Biden’s Continuing Trump’s Targeting of Venezuela

Posted by the Institute for Public Accuracy (Accuracy.org)

January 21, 2021

by Steve Ellner

It is obvious that Biden’s foreign policy team has learned nothing from the disastrous results of Trump’s initiatives toward Venezuela. In a nutshell: regime change cannot be the starting point in any Venezuela policy. The Biden people claim that their plans to enlist the support of allies is an innovation in that it corrects Trump’s go-it-alone approach toward Venezuela. In fact, Trump did seek and attain the support of over 50 nations (hardly a majority in the UN’s General Assembly) by taking advantage of the fact that much of Europe and Latin America was in the hands of conservative and right-wing leaders.

In addition, future Secretary of State Antony Blinken announces that the Biden administration will provide Venezuela with much-needed humanitarian assistance. The Trump administration, however, also extended Venezuela humanitarian aid. But it was channeled through the parallel government of Juan Guaidó resulting in multiple denunciations of misuse of funds – not to say blatant acts of corruption – by members of his team who resigned in protest. 

Blinken also claims Biden will embark on a new course in that it will “more effectively target” sanctions. Exactly what this means is unclear, but decades of the use of sanctions throughout the world demonstrate that, regardless of intent, the real victims of sanctions are the entire population. Even the Trump administration announced that the supply of medicine and food would not be affected but in fact it was. Everyone in the global commercial chain feared reprisals if they had any interaction at all with Venezuelan companies, both private and state-owned.

Far from regime change, the starting point of U.S. policy toward Venezuela has to be recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the nation’s legitimate president. There may have been some irregularities in the Venezuelan presidential elections of 2018, as there have been in U.S. electoral contests, but there was no credible evidence of the votes not getting counted correctly, that is, electoral fraud. The commercial media’s uncritical employment of the term “authoritarian” and “dictator” to refer to Maduro is nothing short of deceptive and it ignores context, namely the multiple violent attempts to remove him, even physically.

Maduro has clearly indicated his interest in negotiations with the U.S. and of late has expressed willingness to make concessions specifically regarding the release of several jailed U.S. citizens. He has also recently indicated his openness to concessions on the economic front. These topics have to be the nuts and bolts of negotiations, not U.S. sponsored regime change which is doomed to failure.