Near the peak of U.S. military escalation in the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In the ensuing years the U.S. government has developed, at an accelerating rate, a new method of delivering lethal violence to achieve its aims: broad, unilateral economic sanctions. A study published by the Lancet Global Health medical journal, which I co-authored with economists Francisco Rodríguez and Silvio