Daily Inspiration Quote by Bianca Jagger

It’s a neat reversal of the usual Washington storyline: sanctions as a moral lever that topples bad actors. Bianca Jagger flips the script and, in doing so, exposes the embarrassment baked into a lot of Cold War policy. The line isn’t just arguing that the U.S. embargo “failed.” It’s claiming it succeeded at the opposite of its stated aim, propping up the Sandinistas by giving them exactly what embattled movements crave: a villain, a siege narrative, and an excuse for scarcity.

The intent is pointedly pragmatic. Jagger isn’t romanticizing the Sandinistas; she’s indicting the U.S. for turning Nicaragua into a laboratory of coercion where the predictable human response to external pressure got ignored. The subtext is that power doesn’t only come from popularity or competence; it also comes from conflict. An embargo can consolidate authority by rallying nationalism, marginalizing internal dissent (“you’re helping the enemy”), and shifting blame for economic pain from domestic governance to foreign punishment.

Context matters: 1980s Nicaragua sat at the center of Reagan-era anti-communist fervor, with the Contra war, covert operations, and a broader hemispheric message about U.S. dominance. Jagger, as a celebrity-activist with international visibility, leverages her platform less to sound scholarly than to puncture the moral clarity Americans were sold. The phrase “actually maintained them in power” is the sting. It suggests a policy so self-defeating that it becomes indistinguishable from complicity, and it forces readers to confront an uncomfortable possibility: sometimes “tough” foreign policy is just a machine that manufactures the very outcomes it claims to prevent.