Blinken’s Inept Policies Make a Bad Situation in Venezuela Worse

Writing 40 years ago as a student at Harvard, Tony Blinken provided a telling insight on his perspective in dealing with Marxist strongmen in Latin America who steal elections. Pondering dictator Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1983, the future secretary of state recommended,

The wisest course would be for Washington to try a little experiment. The Administration should withdraw any support it is supplying to the counterrevolutionary groups and pressure them to cease their activities. The government should then restore aid to the Sandinistas and initiate negotiations aimed at easing tensions between the U.S. and Nicaragua. For their part, the Sandinistas would have to liberalize their rule and schedule elections for the near future.

None of us should be too harshly judged on what we wrote, decades ago, as undergraduates—but I am betting Blinken would stand by that same recommendation today.

Blinken’s naïve “little experiment” idea goes a long way in explaining his reluctance today to exercise U.S. power in the hemisphere, preferring instead to pass to Mexico and Brazil the leading role in dealing with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s stolen election mess.   

Unpacking U.S. dealings with dictator Maduro reveals how the Biden administration’s pursuit of misplaced ideological priorities, linked to climate change and open borders, has foolishly supplanted realist American diplomacy.

In fairness to Blinken and company, responding to Venezuelan Marxist strongmen, first Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro, has been a constant headache for Washington and our hemispheric allies for the past quarter century.

Venezuelan Chavismo has provided crucial assistance to enemy regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, while opening the hemispheric door to Iran, Russia, China, and other hostile actors.

The right approach for Washington to these challenges was and continues to be steady realpolitik. The State Department needs to pursue policies that prioritize defending traditional U.S. hemispheric interests, our values, our friends, and our national borders. It is true that our hemispheric allies put great stock in a multilateral approach, but they also highly value decisive U.S. leadership.

Instead, the Biden administration is playing out versions of Blinken’s “little experiments” that discard U.S. geopolitical leadership in the Americas, while prioritizing radical concepts on climate change and open-border migration. This foreign policy mishmash is clearly visible in Washington’s confused and ineffectual strategy in dealing with Maduro. 

President Biden foolishly ended the Trump-imposed economic sanctions on the Venezuelan petroleum industry. Initiated in 2019, U.S. sanctions were leverage for the international campaign to recognize Juan Guaidó as Venezuelan president, an effort that brought together 60 governments, including even the Trump-skeptical European Union. It was a legitimate plan to counter Chavismo in the Americas. 

Although economic sanctions were successful in squeezing the regime, Biden’s decision to end them in 2022 was a unilateral concession to Maduro for his promise to play fair in the next round of presidential voting. Given the Venezuelan strongman’s open theft of the July elections, the Biden team, today, clearly appears to have been hoodwinked yet again. 

And indeed, they were, but there was more to the story, and it involved the Biden administration’s climate change quixotism. Biden ended sanctions, at least in part, because the White House also wanted to cooperate with Maduro to pump oil.  Duping his green constituency at home, Biden cynically calculated he could expand petroleum exports from Maduro’s Venezuela, while continuing to oppose U.S. domestic production.  Presumably, the deal was also supposed to curry favor with the dictator.

The Biden team then vetoed an international loan to assist Venezuela’s neighbor, Guyana, to develop its own massive offshore oil reserves.  That decision appears to have involved both climate change genuflection as well as an element of kowtowing to Caracas. Venezuela aggressively covets its neighbor’s offshore oil deposits as well as Guyana’s national territory. 

Where was the U.S. national interest in all this? When pressed, my contacts inside the State Department privately confirmed that this phony climate change diplomacy was in fact as cynical and confused as it appeared. 

Then there is the hemispheric migration chaos, Biden’s signature issue. Some 8 million Venezuelans (out of a population around 29 million) have already fled the disaster and repression of the Maduro government. Most are in Latin America, but more than 600,000 are now in the U.S., with millions more calculating their chances of picking up and leaving Venezuela.   

This diaspora is catastrophic for Venezuela’s future, and it plays right into what Maduro wants. Prudent U.S. policy should work to keep disgruntled Venezuelans in their homeland. The vast majority who flee are opportunity and economic migrants, not classic political dissidents directly victimized by regime reprisals. 

