The imperial mind operates under several simple and brutal assumptions. For example, they believe that if the West makes life unbearable for ordinary people in a targeted nation, they will eventually turn against their own government. Starve them enough and they will beg for regime change.
This is the foundational logic behind every sanctions regime ever devised by Washington. It is also a logic that has failed repeatedly across multiple continents for decades.
The architects of American foreign policy never learn. They keep returning to the same blunt instrument, expecting a different result. The reason is not ignorance but cynicism. If they never work, then sanctions can't really be about changing behaviour. They are about the collective punishment of a people who refuse to surrender their sovereignty.
The Syrian Exception
Western commentators spent years presenting the war in Syria as a spontaneous uprising against a tyrant. This narrative was always fraudulent. The chaos that engulfed Syria was not born from popular discontent. It was nurtured by the deliberate destruction of the Syrian state's capacity to function.
Before the war, Syria was already under severe US and European sanctions. These measures were designed to cripple the economy and degrade the government's ability to provide services. When a state cannot deliver fuel, electricity or bread, people naturally become desperate. That desperation was the point.
Western intelligence agencies then flooded the country with billions of dollars. This cash flowed directly into the hands of armed jihadists, including ISIS. To a starving population, these well-funded fighters presented themselves as a viable alternative. They had food, weapons and money while the state had been reduced to nothing.
The Syrian people knew exactly what was happening. They understood the game being played. But it is difficult to argue ideology with a hungry stomach. The sanctions achieved their true purpose, which was never democratic reform but the dismantling of a sovereign government.
Crucially, this strategy only achieved traction because parts of Syria were already occupied by Western forces and their proxies. There was a physical foothold on the ground. Even then, the predicted mass uprising against Damascus never materialised. Only years after the failed initial uprising were the US and Israel able to impose their ISIS proxy on the Syrian people. Now Syria is ruled by literal ISIS head-choppers and we are supposed to see that as an improvement. Don't be Syria.
The Cuban Resistance
Six decades of blockade have produced a very different result in Cuba. The US embargo has tightened and loosened over the years but it has never been lifted. Recently the blockade has stopped Cuba from importing oil from neighbouring Venezuela. This has inflicted immense suffering. American politicians have openly boasted about starving the Cuban people. They speak of it as a job well done.
Yet the Cuban government remains firmly in place. Support for the revolution has not collapsed. The reason is straightforward. The Cuban people can see the trap laid out before them with perfect clarity.
When every shortage, every power cut and every empty shelf can be traced directly to Washington's policies, blaming your own government becomes an act of wilful stupidity. The blockade is not hidden. It is announced, debated and celebrated openly in the US. There is no ambiguity about where the responsibility lies.
Cuba also lacks a crucial element that the US exploited in Syria. There is no ISIS equivalent on the ground. No armed insurgent proxy capable of offering a notional alternative. Without boots on the ground and guns in the street, the sanctions machine loses its final lever. All that remains is propaganda.
The Cuban Propaganda Corps
This is where the anti-Cuba online apparatus enters the picture. Thousands of social media accounts claim to represent authentic Cuban voices while operating from within the United States. They repeat the same scripted lies with mechanical precision. "Cuba is a dictatorship. The blockade is irrelevant. The people long for American liberation."
The great imperialist pantomime is that communism is to blame for bread lines in Havana but capitalism must never be blamed for poverty in Detroit, Houston or Haiti.
A favourite tactic of these propaganda accounts is to insist that Cuba is free to trade with whomever it wishes. They argue that the blockade is simply a matter between Havana and Washington. This is a deliberate and easily exposed lie. The US sanctions regime operates through a stranglehold on the entire global financial and logistical system. It is not merely that Cuba cannot trade with the US. Any third party nation, any shipping company, any insurer, any bank that facilitates a transaction with Cuba faces crippling secondary sanctions by the US. If a single component of a traded item was manufactured in the US or passed through US territory, the transaction becomes toxic. It is a totalitarian net cast across the entire planet.
