The Insanity of the Venezuela Hawks

The U.S. hasn’t really departed from the “maximum pressure” campaign, and the real insanity is thinking that the solution to the failure of that campaign is to intensify it.

Marco Rubio demands that the U.S. fully embraces the policy that already failed and caused massive suffering:

To regain foreign policy coherence on Venezuela, we must return to the maximum pressure campaign of the Trump administration.

It is a sign of how deranged the Venezuela hawks are that Biden’s extremely modest easing of sanctions causes them to charge him with appeasement. The devastating sectoral sanctions that have been wrecking Venezuela’s economy for the last four years are still in place. There has been almost no change from Trump-era Venezuela policy, but Rubio disingenuously blames the destructive consequences of the policy he championed on the slight, insignificant changes that have been made to it under Biden. The U.S. hasn’t really departed from the “maximum pressure” campaign, and the real insanity is thinking that the solution to the failure of that campaign is to intensify it.

Rubio complains that Maduro has “tightened” his grip on power, but makes it seem as if this is the result of reducing pressure rather than the effect of the pressure campaign itself. He calls attention to the massive exodus of millions of people from Venezuela, but then pretends that the collective punishment that he supports inflicting on these people is not one of the major causes for their flight. Like every sanctions hawk before him, Rubio feigns concern for the population that his preferred policy has been impoverishing and brutalizing for years.

The senator has a big stake in this policy, as he was one of the leading supporters of Trump’s economic war on Venezuela and he has been one of its most fanatical defenders ever since. His op-ed proves that he can’t be trusted to give an honest assessment of Venezuela policy under either Trump or Biden.

In fact, he can’t even be trusted to get basic facts right. For instance, he claims that Maduro and his allies “stole power from Juan Guaidó in 2019,” which would have been quite a trick since they were already in power and he was a little-known legislator at the time. The more accurate way to describe what happened was that the U.S. and its allies pretended that Guaidó was the president when he had no power and then persisted in this fantasy until the opposition gave up on it. Guaidó never had any power for anyone else to steal. The hawks’ hare-br.ained idea of trying to force regime change failed with ruinous consequences for the people of Venezuela, who continue to suffer under the sanctions that Rubio celebrates.

Rubio says that Maduro and his allies “drove 90% of the Venezuelan populace to near-starvation,” but an honest reckoning would show that U.S. sanctions directly contributed to increased food insecurity and exacerbated the humanitarian crisis that existed. The current leadership shares in the responsibility for bad conditions in the country, but it was sanctions that made those conditions even worse. Rubio is one of the chief architects of the policy that has been starving ordinary Venezuelans, and he has the gall to use the suffering of the people that he has helped to torment to call for even more cruelty.

It will surprise no one that Rubio’s answer is even more collective punishment of Venezuelans. He demands that the U.S. designate “the Venezuelan regime and its paramilitary “colectivos” as foreign terrorist organizations,” and he wants “doubling down on sanctions and blocking the regime from assuming Venezuela’s seats at the OAS, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” The designations aren’t merited, and they would add to the hardships of the population by further strangling the Venezuelan economy. Doubling down on a policy that has already failed in every respect is insane.

If there were any accountability in our foreign policy, Rubio’s views on Venezuela policy would discredit him forever. There are few politicians more responsible for this cruel and monstrous policy than Rubio is, and he ought to be made to answer for the misery he has helped to cause. Unfortunately, there is no accountability in our system, and Rubio is allowed to hold forth as if he were a credible and serious policymaker instead of being recognized as the ideological ghoul that he is.