Some on the Biden team have reasonably expressed concerns about this looming new flood of migrants. Yet, typically, the Biden administration sends confused signals, saying the U.S. frontier is closed to illegal crossings, but—based on its actions—the real message is: come and we will let you in.  

Not surprisingly, the Biden administration is throwing away another chance to deter massive illegal migration coming out of the region. Panama is asking for U.S. assistance in closing down the Darien Gap, the dangerous land route that enables vast numbers of Venezuelan migrants, along with other nationalities, to move through Colombia on their trek north.

Panama’s President Mulino needs Washington’s help to shut down this major pipeline of human trafficking and organized criminal activity. To help Mulino, the U.S. must apply diplomatic pressure on Bogotá to accept deportations, including third-country nationals, who leave Colombia crossing into Panama. 

Washington hardball diplomacy vis-à-vis Bogotá would drastically slow the movement of Venezuelans, with many deciding to remain in Colombia or not even undertaking the perilous journey in the first place.  

Yes, Colombia is already hosting some 3 million Venezuelans and is stretched. But facilitating new millions to make the dangerous illegal journey northward is not in the U.S. national interest; it is also a recipe for yet another chapter of human exploitation and tragedy that immigration romantics cannot whitewash.  To assist Colombia, Washington could offer more financial assistance in maintaining and sheltering the next round of Venezuelans fleeing Maduro. Their geographic nearness to their homeland represents valuable pressure on the dictator. 

But we already know that Secretaries Blinken and Mayorkas, for ideological reasons, reject such a strategy; they believe in an absolute right of unauthorized migrants to pick up and go, all the way to the United States. “Surge to our border” famously urged the candidate Joe Biden to the world. 

If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, expect the Venezuelan illegal population in the United States to grow by many millions. Domestic political pressure on Maduro will drastically ease, and Venezuela, sadly, will permanently become the region’s next Cuba – a poverty-stricken country that produces vast numbers of migrants who work hard in the U.S. to send back remittances that allow a bankrupt communist regime to survive.  

Highlighting administration unwillingness to use realpolitik, Secretary Blinken has bizarrely turned to Mexico and Brazil to undertake the needed “diplomatic pressure” to reverse Maduro’s stolen election.  

These regimes—led by anti-Americanists AMLO in Mexico and Lula in Brazil—are fundamentally hostile to traditional U.S. involvement in the region.  These leaders actually have more ideological sympathy for Maduro than for Biden. They really want Washington just to butt out. 

They also doubtless see President Biden and Secretary Blinken as pliable, woke liberals whom they can mau-mau and guilt for historical reasons. And they are right.

Wise U.S. policy certainly does not need Mexico and Brazil. Even the international left acknowledges that Maduro and his henchmen have stolen the July elections. Everyone from the New York Times to the European Union recognizes the fact, yet AMLO and Lula—revealing their fundamental loyalties—have done little to nothing to condemn the results. 

Lula even recommended that the Venezuelan courts, totally controlled by the caudillo Maduro, might clarify the election winner.  Now, as of this writing, Lula’s “solution” is to call for new elections knowing full well that Maduro stole the results last time. 

Blinken should return to past diplomacy through which Washington applies bilateral pressure, and the United States cooperates with its regional allies through the Organization of American States (OAS). It is often a slow and tedious approach that allows the U.S. to exercise vigorous leadership while also paying homage to the multilateralism that brings along most of our hemispheric allies. The OAS is a flawed partner, true, but then there is no such thing as perfection in diplomacy. Certainly, it is a better approach than relying on AMLO and Lula.

Finally, a word to those in our own ranks who may think Venezuela is simply not worth our effort. They are, respectfully, mistaken. The U.S. national interest is at stake in this crisis.

Modern America-First conservatives continue, rightly, to make reference to the Monroe Doctrine because geography matters in geopolitics.  A direct consequence of Maduro’s tyranny is that illegal migration and criminal activity will continue to grow and strike at the U.S. heartland. Our global enemies will continue to use Maduro’s Venezuela to enter the region. Not to engage leaves Washington with nothing better than a hemispheric Maginot Line.  

It is true that a wise United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; but we do undertake prudent steps to protect our borders and defend rule of law at home and in our immediate region, while checking nearby enemies who plot to undermine us.