Venezuela 2025

[Soloist]

I hypothesize one shift of Trump foreign policy is the embrace of violence as a positive tool to create more good in the world. It's now more of a first response than a last resort.

I don’t know that is accurate though. He certainly is talking about it more.
From my examination of history, it seems like America chooses violence pretty fast in almost every situation.

[JohnH]

I hypothesize one shift of Trump foreign policy is the embrace of violence as a positive tool to create more good in the world. It's now more of a first response than a last resort.

Er… when was violence (or the threat of it) not an integral part of a superpower empire’s policy strategy?

[Bootstrap]

For instance - I would not have realized, from news reports, that the Biden administration was who tightened the sanctions screws on Venezuela last year. I'm not saying it wasn't reported - just that for whatever reason I didn't see it.

It was the Trump Administration that initially pushed Venezuela out of the American market and into the arms of Russia and China, starting in 2017 with sanctions that restricted Venezuela's ability to issue new debt or restructure existing debt. The United States had been Venezuela's largest export market, the United States halted Venezuelan oil imports to the United States market. The Venezuela government was also shut off from the dollar system.

In 2020, these sanctions were explicitly presented as leverage for regime change.

So what did we get out of that? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, turning to China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and illegal networks to sell their oil and get financing. Russia and China gained influence in the Venezuelan government.

From 2021-2023, the Biden Administration was maintaining the Trump sanctions, but generally easing them. In 2024, Maduro blocked opposition candidates and undermined the elections, and Biden re-imposed the Trump sanctions - these were not new sanctions, they were the same Trump sanctions that Biden had been loosening. I think this made the United States look like an unreliable long-term partner to Venezuela. So Venezuela doubled down on China and Russia.

Venezuela is one of the poorest and weakest countries in South America. It has no blue-water navy, no real military to speak of, and no ability to threaten the United States in any meaningful way. It wasn’t an enemy state, it had been an economic partner. The same is still true of Colombia, which is a U.S. ally, though we seem determined to bully them too.

So what exactly was the point?

What did the United States gain by using the full weight of the world’s largest military and financial system to crush Venezuela economically? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, just not to us. We lost influence and access, while Russia and China gained both.

f the goal was to show that the United States is strong, all we really demonstrated is that we can bully weak countries. But we still failed to get anything of real value out of doing that.

That doesn’t look like strategy. It looks like performative toughness that backfires. Ooooh, look, we are bigger and tougher than one of the poorest and weakest countries in the world!

[Bootstrap]

I do not think that for the US to be threatening and bullying its neighbors with military force is a new thing. The US has a long history of intervening in South/Central American issues - sometimes overtly such as when Panama seceded from Columbia, sometimes covertly such as in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and of course Venezuela (names involved in the Venezuela effort include Bolton, Pompeo, Pence, and others).

Do we still do the Cold War or colonization thing now that the Cold War is over? I don’t think so.

Colonialism, Cold War interventions, and sanctions are very different periods in history, with very different strategies, and I think it is misleading to treat them all as one continuous history.

After colonialization ended, we had decades of Cold War conflicts that treated the governments of Latin America as pawns. I think there was huge fear of communism that led the United States to do a lot of things that were blatantly wrong.

Since the Cold War ended, our policy has been quite different than in the colonial period or the Cold War. In the 2010s, Venezuela wasn’t a military threat, and it wasn’t a proxy for a rival superpower. It was a weak, failing state with a lot of oil.

Since the Cold War ended, U.S. policy toward Latin America has mostly shifted to trade agreements, aid, security coooperation, diplomacy. Sanctions were targeted, and generally targeted individuals, they did not try to isolate entire countries or disable their economies.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, I can't think of any other country in Latin America that the United States has treated the way it is now treating Venezuela. This is where I understand history rather differently than what you have been describing.

[ken_sylvania]

For instance - I would not have realized, from news reports, that the Biden administration was who tightened the sanctions screws on Venezuela last year. I'm not saying it wasn't reported - just that for whatever reason I didn't see it.

It was the Trump Administration that initially pushed Venezuela out of the American market and into the arms of Russia and China, starting in 2017 with sanctions that restricted Venezuela's ability to issue new debt or restructure existing debt. The United States had been Venezuela's largest export market, the United States halted Venezuelan oil imports to the United States market. The Venezuela government was also shut off from the dollar system.

In 2020, these sanctions were explicitly presented as leverage for regime change.

