Abandon the Failed Venezuela Policy

The least that the U.S. could do after all these years of wrecking their country is to stop causing more harm.

Max Boot denounces Washington’s failed Venezuela policy, but then concludes that the failed policy will have to remain in place:

The dismal reality is that we are stuck with a failed policy in Venezuela. But no one, including me, has an idea for a better one. The United States certainly cannot relax sanctions now [bold mine-DL]; doing so would simply reward Maduro’s power grab.

There is no question that U.S. Venezuela policy has been a catastrophic failure, and the people of Venezuela have been paying the price for that failure for years. Broad sanctions have contributed significantly to impoverishment and food insecurity, and they have been a major driver of the flight of millions of people out of the country. Faced with total failure, sane policymakers and analysts would insist on changing course, but nothing about our Venezuela policy has been sane for a long time.

The economic war that the U.S. has waged against Venezuela, especially over the last five years, has been one of the most severe and destructive in the world. It has also been utterly useless when it comes to achieving anything other than devastation. It stands out as one of the most monstrous and indefensible U.S. policies in existence right now, so naturally people like Boot shrug and say that it has to continue so that we don’t “reward” the targeted government.

The Venezuelan people have endured tremendous hardship from their own government and from the foreign governments that have pretended to be “helping” them by further destroying their economy. They should be offered some respite from the latter since it seems unlikely that they will be rid of Maduro for the foreseeable future. The least that the U.S. could do after all these years of wrecking their country is to stop causing more harm.

Boot says that “we are stuck with a failed policy in Venezuela,” but that isn’t because there aren’t other options available. The U.S. is “stuck” with this policy because of the cruelty of ideologues and the cowardice of our political leaders. Trying to strangle Venezuela into greater democracy has been a nightmare for the people of Venezuela, and it is hard to see how it has benefited the United States in any way. There might still be an opening to avoid letting Venezuela sanctions become effectively permanent, but the window is rapidly closing. If the Trump-era sanctions aren’t lifted in the next few years, it is possible that most of us alive today will never see the end of them.

Sanctions relief is the only way forward that makes any sense. If that is off the table because people stupidly believe that it would “reward” Maduro, our Venezuela policy will continue lurching from one disaster to the next. That won’t be because we lack other good options. It will be because our leaders choose to continue harming innocent people because they lack the courage to try something different.

If there is one thing we can say about Venezuela sanctions, it is that Maduro and his cronies have not been all that bothered by them. They might like to be rid of them, but they aren’t the ones suffering the greatest harm from them. Refusing to grant sanctions relief that primarily benefits the vast majority of the population because you don’t want to appear to be “rewarding” Maduro is to make the same cruel blunder that Trump made when he first launched this economic war. Broad sanctions punish the common people for no good reason.

There is no guarantee that lifting sanctions and allowing Venezuela to recover economically will lead to more desirable political outcomes, but more of the same sanctions clearly won’t be doing that, either. One of the key flaws in our policy is assuming that the U.S. has any business trying to influence internal Venezuelan politics in the first place. Maybe if the U.S. hadn’t been trying to throttle Venezuela into submission the political change that Washington wanted might have already happened. Regardless, the U.S. would have been wiser not to inflict intense economic pain on a neighboring country. Maduro might have ended up clinging to power either way, but at least our government wouldn’t have been guilty of starving and killing innocent people by driving up the cost of food and medicine.

It’s true that Venezuela policy is a bipartisan failure. When Trump was trying to choke Venezuela into capitulation, he was cheered on by members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. When Biden kept Trump’s horrid policy in place, he likewise enjoyed broad support. The bipartisan nature of the failure helps to ensure that nothing will change. No one can defend the policy on the merits, but everyone just accepts that a brutal policy of collective punishment will go on without end because no one in Washington has the guts to repudiate a policy that everyone acknowledges to be a failure.

As usual, Boot reaches the wrong conclusion. He writes, “The long record of U.S. futility in Venezuela is not an indictment of either Republican or Democratic administrations.” On the contrary, it is an indictment of administrations of both parties and our entire rotten foreign policy establishment that a policy this dreadful and harmful was implemented and remains in place even now. Yes, U.S. power is clearly limited, but the deranged ambitions of our policymakers seem to know no limits.

It’s also true that the U.S. often doesn’t have solutions to the problems of other countries, but then that is an argument for not mucking around in their internal affairs in the first place. When something backfires as badly as our Venezuela policy, the only sensible thing to do is to end it. Boot and the other interventionists resist this obvious answer because it would mean acknowledging the a major part of their foreign policy worldview has always been wrong.