Venezuela policy: time to trust but verify as we loosen sanctions

Critics of the Biden administration’s emerging Venezuela policy have harshly denounced what they perceive to be a naive, ill- intentioned, and fraught policy that will leave Nicholas Maduro’s soulless regime further entrenched by enriching it with oil revenue.

Trump-era, Venezuela Special Representative Elliott Abrams has been scathing from his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations. As well, the former Nicaraguan Ambassador to the Organization of American States, Arturo McFields, recently wrote in a Hill editorial:

“Nicholas Maduro is celebrating like never before. Suddenly and sadly the international community seemed to have forgotten his crimes against humanity, the shady deals with Russia and Iran, as well as a long list of violations of human rights.”

When separated from the churlish invective that usually accompanies Abrams’ and others’ criticism, the core arguments against the Biden strategy are the following.

· Former president Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have engaged in negotiations with the Venezuelan opposition in bad faith and to no good effect for over 15 years. Only a fool would try again.
· Any softening of Trump's holdover policy of “maximum pressure,” with its broad sectoral and prolific individual sanctions will only result in strengthening Maduro’s grip on power.
· And finally, the Unitary Platform (PU) that encompasses the various parties of the democratic opposition is incapable of negotiating in Mexico with the Maduro regime because the Bolivarian apparatus of state repression renders them hopelessly divided despite their name. They are unequal to the task of conducting effective negotiations, even with the neutral and dexterous hand of Norwegian moderators.

None of these points stand up to examination. But first, let's first look at what was actually announced.

On November 25, Biden’s team stated that it would grant a narrow exception to its crushing sanctions regime against Venezuela’s petroleum sector, specifically PDVSA, the parastatal oil company. As a precursor to this announcement, in October, Maduro finally released 7 American citizens who had been unjustly held for over four years on bogus charges in Caracas. In return, the U.S. freed two of Maduro’s nephews serving time for drug trafficking. With those preconditions in place, on November 26, Venezuelan government officials and representatives of the PU met briefly in Mexico City for a photo opportunity, declaring their mutual commitment to begin negotiating a settlement to hold national elections in Venezuela. Linked to the talks, the United States and its allies pledged to begin discussions to unfreeze three billion dollars in Venezuelan assets for a UN-sponsored and implemented program of humanitarian assistance for the Venezuelan people.

Predictably within days, Maduro publicly placed a further condition on the talks – relief from all U.S. sanctions. It was classic pre-posturing before a sit down, but the critics felt vindicated, and alleged that Maduro emerged the clear winner.

This incorrect assertion belies the fact that, under the terms of the exception to the U.S. oil sanction, not a single dime of revenue will accrue to Venezuelan government bank accounts. Rather, the profits from permitted sales of Venezuelan crude to just one company, U.S. oil giant Citgo, will be used to pay down the 1.7-billion-dollar debt PDVSA owes it. Future Venezuelan oil sales will not be permitted to the usual sanction busters like Iran, Russia, and India. They will not purchase arms and supplies for Maduro’s repressive security forces. They will not find their way into the offshore accounts of corrupt Bolivarian regime officials. The revenues will simply pay a long-standing debt to an American company that now has six of its American citizen employees home for Christmas after a long, unjust captivity.

At the same time, the nations that hold frozen Venezuelan assets will begin to structure desperately needed humanitarian aid delivery under the auspices of international scrutiny to the Venezuelan people whose living standards have now slipped below most African poverty indexes.

This is all that has happened to date.

Yet the Congressional and mostly Florida-based critics of Biden’s approach wholly discount a priori any possibility of success, intoning Cassandra-like predictions that Maduro will outfox his dim-witted U.S. and opposition counterparts, figuring out a way to divert the frozen assets from humanitarian purposes for his own enrichment.

I fundamentally disagree.

As a former U.S. ambassador in Latin America, I fully understand that the Maduro regime is a bad faith negotiator. So what? By promoting dialogue towards reconciliation in Venezuela the Biden neither legitimizes nor coddles the Maduro dictatorship. All hostile parties to a negotiation will act in perceived self-interest and bad faith until circumstances convince them otherwise, or corner them into concessions. Everyone should be suspicious of the other. Recall Ronald Reagan’s dictum with the Soviets: Trust…but verify.

The critics’ second argument, that loosening sanctions will entrench the regime, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of sanctions. They are meant to change behavior, not castigate, or serve as just punishment for wrongdoing. That is a judicial proceeding. The evidentiary standard for sanctioning an individual, a business or an economic sector is much lower than judicialized evidence for a reason: the policy goal is to be able to lift the sanction in the face of changed comportment.

In Venezuela’s case that has not yet happened – and it may never. Maduro and his henchmen are serially corrupt kleptocrats involved in illegal drug, gold, and human trafficking. Still, a slight lessening of one aspect of one of the hundreds of sanctions currently in place remains a legitimate tactic for the United States to try to induce a possible scenario wherein humanitarian aid reaches a starving, downtrodden population. Moreover, even the harsh Maduro critic, Sen Bob Menendez (D-NJ), recently recognized that the United States can “snap back” its PDVSA sanction at any moment if it sees no progress in the talks.

Under President Trump, U.S. policy towards Venezuela became “Cubanized,” with a former National Security Advisor once stating that there would be a “new sanction a week.” It also included puerile, performative psyops, like John Bolton holding a conspicuous notepad at a Venezuela briefing that said “45,000 troops,” which recalled the jingoistic Donald Trump’s mantra that “all options, to include military, are on the table.”

Maximum pressure failed in Venezuela. It has failed in Cuba for over half a century. For as untrustworthy and criminally depraved as the Maduro government may be, absent the use of U.S. military power to effect regime change, continued international pressure to get the government and the opposition to a negotiating table is the only recourse the international community has, if it wants to address the devastating humanitarian crisis Maduro and Co. have wrought in Venezuela.

Frankly, I am not terribly optimistic this latest effort to reach an electoral scenario in Venezuela will succeed. But there are no guarantees in international affairs, and more of the same will only result in the continued suffering of the Venezuelan people.