Sanctions Escalate Tension

Hands across the water
Heads across the sky
--Paul and Linda McCartney

People often view economic sanctions as a peaceful deterrent. However, sanctions deny people their natural right to produce and trade with others to better their situation. When voluntary exchange is prohibited, then standard of living falls. When people are starving due to another country's prohibitive policies, they are, as noted below, likely to 'do desperate things.'

Desperate people do desperate things. Like this, and lack of proper crowd control at Soleimani's funeral so 50+ are stampeded to death.

Ukrainian airplane shot down by mistake by Iranian anti-aircraft missile, Pentagon officials believehttps://t.co/kn7JSTuLzT https://t.co/MWAfoc4Img

— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) January 9, 2020

From their standpoint, sanctions are acts of aggression. As with any aggression, people have a natural right to defend themselves sanctioned aggression.

Sanctions do not relieve geopolitical tensions. They escalate them. Sometimes to the point of war.