The Obstacles to Ending Senseless Economic Wars

Venezuela is becoming a cautionary tale of how a policy of collective punishment has been allowed to continue for years for no good reason.

Francisco Rodriguez calls once again for lifting broad U.S. sanctions on Venezuela:

No civilized nation should adopt policies that target vulnerable civilian populations. In fact, no other nation does. The United States is the only country to impose economic sanctions on Venezuela. Other countries have explicitly limited themselves to individual sanctions targeted at regime leaders and have openly rejected and criticized the use of economic sanctions that hurt ordinary Venezuelans.

The Biden administration’s Venezuela policy remains a cruel farce, and it is showing no signs of changing for the better. U.S. treatment of Venezuela over the last several years is one of the clearest examples of how Washington’s addiction to broad sanctions as a default option and our political leaders’ desire to be seen “doing something” about a foreign crisis have combined with disastrous results. Using broad sanctions in a bid to compel Maduro to give up power was never likely to work, as many people observed at the time, and more than three years after the Trump administration’s ill-advised decision to recognize Guaidó as president we can say without any doubt that it has failed. Venezuela is becoming a cautionary tale of how a policy of collective punishment has been allowed to continue for years for no good reason. Because there is no significant domestic political pressure to ease or lift the sanctions, the administration is able to let the policy run on autopilot without having to fear any backlash.

As I noted in one of my columns this week, the Biden administration’s official position is that broad U.S. sanctions do not contribute to ordinary Venezuelans’ suffering at all. As Rodriguez mentions in his article, Assistant Secretary of State Nichols made this preposterous claim when he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When confronted with the destructive effects of the economic war that our government is waging against the people, U.S. officials simply pretend that it has nothing to do with the hardship that the people are enduring. If the policy I supported was responsible for causing thousands of preventable deaths and contributing to deepening the misery of millions more, I might not want to admit it, either, but it is unacceptable for the government to wage a relentless economic war against an entire nation and then wash its hands of the consequences as though the sanctions had nothing to do with it. When the administration denies responsibility for the consequences of its policy, I have to assume that they are doing that because they know they cannot possibly defend the sanctions once they acknowledge the costs.

There is some growing recognition in the U.S. that our broad sanctions policies are destructive and senseless, but there is still a bipartisan consensus in favor of the frequent use of these policies even when their advocates know that they will achieve nothing. American politicians and policymakers routinely propose coercive and punitive measures that inflict tremendous harm on millions of people, and they are able to do so because their support for these measures entails no political risk and may even bring some political rewards.

In sharp contrast to their aversion to voting on authorizations for military action, members of Congress are only too happy to attach their names to policies of economic warfare that may end up killing more people than military action would. Sanctions kill a lot of innocent people, but they are often imposed as frivolously as if Congress were naming a new Post Office branch and when they are imposed they are usually tied to conditions that make them all but impossible to lift later on. No politician is ever held responsible when sanctions that he voted for or imposed cause preventable deaths, but a politician that criticizes sanctions and calls for sanctions relief runs the risk of being attacked for wanting to “reward” the targeted government. If we are going to put a stop to policies of collective punishment, those incentives have to be changed to make it harder to start economic wars than it is to end them.

One way to begin changing those incentives is to change the way that people see and think about broad sanctions. When it becomes clearer to the public that they inflict needless suffering on huge numbers of innocent people while mostly leaving abusive officials and their cronies untouched, sanctions should become a less popular default tool over time. Instead of being the policy of first resort, broad sanctions may gradually come to be seen as the indiscriminate and cruel weapon that they have always been. To that end, critics of economic warfare have to keep shining a light on the destructive nature of these policies so that official denials will be recognized as the falsehoods that they are.