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. US 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 US 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, US 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.
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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
Thank you, Daniel, for your relentless effort to educate people about the cruelty of sanctions/economic wars. I wish there were more like you.
Biden has the same policy towards Venezuela that Trump, Obama and Bush had. The sanctions against Venezuela will not bring about regime change and only hurt the average people there.
So many people say the sanctions don’t hurt anyone and blame everything on the leaders of the countries where the sanctions are places. They say every country should take care of its own people. They either don’t know the US interferes in other countries’ affairs to get regime change or they deny the US does that.