‘Maximum Pressure’ Fails in Venezuela, Too

Jackson Diehl reminds us that crippling U.S. sanctions are having their expected effect in worsening Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crises:

Meanwhile, the claim that the United States is responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe, now confined to the Maduro regime and the fringe left, will have gravitated to the mainstream. That’s because even though the ban on Venezuelan oil purchases that Trump rashly ordered in January failed to accomplish the goal of forcing regime change, it has had a devastating economic effect.

Venezuela had already experienced a historic economic collapse by the end of last year, with severe shortages of food, medicine, power and water. Oil exports, virtually the only source of the dollars Venezuela needs to import 95 percent of its food, had fallen by half. But the plunge since the U.S. oil ban went into effect has been stunning. In the first half of this month, according to Russ Dallen of Miami-based Caracas Capital, loadings of ships for oil exports had dropped below 600,000 barrels a day — compared to average exports in 2018 of 1.2 million barrels a day.

Venezuela was already suffering from severe economic and humanitarian crises before the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, and those sanctions were guaranteed to inflict much more pain and suffering on the civilian population as essential humanitarian goods became increasingly scarce. Trump’s imposition of these sanctions earlier this year was a disastrous mistake, as many of us said at the time, and the Venezuelan people are the ones that are paying the price. The U.S. should immediately lift these sanctions so that our government is at least not contributing to the disaster, but like all other sanctions the ones on Venezuela are much easier to impose than they are to take back.

Diehl continues:

Trump administration officials profess to be untroubled by the prospect of being blamed for creating Latin America’s first modern famine.

Judging from the administration’s indifference to helping create the world’s worst famine in Yemen, they probably are untroubled by this. Inflicting pain on tens of millions of people in pursuit of reckless and unrealistic goals has become a recurring theme in Trump administration foreign policy. Because most of the misery remains invisible here in the U.S., the administration assumes that they can get away with making things much worse for entire nations. “Maximum pressure” has failed in Venezuela, and that failure is coming at a terrible cost to the civilian population.