Written by Caitlin Johnstone

“As billions hunker down to halt the spread of the virus, President Donald Trump has only ramped up sanctions and other pressure against frequent targets such as Iran and Venezuela,” reads a new article by AFP.

“Iranians say humanitarian imports have effectively been blocked as few foreign banks are willing to deal with Iran due to US sanctions, leading to shortages of vital supplies such as masks,” AFP adds. “Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, which studies peaceful solutions to global problems, said the Trump administration likely believes that any aid would only throw a lifeline to a regime it sees on the brink of falling.”

“It’s almost like a bad joke. What’s worse than a pandemic appearing in a country where there is no government? That is really the last thing that you want,” the Quincy Institute’s Max Abrahms told AFP. “We need to rethink our understanding of US national security. It seems particularly absurd for the United States to invest so heavily in remaking foreign countries at a time when our own nurses in New York City are literally wearing trash bags.”

Indeed, in some very important ways the US government has clearly seen the coronavirus outbreak not as a dangerous humanitarian crisis, but as a strategic advantage to be weaponized against governments which refuse to bow to its empire-building agendas.

Weaponizing a virus is the thing that biological warfare is. The US government might not have deliberately released the virus (also not a settled question), but they are using the virus as a weapon aimed at toppling vulnerable targeted governments.

The use of biological warfare, or germ warfare, is prohibited by international law, though in typical fashion the US is skirting the parameters of those laws in this case by weaponizing a virus that was already spreading. Which is not to say that the US is above deliberately infecting a population using biological weaponry as well; they used them extensively during the Korean War.

Thousands of Iranians have already died of this virus due to the difficulties US sanctions create in obtaining medicine, equipment and resources, and it’s possible that orders of magnitude more dead may follow. This is not accidental, this is deliberate. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone on record to say that the objective is to make Iranian civilians so miserable and desperate that they overthrow their own government, and it is clear that this virus is being employed toward this purpose.

This same imperial war machine is actively attempting to inflict this same fate upon Venezuela, where tens of thousands have already died of malnutrition and inability to access medicine because of the Trump administration’s brutal economic warfare. The DC-based International Monetary Fund has denied Venezuela a loan it says it needs to fight the pandemic citing dispute over the legitimacy of the Maduro government, a dispute the US itself created out of thin air and narrative spin. On top of all this the Trump administration is now offering a $15 million bribe to anyone who will help them arrest Maduro on ridiculous drug trafficking and terrorism charges.

Who would benefit from a disease-ravaged nation not having a government? Certainly not the Venezuelan people.

We’re seeing the same germ warfare inflicted upon targeted individuals as well as governments, with Julian Assange denied bail as the virus spreads through UK prison systems despite doctors’ warnings of his vulnerability to death from an infection due to chronic lung disease.

We may be absolutely certain that at least a few people in at least a few government agencies have voiced the observation that Covid-19 may finally solve their Assange problem once and for all. And of course those observations would be a perfectly accurate appraisal of the situation. Psychopathic, but accurate.

For all the outraged shrieking the US government does about disobedient nations like Syria allegedly using chemical weapons, it has certainly shown no hesitation in employing biological warfare today. Those dead Iranians are just as dead as the Syrian civilians who according to the US government’s plot hole-riddled claims were killed by chemical weapons dropped by the Assad government, and they are dying on a much larger scale. They are dying of a virus that is being used as a weapon to topple a government which dared to disobey the dictates of Washington and its covert controllers, which means they are dying of germ warfare.

Everything the US empire accuses unabsorbed governments of doing, the US empire does worse. That’s the true meaning of American exceptionalism.

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