On Thursday, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Mike Crapo and Ranking Member Sherrod Brown announced a bipartisan agreement on legislation to strengthen and expand current US sanctions on Russia.
"These new sanctions will continue to backfire," Pierce, a historian and former military lawyer said on Thursday. "We are creating a world which hates us, outside of where our propaganda organs have a captive audience."
Imposing additional sanctions on Russia could only serve to hurt millions of ordinary people and make them feel hostile towards the United States, Pierce warned.
"Additional sanctions on Russia serve to make Americans feel good because that’s what Americans love to do today: make others suffer," he said.
Pierce said countries around the world were learning to create their own security arrangements with each other and to steer clear of the United States and its allies.
"The rest of the world has come to learn they can’t trust the world’s biggest hypocrite so they are building alliances outside of the Western countries that have been engaged in a war against the rest of the world now for 16 years," Pierce said.
Efforts to boost sanctions on Russia were particularly ironic given the enormous US federal government debt and annual deficit and the problems of domestic economic decline, Pierce pointed out.
"The US recedes into a former Superpower, with its people burdened under the debt it eagerly went into to finance its wars and serving as a form of self-imposed sanctions, except for the beneficiaries of the Military Industrial Complex," he said.
The proposed new legislation will strengthen existing sanctions on Russia, especially on energy projects and on debt financing in key economic sectors.
It will also impose new sanctions on Russian individuals and companies including those alleged to be supplying weapons to the internationally recognized government of Syria and against individuals and groups alleged to be conducting malicious cyber activity, according to media reports.
The proposed legislation will also impose broad new sanctions on key sectors of the Russian economy, including mining, metals, and railways, the reports said.