So what did we get out of that? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, turning to China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and illegal networks to sell their oil and get financing. Russia and China gained influence in the Venezuelan government.

From 2021-2023, the Biden Administration was maintaining the Trump sanctions, but generally easing them. In 2024, Maduro blocked opposition candidates and undermined the elections, and Biden re-imposed the Trump sanctions - these were not new sanctions, they were the same Trump sanctions that Biden had been loosening. I think this made the United States look like an unreliable long-term partner to Venezuela. So Venezuela doubled down on China and Russia.

Venezuela is one of the poorest and weakest countries in South America. It has no blue-water navy, no real military to speak of, and no ability to threaten the United States in any meaningful way. It wasn’t an enemy state, it had been an economic partner. The same is still true of Colombia, which is a U.S. ally, though we seem determined to bully them too.

So what exactly was the point?

What did the United States gain by using the full weight of the world’s largest military and financial system to crush Venezuela economically? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, just not to us. We lost influence and access, while Russia and China gained both.

If the goal was to show that the United States is strong, all we really demonstrated is that we can bully weak countries. But we still failed to get anything of real value out of doing that.

That doesn’t look like strategy. It looks like performative toughness that backfires. Ooooh, look, we are bigger and tougher than one of the poorest and weakest countries in the world!

You're kidding me, right? The Trump administration is who pushed Venezuela out of the arms of the US into the arms of China and Russia? And previous to those 2017 sanctions Venezuela was an "economic partner" with the US? Seems to me that if seizing the GM plant was an act of economic partnership, then seizing oil tankers should count as economic partnership as well.

At the 2005 meeting of the Organization of American States, a United States resolution to add a mechanism to monitor the nature of democracies was widely seen as a move to isolate Venezuela. The failure of the resolution was seen as politically significant, expressing Latin American support for Chávez.

In the wake of Chavez's death, Maduro blamed Roger Noriega and Otto Reich for an attempted assassination plot against Henrique Capriles who was running against Maduro in upcoming elections. On 1 October 2013, the US ordered three Venezuelan diplomats out of the country in response to the Venezuelan government's decision to expel three US officials from Venezuela. On 16 February 2014, President Nicolas Maduro ordered another three US consular officials to leave the country, accusing them of conspiring against the government and aiding opposition protests. Maduro described the US statements that claimed to be concerned with rising tensions and protests and warned against Venezuela's possible arrest of the country's opposition leader as "unacceptable" and "insolent." He said, "I don't take orders from anyone in the world." The United States responded by expelling three additional Venezuelan diplomats from the country. On 2 February 2015, the United States Department of State imposed visa restrictions on current and former Venezuelan officials that were allegedly linked to human rights abuses and political corruption. The visa restrictions also included family members, with the Department of State saying, "We are sending a clear message that human rights abusers, those who profit from public corruption, and their families are not welcome in the United States".

On 9 March 2015, the United States President, Barack Obama, issued a presidential order declaring Venezuela a "threat to its national security" and ordered sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced the sanctions as an attempt to topple his socialist government. Washington said that the sanctions targeted individuals who were involved in the violation of Venezuelans' human rights, saying that "we are deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government's efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents"

On 20 April 2017, the Venezuelan Government seized the General Motors plant in the Venezuelan state of Zulia, causing the plant to close operations.

So what caused Venezuela to break ties with the US? Again, according to Wikipedia,

On 23 January 2019, Maduro announced that Venezuela was breaking ties with the United States following President Trump's announcement of recognizing Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela's National Assembly, as the interim President of Venezuela.

Maybe the US shouldn't have recognized Guaido as interim President, but I think it's worth at least remembering that the EU overwhelmingly voted to recognize Guaido as president of Venezuela, and as many as 60 countries recognized Guaido compared with only 20 who recognized Maduro. Seems like a fairly widespread alliance there.

[ken_sylvania]

For instance - I would not have realized, from news reports, that the Biden administration was who tightened the sanctions screws on Venezuela last year. I'm not saying it wasn't reported - just that for whatever reason I didn't see it.

It was the Trump Administration that initially pushed Venezuela out of the American market and into the arms of Russia and China, starting in 2017 with sanctions that restricted Venezuela's ability to issue new debt or restructure existing debt. The United States had been Venezuela's largest export market, the United States halted Venezuelan oil imports to the United States market. The Venezuela government was also shut off from the dollar system.

In 2020, these sanctions were explicitly presented as leverage for regime change.

