It's Time to Bring Our Farcical, Monstrous Venezuela Policy to an End

Economic warfare against innocent people is a senseless, destructive policy that the U.S. must repudiate.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the possible easing of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, but it is not certain that this will really happen:

U.S. officials said details are still under discussion and cautioned that the deal could fall through, because it is contingent on Mr. Maduro’s top aides resuming talks with the opposition in good faith.

“There are no plans to change our sanctions policy without constructive steps from the Maduro regime,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said.

It remains to be seen if there will be any real sanctions relief for Venezuela in the near term, but fortunately there is growing recognition in Washington that the “maximum pressure” regime change policy that the U.S. has been pursuing for almost four years has failed and needs to be scrapped. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said this earlier today:

Just in case you haven’t noticed, our policy of sanctioning and isolating Maduro hasn’t worked. At some point when your policy isn’t getting results, it’s malpractice to not try something else.

Murphy is right that the policy has failed, and he correctly puts the burden of proof on the defenders of the current policy to justify continuing with that failure. We need to acknowledge that the reason that the policy failed wasn’t just that the coercive measures employed were ill-suited to the task. The policy failed because it was seeking the extremely ambitious goal of forcing the de facto government to give up power, and it pursued this goal with virtually no understanding of the political landscape of the country whose government it was trying to overthrow. The more ambitious the policy goal is, the less likely it is that sanctions can reach it.

The bigger lesson to draw from the failure of this policy is that imposing broad sanctions on a country that is already suffering a severe economic and humanitarian crisis simply compounds the misery of the people and should never be attempted again. Our Venezuela policy has been much worse than a failure to force Maduro out. It has been actively contributing to the worsening of conditions for tens of millions of people for years, and it continues to do so every day that these sanctions are in place. Economic warfare against innocent people is a senseless, destructive policy that the U.S. must repudiate, and Venezuela is one of the first places where it should put a stop to it.