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There's a model of Biden foreign policy that's very simple and predictive. I will present it in full.
"The foreign policy of the Biden administration is whatever will make the price of gasoline go down before the election."
It's super effective!
For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis, and which has threatened to seize the territory of neighboring Guyana? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.
What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world, supports the Houthis in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is rapidly progressing on its goal to build nuclear weapons? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.
But surely Russia, the Greatest Threat to Democracy Since Hitler, will feel the wrath of U.S. sanctions. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting them in Ukraine. We help send hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men into the meat grinder to die. Because it's worth it. With stakes this high, there's no way that Biden would let his lust for cheap gasoline affect the conflict. Right, Anakin, right?
Today, Biden has urged Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. It was causing gasoline futures to increase.
That's it boys. We've found the red line that Ukraine musn't cross. Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step. But an old dog still knows some tricks and he knows one. If you want to get re-elected you need cheap gas. As usual, the U.S. will support pretty much any tinpot dictator as long as they have oil. Sometimes, it really is that stupid.
When Ukraine is everything but democratic because they are in a state of war it is excused. Yet, those under threat from the US are supposed to be completely democratic despite America's long history of sponoring terrorist groups, assassinating leaders and trying to colour revolution countries. If Venezuela didn't hold a tight ship they would have ended up like Iraq, Syria, or Libya. Putting countries in a state of perpetual state of semi war in order to destabilize them increases migration. The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants. The best way to stop the migrant flow is to stop the aggressive posturing. Stealing Venezuelan assets makes the situation in Venezuela worse which encourages emigration.
When Ukraine gets invaded we all have to help them. When Iraq gets invaded, Iran is supposedly supposed to just quietly accept it. Why would they? It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves. Iran has given support to groups under direct military threat. Destablizing Iran would mean another giant refugee crisis. Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies. Stealing their assets is not only immoral and absurd, it is directly damaging to Europe. When Hillary Clinton was sponsoring Jihadists in Syria which flooded Europe with migrants Iran was helping Syria stay together. We should thank Iran for their support against ISIS.
American policy has been aggressively attacking countries that aren't subservient to the United States and causing continuous blowback.
Venezuelans are fleeing because 25 years of catastrophic socialist policies have completely destroyed the economy. Leaving the current government in power is the single biggest cause of migrant outflows, and they will continue as long as the Chavistas are in control.
And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows? Migrants flee Venezuela because it is bad, so making it worse should lead to more migrants. Clearly, the US hasn't been able to topple Venezuela's government, and the US has made it worse in Venezuela. In other words, foreign meddling once again lead to a migrant crisis.
The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.
I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.
Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be.
Why you think so?
There is an argument that, as the de facto economic hegemon, the US should let as many people as possible come to the table to deal, but at the same time, as expressed elsewhere, there are fairly valid reasons for why the US has done the economic-warfare things it has done.
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American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay. I have plenty of negative things to say about the CIA, but backing the guys that throw communists out of helicopters is actually a good solution to communist rule. Not good for the communists, of course, but it's in everyone's long-run interest to remove communists from governance.
The most stable and productive Latin American country is Costa Rica, which has a nice business allowing upper-middle class boomers to retire in luxury. Anti-communist but not due to US coups.
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Defining "stable" and "productive" is a headache all by itself, but even if I assume you mean "political stability" and "economic prosperity", I think that thanking the USA for those in the two countries you mentioned makes little sense.
What happened in Chile was a series of quasi-fortunate events. Unlike leftists would like you to believe, Pinochet began his regime being just as much socialist as Allende; the CIA trusted him merely because he hated commies, but that's about it; he had no economic ideas for the country at all, so basically continued doing the same as his predecesor but with an CIA stamp of approval (he even met with Fidel Castro! Seriously!). The only reason why things took a free market turn was due to Milton Friedman (who at that time was advising Xiaoping's China to end communism there) meeting with Pinochet once and writing him a letter explaining what he should to turn things around. That's it. Never did the CIA or the Pentagon had anything to do with the so-called "Chilean Miracle". If it wasn't for that visit and the involvement of the Chicago Boys (José Piñera, Hernán Büchi, etc.) in Pinochet's rule, the CIA would've merrily go along with whatever crap Pinochet would've thought that made things better as long as he continued throwning tankies off helicopters.
While I myself consider the Chilean model to be a very good example of how to achieve economic well-being, there's no doubt it that caused signifcant social unrest that climaxed in the 2019 protests, and even if you consider to be the protests to be unworthy of merit (just because people dislike economic policies doesn't necesarily mean they're bad, even if legitimitate concerns like the massive unemployement in the just-out-of-college-with-student-debt demographic and the privileges the goverment continued to hand over to the military elite where there), it shows there are consequences that go beyond economics to take into consideration when a country formulates policies.
