The death of 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously said in 1996. She was talking about the possible costs of a punishing sanctions regime against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Two dozen years later, the Trump administration’s fixation on so-called maximum-pressure policies against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela — particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — follows in Albright’s bloody footsteps.
