American interests are better served by the Maduro regime’s isolation — better still by its replacement with a responsible and democratic civilian authority.
In its first month, Donald Trump’s second administration seemed disinclined to revisit the Biden administration’s efforts to reintegrate Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime into the global economy. That inclination evaporated abruptly on Wednesday. The Trump administration announced that, as of March 1, Biden-era waivers allowing the U.S.-based energy producer Chevron to extract and export oil from the anti-American regime in Caracas will be revoked.
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Trump’s announcement came nearly a month after senior White House envoy Richard Grenell met with Maduro in Caracas to strike a deal that would restart deportation flights to the country, a pact that many regional observers thought meant the president would allow the oil to keep flowing. Maduro has long refused to accept deportees after almost eight million Venezuelans left the country during his 12-year tenure because of economic contraction and political repression.
U.S. officials had said the deal included Venezuela taking back members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which has been accused of involvement in several high-profile crimes in the U.S.
The Trump administration’s rationale for the initiative makes sense. But the Venezuelan regime’s refusal to repatriate Venezuelan nationals in the U.S. illegally is a reversible posture, and the administration may ease the pressure on the Maduro regime if it decides to play ball on deportations. The president would be well-advised to maintain and even augment the constraints on the Venezuelan regime’s freedom of action because its offenses against the United States extend well beyond immigration policy.
The Biden administration only loosened the restrictions Trump 1.0 imposed on Venezuela in response to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine — a threat to the geopolitical order that, if the West met it with proper resolve, would necessarily yield higher energy prices in the West. Initially, the Biden administration flailed, blaming both Moscow for “the Putin price hike” and attacking domestic energy producers for failing to properly “invest in clean energy” that would absorb the shock in some fantastical way. But when none of these excuses generated traction, the administration resorted to fighting tyranny in Europe by warming up tyrants everywhere else.
The Biden administration abandoned its efforts to antagonize the Saudi government over its conduct of the war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels — a war the Biden administration would later be compelled to join when its accommodationist attitude toward Iran’s proxies proved ill-considered. It shied away from enforcing secondary sanctions against importers of sanctioned Iranian oil — China and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, primarily. And it ushered Maduro back into the community of nations. Not quietly, either. Just weeks after Moscow embarked on its ongoing adventure in Ukraine, U.S. officials broke Venezuela’s diplomatic isolation with a showy sit-down between Caracas’s representatives and administration officials in which the two sides discussed sanctions relief despite the Biden administration’s recognition of opposition figure Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
That tells you something about the lengths Biden administration officials were willing to go just to avoid repealing its executive orders prohibiting the exploration of oil and gas deposits on U.S. soil — a blinkered crusade that limited America’s options in its effort to punish Russia and insulate America’s allies against the Kremlin’s energy blackmail. The Trump administration, by contrast, is not beholden to that highly ideological initiative. And although the new president and his acolytes pose as though they are allergic to moralism in the conduct of foreign policy (unless they’re trying to strongarm an American partner abroad), a purely rational assessment of the threats posed by this illiberal regime justifies squeezing it regardless of whether it facilitates the administration’s immigration objectives.
The Venezuelan regime has cast its lot with America’s enemies: Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. It plays host to their hard-power military assets as well as covert actors. It exports narcotics and narcoterrorism throughout the Western Hemisphere. It is a socialist backwater which, contrary to the claims of its apple polishers among the moral reprobates who populate the global Left, is propped up only by the proceeds it derives from its energy exports. And it is a human-rights abuser — an enemy of liberal democracy — as assessed by Donald Trump’s SOUTHCOM commander in 2020. “At the heart of the threat, it’s the lives that are we’re losing unnecessarily, and it’s the undermining of democracy,” Navy Admiral Craig Faller said at the time. “That was a choice Maduro made to take the once thriving state into the current dictatorship that it is.”
The Trump administration was wise to acknowledge the illegitimacy of the regime that survives as the last vestiges of the Marxist despot Hugo Chavez’s legacy. It should not stray from that moral clarity, as the Biden administration did, amid little more than the pursuit of ephemeral political objectives. American interests are better served by the regime’s isolation — better still by its replacement with a responsible and democratic civilian authority. Trump’s latest move is a step in the right direction. He should not stray from that path.