So what did we get out of that? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, turning to China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and illegal networks to sell their oil and get financing. Russia and China gained influence in the Venezuelan government.

From 2021-2023, the Biden Administration was maintaining the Trump sanctions, but generally easing them. In 2024, Maduro blocked opposition candidates and undermined the elections, and Biden re-imposed the Trump sanctions - these were not new sanctions, they were the same Trump sanctions that Biden had been loosening. I think this made the United States look like an unreliable long-term partner to Venezuela. So Venezuela doubled down on China and Russia.

Venezuela is one of the poorest and weakest countries in South America. It has no blue-water navy, no real military to speak of, and no ability to threaten the United States in any meaningful way. It wasn’t an enemy state, it had been an economic partner. The same is still true of Colombia, which is a U.S. ally, though we seem determined to bully them too.

So what exactly was the point?

What did the United States gain by using the full weight of the world’s largest military and financial system to crush Venezuela economically? Maduro stayed in power. Venezuela kept selling oil, just not to us. We lost influence and access, while Russia and China gained both.

f the goal was to show that the United States is strong, all we really demonstrated is that we can bully weak countries. But we still failed to get anything of real value out of doing that.

That doesn’t look like strategy. It looks like performative toughness that backfires. Ooooh, look, we are bigger and tougher than one of the poorest and weakest countries in the world!

I'm glad I'm not President, because I surely don't know what the best way is to handle a country ruled by a dictator who isn't holding power legitimately. Historically the US has often chosen sanctions but like you said they haven't always proved effective.

Your argument seems, to me, to oppose the use of sanctions and toughness to try to reign in a dictator who is violating the rights of his countrymen.
Does this same objection to bullying and sanctions apply to relationships that the US has with other countries as well? Or is force and sanctions OK only when a country is a threat to other countries - and as long as a dictator's only victims are his countrymen then we should smile and play nice with him and pretend everything is AOK? Oh, wait - that would mean talking to and partnering economically with Kim Jong Un. I guess that might not be the worst idea in the world. I agree US sanctions haven't been successful there either.

That being said it doesn't quite feel right either to embrace Maduro and his government when he almost certainly was not elected fairly. Does the US want to allied closely with dictators?

[ken_sylvania]

Since the Cold War ended, our policy has been quite different than in the colonial period or the Cold War. In the 2010s, Venezuela wasn’t a military threat, and it wasn’t a proxy for a rival superpower. It was a weak, failing state with a lot of oil.

Since the Cold War ended, U.S. policy toward Latin America has mostly shifted to trade agreements, aid, security coooperation, diplomacy. Sanctions were targeted, and generally targeted individuals, they did not try to isolate entire countries or disable their economies.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, I can't think of any other country in Latin America that the United States has treated the way it is now treating Venezuela. This is where I understand history rather differently than what you have been describing.

In the way you understand history, do you think President Obama was wrong to declare the Venezuela was a threat to the national security of the United States in 2015?
Were the deaths of 100,000 Venezuelans who died between 2014 and 2020 as a result of US sanctions less horrific than the bombing of drug couriers, or just less dramatic? Now, maybe US is setting the stage for another 100,000 lives to be lost, or more. In that case, maybe the current policy is worse.

[Valerie]

Since the Cold War ended, our policy has been quite different than in the colonial period or the Cold War. In the 2010s, Venezuela wasn’t a military threat, and it wasn’t a proxy for a rival superpower. It was a weak, failing state with a lot of oil.

Since the Cold War ended, U.S. policy toward Latin America has mostly shifted to trade agreements, aid, security coooperation, diplomacy. Sanctions were targeted, and generally targeted individuals, they did not try to isolate entire countries or disable their economies.

Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, I can't think of any other country in Latin America that the United States has treated the way it is now treating Venezuela. This is where I understand history rather differently than what you have been describing.

In the way you understand history, do you think President Obama was wrong to declare the Venezuela was a threat to the national security of the United States in 2015?
Were the deaths of 100,000 Venezuelans who died between 2014 and 2020 as a result of US sanctions less horrific than the bombing of drug couriers, or just less dramatic? Now, maybe US is setting the stage for another 100,000 lives to be lost, or more. In that case, maybe the current policy is worse.

Trump is trying to save lives by this- I understand it’s hard to see why he is trying hard to protect lives he feels responsible for here.

[ohio jones]

Please continue this year's discussion in a new thread.
Venezuela 2026