These same trolls also insist there are generous exemptions for medical supplies and humanitarian aid. In reality, these so-called exceptions are designed to fail. The licensing process is deliberately dysfunctional. Suppliers and shipping companies are so terrified of upsetting US regulators that they refuse to engage even when exemptions supposedly exist. The blockade is explicitly designed to ensure maximum possible suffering and the exemptions exist only to allow anti-Cuba propagandists to pretend otherwise.
These accounts also repeat scripted lies about the Bay of Pigs being a noble tragedy rather than a failed illegal invasion. They cheerlead openly for US military action against their supposed homeland.
The Cuban people call them gusanos (worms). Whether they are real individuals or bot networks programmed by imperial agencies hardly matters. Their function is identical. They exist to create the illusion of internal Cuban resistance that might justify future US invasions. Their noise is loud but their influence inside Cuba is thankfully negligible.
Don't be Haiti
Haiti is a permanent exhibit of what awaits Caribbean nations that are destroyed by imperial plunder. Haiti is the perennial reminder to nations around the world that they must keep resisting Western imperialism. Once the richest colony in the world, Haiti was punished for the audacity of a successful slave revolt with crushing debt, repeated military interventions and a century of deliberate underdevelopment. Today it is presented as a failed state, yet its failure was manufactured in Washington and Paris.
Once Haiti's ample breast had been sucked dry by the imperial plunder of her natural resources, the capitalists simply abandoned her to chaos after ensuring no independent economic base could ever take root. This is the future the gusanos are so eager to deliver to Cuba. A fully recolonised island stripped of sovereignty and left to rot the moment it ceases to be useful to the disaster capitalists. The Cuban people need only look across the water to understand exactly what their resistance has prevented.
The Persian Mirror
Iran tells a similar story of spectacular imperial failure. For forty-five years, sanctions have been layered upon sanctions. Iranian citizens have endured shortages, inflation and hardship deliberately inflicted from outside. Alongside the economic warfare came a barrage of well-funded propaganda channels run by expatriated "Persians" on the payroll of Western intelligence.
These channels spent decades insisting the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse. They urged US forces to mount a full ground invasion. They spoke of a population desperate to be liberated from their own government.
Then came the actual attacks. The US and Israeli strikes on Iran did not trigger the predicted uprising. Instead, they convinced many ordinary Iranians who had previously been critical of the regime that the real enemy was exactly who the Mullahs always insisted it was. Faced with bombs from Washington and Tel Aviv, internal political disputes became secondary.
The regime's popularity surged to levels not seen since the 1979 revolution. Four and a half decades of crippling sanctions had failed to turn the population into collaborators. When the moment of truth arrived, the Iranian people rallied behind their own state and mounted an epic defence.
The Strategic Bankruptcy
The entire imperial playbook follows a predictable sequence. First, weaken the target nation through economic strangulation. Second, spend billions on propaganda and psychological operations to convince the population that life would improve under occupation. Third, launch decapitation strikes and move towards full military control.
This strategy has never actually worked as intended. Not in Korea, not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Libya, not in Cuba and not in Iran. The pattern is consistent. Sanctions inflict misery but they do not break political will. They create resentment but that resentment is directed towards the West.
The imperialist cannot comprehend this because they view targeted populations as passive objects. They assume that human beings will always choose material comfort over political dignity. History demonstrates the opposite. When people understand they are being deliberately starved into submission, they dig in.
You can't bomb a people into loving you. You can't sanction a nation into gratitude. The decades-long torture of entire populations has produced nothing but suffering, resistance and an ever-growing roster of imperial failures.
The architects of this cruelty will never face justice. But the historical record is clear. Hamas still represent the Palestinian people, Hezbollah represent the Lebanese, the Ayatollah represents the Iranian and the Communist Cuban government still represent the Cubans.
The imperial grand strategy is intellectually bankrupt and practically useless. They are simply torturing people for nothing.