the measures could take effect as of January 1, 2025.

In a video address posted on Instagram on Sunday, Vucic reiterated that such plans exist, and said the matter had already been discussed with BIA, Serbia’s national security service.

“We discussed what we managed to obtain as official information that sanctions will be imposed on NIS by the US and some other countries. We discussed how to act in this situation, how to react, and how to ensure the safety of Serbian citizens,” he stated, adding that the Serbian authorities plan to “initiate negotiations with the Americans, Russians and everyone else” as early as Monday. …

This is typical of the aggressions that the U.S. Government carries out by means of illegal international sanctions instead of by illegal coups or by illegal invasions — all of which this regime does with impunity. This means that the U.N. — the only legitimate source of international war — is publicly exposed as being merely a talking-forum, no government at all that’s behind its ‘laws’ (which are meaningless as regards being applied to the U.S. Government). This is a gangster world-order now.

The 271-page academic book Economic Sanctions in International Law and Practice, published in 2020, opens with a Preface, which says

Part I is focused on generic legal considerations. Chapter 1 (Masahiko Asada) discusses the definition and legal justifications of economic sanctions. As exemplified by the ICJ suit recently brought by Iran against the United States, economic sanctions may possibly “violate” rules of international law applicable to their authors and targets. The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions. … Chapter 4 (Mirko Sossai) discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, the imposition of autonomous sanctions may cause legal problems not only between the author and the target States but also between the author and third States. Controversy has centered on the legality of secondary sanctions applied by the United States on entities in other counties that have transactions with the entities under primary sanctions.

The Introduction to Chapter 4 says:

The application of secondary sanctions, targeting activities of non-US persons with no connection to the US, has proven highly controversial. Insofar as they constitute exercise of jurisdiction on an extraterritorial basis, they raise concerns from the viewpoint of international law, as they may violate, inter alia, the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other States.6

The European refusal to recognize the effects of this type of sanction is not a new phenomenon: the Blocking Regulation was originally approved in 1996-7 to counteract the effects of certain extraterritorial sanctions adopted by the US vis-à-vis Cuba, Libya, and Iran. At that time, similar initiatives were undertaken by Canada and Mexico.8 The purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of the different generations of the US “extraterritorial sanctions,” with a focus on the different positions concerning their legality from an international law viewpoint.

The Chapter proper says:

If autonomous sanctions – either adopted by individual states or by regional organizations – coexist with UN sanctions, then a key question arises as to whether the former should be qualified as enforcement measures on the basis of UN sanctions or, rather, as additional measures, whose legality needs to be appreciated under general international law. In this second scenario, autonomous sanctions may be regarded as acts of retorsion if they constitute “unfriendly” conduct not inconsistent with any international obligation; if unlawful, they can be justified as countermeasures.

Notice that it doesn’t place that word “justified” in skeptical form, as ‘justified’, but instead it presumes that the U.S. Government definitely ISN’T violating international law with these “autonomous [i.e., NOT authorized in international law] sanctions.” (This DESPITE the book’s Preface’s having acknowledged that these are “per se illegal sanctions”.) (FURTHERMORE, if “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” then where does it do that? It doesn’t — it doesn’t even TRY to.)

The Chapter focuses not on the U.S. Government’s sanctions against Russia, but mainly on President Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal or “JCPOA” and his re-institution of anti-Iran sanctions, and it never gets around to, as the book’s Preface promised that it would, “discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, …” The entire 271-page book ignores that question (‘the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions’). (And what’s ‘diffiicult’ about it is that since these are NOT U.N.-authorized sanctions they’re referring to, they’re per se illegal; and, so, this task isn’t “difficult” — it is logically IMPOSSIBLE.)

They don’t want to deal with it, because they serve the U.S. regime. However, when the book uses in its Preface the phrase, referring to Chapter 1, “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” it is already acknowledging that America’s sanctions that DON’T have U.N. authorization ARE, in fact (they call it “per se,” meaning, “in themselves”) ILLEGAL under international law. It’s the unspoken — and unspeakable — reality. Why does the book ignore this? For the same reason why the U.S. regime gets away with doing it: this is a mono-polar world order, NOT under the U.N. as being that “pole” (as FDR had been planning for the U.N. to be) but instead under the U.S. regime as being that “pole” (as Truman made it to be). And, so, of course, it is actually a world in which the enemy is, from the U.S. standpoint, the entire rest of the world, and, from the rest of the world’s standpoint, it is the U.S. Government itself. Every other Government must accommodate itself to the demands that are being made by the U.S. Government. The ones that don’t, become thereby targeted for “regime-change.” This is an international-gangster regime. It insists upon making every other country “a deal it cannot refuse.”

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.