In the December 29, 2024, issue of the conservative Wall Street Journal, the paper’s longtime columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who also serves on the Journal’s editorial board, wrote an article harshly criticizing the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. Quoting a State Department statement issued in January 2021, she points out that the Cuban communist regime is a murderous supporter of terrorism that lets the Cuban people “go hungry, homeless, and without medicine.”
O’Grady also also points out that Cuba is a supporter of the dictatorial regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who has ruthlessly tyrannized the Venezuelan people, not only politically but also economically with the same type of socialist economic system that exists in Cuba. Harkening back to the popular post-9/11 US “war on terrorism,” which replaced the previously popular “war on communism,” she points out that Venezuela is as big a supporter of terrorism as Cuba is.
O’Grady concludes her essay with the following statement: “Under Cuban political tutelage, eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, there are 1,900 political prisoners, and the five patriots inside the [Argentine] embassy are being starved to death. This is state-sponsored terrorism by any other name.”
Yesterday, the Journal published an editorial calling on the US government to come to the support of the Venezuelan people. The editorial points out that “only Venezuelans can reclaim their democracy” but then adds this concluding interventionist line: “But a US policy that restores sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports and puts maximum pressure on the regime would at least show which side America is on.”
Those two articles demonstrate much of what is wrong with the US government’s foreign policy of interventionism, which, needless to say, is favored not only by right-wingers but also by left-wingers.
Consider Cuba. For more than 60 years, the US government has maintained a harsh system of sanctions against the people of that nation. We call it an “economic embargo” but that’s just another fancy word for the modern-day term of “sanctions.”
The US embargo targets the Cuban people with death by starvation — the same thing that O’Grady criticizes the Cuban and Venezuela regimes for doing. The idea behind the embargo is that if the Cuban people are faced with death by starvation, they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust their communist regime, and replace it with a pro-US puppet regime that will do the bidding of the US government. It would all be billed as bringing “freedom” to Cuba, much like “Operation Enduring Freedom” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” were going to bring “freedom” to the people of those nations.
But notice something important about this strategy: Both regimes — the Cuban regime and the US regime — are doing the same thing — bringing death by starvation to the Cuban people. The Cuban regime is doing it with its socialist system. The US regime is doing it with its embargo. The Cuban people are in the middle of this vise, having their lives and well-being squeezed out of them by both regimes. The only difference is that the Cuban death machine is an unintended result of socialism while the US death machine is an intentional, knowing, and deliberate act designed to kill people.
It’s no different with Venezuela. The socialist system in that country has brought massive economic chaos and crisis to that nation, just as it has in Cuba. Once again, to bring about regime change, the US government targets the Venezuelan people with harsh economic sanctions. The idea is that if the Venezuelan people and their children are facing death by starvation, they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust Maduro from power, and replace him with a pro-US stooge.
What’s important to recognize is that the situation in Venezuela is the same as it is in Cuba — the Venezuelan people are being squeezed to death by a vise consisting of Venezuelan socialism and US sanctions. The question naturally arises: Why isn’t the US government’s policy of targeting innocent people with death as a way to achieve a political goal considered terrorism? It seems to me that is precisely what terrorism is.
Given that Maduro has implemented a strict system of gun control, which many American left-wingers favor here in the United States, the Venezuelan people have no effective way to do what the US government and US interventionists want them to do. If they violently revolt with, say, knives, they will be shot dead by the Venezuelan national-security establishment, which is well-armed, just as the US national-security establishment is here in the United States.
So, Venezuelans have taken the most logical route — escape from the country. As the Journal points out, eight million of them have fled in a desperate attempt to save their lives from death by starvation — a death that Venezuelan socialism and US sanctions have jointly imposed on them.
As we all know, many of those Venezuelans have come to the United States and entered the country either illegally or by seeking refugee status. That has terribly angered and upset many Americans, especially right-wingers. They’re upset because they want those Venezuelans to stay in Venezuela, so that the sanctions can force them to rise up in a violent regime-change revolution against Maduro and his well-armed military forces. The idea is that if people are faced with death by starvation versus rising up in a violent revolution, they will choose the latter, even if thousands of them will be shot dead in the process. So, American immigration-control advocates support the immediate deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to Venezuela, where they can be, once again, targeted with death by starvation by US sanctions in the hopes of achieving regime change.
In my opinion, it would be difficult to find a more morally depraved foreign policy than that, especially for people who pride themselves on going to church every Sunday and who love to wear their religion on their sleeves. Yes, bad things happen around the world, including brutal dictatorships, but there is absolutely no reason why the US government has to make it worse for people. As the Journal rightly points out, it’s up to the foreigners to deal with their problems. What the Journal and other interventionists fail to see, unfortunately, is that US sanctions and embargoes that target the Cuban and Venezuelan people with death violates that principle.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
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