As a result, the Venezuelan economy experienced the single largest peacetime collapse of any country in at least 45 years. Millions of Venezuelans have fled to Peru, Colombia, and other Latin American countries, while hundreds of thousands have ended up on the doorsteps of the United States. For years now, Venezuela’s most noteworthy export has been people, not oil. About a third of Venezuelan households get remittances from abroad.
The oil sanctions have hurt ordinary people, as many predicted they would, and they have failed to topple Mr. Maduro, which was also predictable. Yet, the funny thing about sanctions is that, once they are imposed, they become politically impossible to lift without getting something in return. That’s one reason American officials were so keen to try to extract some kind of promise from Mr. Maduro about the elections.
In addition to harming ordinary people, sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry harm U.S. interests in the face of changing geopolitical realities. They pushed Venezuela further into the arms of Russia and China, which are more than happy to fill the vacuum the United States leaves behind. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has visited Caracas twice in less than a year, promising strategic cooperation to help Mr. Maduro weather whatever sanctions the United States throws his way. That’s not a recipe for restoring Venezuelan democracy.
In 2022, Mr. Biden allowed Chevron to resume its work under a special license, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left U.S. officials scrambling for a replacement for Russian oil. Then he made another exception to allow European companies to invest more freely there. But on paper, the sanctions remain in place. In response to Mr. Maduro’s crackdown, U.S. officials are likely to resume some restrictions on foreign companies, but the impact may be limited, by design. “The U.S. has decided that it needs to engage on some level with the Maduro government, even if it doesn’t like it, and it has decided that it wants to allow Venezuela to export oil,” Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, told me. “But it needs to find a way not to appear to be caving in to Maduro.”
It’s a stark illustration of the limits of American leverage. Dictators do dictatorship, whether they are under U.S. sanctions or not. In many cases, sanctions tighten their grip on power. There simply aren’t many sharp tools in the diplomatic toolbox for changing another country’s politics. Individual sanctions on people in the Maduro regime would avoid the widespread collateral damage, but many members of Mr. Maduro’s governments are already on the sanctions list.
