The Biden–Harris administration began lifting sanctions on Venezuela last year. In a deal reached with the Nicolás Maduro regime, Biden allowed:
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Venezuela to export oil.
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In exchange, Maduro promised to allow the opposition to run against him and international observers to monitor the election.
Monthly oil exports from Venezuela hit a five-year high after the sanctions were partially lifted, allowing Venezuela to sell thousands of barrels of oil this year. They also released three Venezuelans in U.S. custody: one was Maduro’s chief money launderer and expert in hiding Maduro’s money, and two of his nephews, who were guilty of drug trafficking. In exchange, Maduro released 10 Americans wrongfully detained there and extradited Fat Leonard, a defense contractor who had bribed U.S. Navy officials in return for classified information.
Then, six months later, in April, Maduro reneged and cracked down on the opposition. He prevented the opposition’s charismatic leader from running against him, and Biden reinstated the sanctions.
The election happened on Sunday. Maduro declared himself the winner, but the exit polls showed that he had rigged the results. The weaker opposition candidate he had allowed to run had beaten Maduro.
He scammed the Biden–Harris team. There is an easy explanation for why he agreed to the initial deal.
Maduro has stayed in power by paying off the military and security services. He buys their loyalty, but he was running out of money. With the money pit drying, the loyalty of his subordinates was becoming questionable. With that in question, he might have lost power in a coup or a revolution.
He needed money to prevent this, so he lied that he would allow for a clean election. There was a tell: There is no clean election that would not vote him out. Everybody knew that Venezuelans would vote him out. At best, he would have to flee to Russia, China, or Nicaragua in exile. Likely, he would be tried for his crimes against his own people. Why would he ever agree to that? Which naïve fools would believe it?
What naïve fools, you ask? Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, the secretary of state.
Democrats, on the other hand, love to trust the bad guys. They first dumped money on North Korea in the 1990s to stop the Kim family from going nuclear. That didn’t work out. Then they traveled to Damascus, and John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi came back concluding that we could “do business” with Bashar al-Assad. Five years later, Assad was about to kill half a million Syrians. Then they trusted the ayatollah and gave him $140 billion. He used the money to fund his proxy militants to shoot at our military.
Trusting Maduro is the latest example of this naive ignorance. And, as always, it worsened things. If no deal had been struck, Maduro would have stayed in power, running out of cash to save his regime. Now, he is still going to be the dictator of Venezuela, but with billions of dollars that will guarantee his survival for several more years.
Sometimes, doing nothing is better than doing something. The Biden–Harris team is incapable of doing things right, so all we can ask for is that they stop trying to fix things to avoid making them worse.
Venezuela is in our own hemisphere. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the dictatorship over the past decade, making it one of the most important countries in the world. The prospect of a Chinese naval or missile base there should horrify us—Cuban Missile Crisis, hello? The combination of incompetence and neglect could result in catastrophic outcomes for Americans. Frankly, the Biden/Harris incompetence on foreign policy has few equals.
When George Shultz became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, he toured the Western Hemisphere, partly symbolically. He wanted to emphasize that the Americas would be the most important part of the world for us.
George W. Bush also championed relations in our neighborhood, with the CAFTA-DR trade agreement, historic progress in Colombia, and warm relations with Mexico. The Venezuela crisis started when Barack Obama was president, but it was Donald Trump who finally took it seriously and appointed a special envoy to address the problem.
Democrats love to talk about Hispanics, but they are utterly unserious about our neighbors—proof being that they archived the Northern Triangle countries’ problems by putting Kamala Harris in charge of solving them. Biden’s strengthening of the Maduro regime is the latest example of this.
Republicans, on the other hand, have a proven record of paying attention to our southern neighbors.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