I can't comment much on the country's political stability, and it's true that there wasn't any dictatorship after Pinochet, but social unrest, justified or not, is never a sign of it, and even if we assume stopping communism justifies a strongman with an iron fist, I don't think the 3000 people killed during his regime were all a threat to the country.
Regarding Uruguay, as someone who was born and lives there...please. First of all, lumping those two countries together makes it sound that the CIA was also involved in the country's military junta rule, and it wasn't at all. It's true that they collaborated with the democratically elected National Party goverment of the sixties and the following presidency of Jorge Pacheco Areco's as part of the Condor Plan by training our military and police forces in counter-subversion techniques including torture (one of the most famous murders carried out by left-wing guerillas in that turmoil of an period was of a CIA operative named Dan Mitrone, who had also worked in Brazil with the military junta that was there at the time), but by the time the tanks rolled in 1973 and the dictatorship started, the buck had already ended for the US; the left wing guerrillas were completely defeated, and the military junta began its rule with no foreign involvement of any kind (why it happened deserves a post of it's own).
So why is Uruguay so politically stable? We...just sort of are that way, I guess? Democracy and the rule of law is in our DNA: the military junta was an anomaly, and in 200 years there were only two other dictatorships in the country, which were resolved as peacefully as the last one and which shed little blood. Our parties institutional resilience is both a cause and proof of this: of the four major political parties in the country, just one (CA) started recently; Broad Front, the main left-wing coalition, started over 50 years ago, while both the aforementioned National Party and Colorado Party have been around ever since the country's beginnings. There are cracks which are starting to show however; ever since the end of the pandemic, the tripartite coaltion led by the NP, which won in no small part due to several corruption scandals by the Broad Front, has been mired on scandals of its own which are arguably worse, one of which involves a very important Senator who has been prosectued for a long history of sexual assault of minors, while the Colorado Party, which once was pretty much the country's dominant party, has become a shell of its former self and lives off its memories, has plenty of candidates for their next primary but no leadership (their leader shockingly resigned and left politics during the pandemic due to disagremeents with the goverment, which considering the guy's reputation I suppose had much to do with its lack of care for accountability and transparency). Add the fact that we have become more polarized, and yeah, we got problems.
As for "productive", we're like the third world that everyone would like to live in if they had to live anywhere in the third word, but that's it; our economy isn't doing horribly but it isn't doing that great either. The fact that we're considered both one of the most "stable" and "productive" countries in Latin America speaks little of us and volumes of how fucked up the region is.
Thanks for this, I appreciate the corrective effort, particularly regarding Uruguay. Duly noted and internalized.
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Venezuela’s situation is due to it being run by socialists, not due to to American sanctions. While Venezuela may not be literally communist in the sense of Eastern block collective farms and shit, they’re making the kind of constant macroeconomic mistakes you would associate with having leaders who studied Marxist economics and ruined their own economy that way, combined with a healthy dose of short-sighted populism.
The counter factual to ‘Venezuela, but competently governed’ is Iran, which is also an oppressive petrostate heavily sanctioned by the USA, and it’s in much better shape than Venezuela even if it’s not quite as nice a country to live in as the US or Western Europe(notably few Iranians decide to try to walk to the EU the way Venezuelans walk to America, after all).
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Venezuela’s collapse since 2014 has very little to do with US sanctions. At high oil prices, the socialist system implemented by Maduro could just about function due to oil exports. After prices crashed in 2014, Venezuela’s shitty, hard to refine oil became much less valuable (much like Canada’s tar sands).
Again, US policy had very little to do with it. Refugee outflows from Venezuela will continue until the socialist system is dismantled. That is not necessarily an argument for forced regime change, only an observation as to the reality of migrant dynamics.
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Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?
The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.
By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?
(This is a direct question, by the way.)
For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.
While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!
The sanction argument often comes up with Cuba (ie Cuba’s communism would be successful but for the sanctions). I always find this argument funny because it is saying “if communism could participate in the capitalist system it would be better proving communism works!”
It’s a valid critique. Protestantism didn’t do so well in 1700s France, either, but not because Protestantism isn’t a viable culture; but because the surrounding system intentionally prevented it from functioning.
If capitalists don’t care to distinguish between “we actively sabotaged your system” and “your system doesn’t work”, perhaps by a tacit appeal to social Darwinism, then sure, I’ll accept that; but by the same token, I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”
African subsistence farmers have the superior system?
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I don’t think the appeal to Protestantism is the same. It is like saying “Protestantism would’ve succeed in France if the Protestants agreed to recognize the supremacy of the Pope”
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There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'
Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.
Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.
Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.
Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.
For those who don't know- Cuba doesn't just host the odd American criminal who can mouth far left ideology(Asata Shakur). It literally hosts a Hezbollah base, among other features in a collection of not really caring about the past history of people who show up making anti-American noises.
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