{"id":54295,"date":"2020-08-19T11:59:07","date_gmt":"2020-08-19T15:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=54295"},"modified":"2020-08-19T12:03:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T16:03:11","slug":"how-the-u-s-failed-at-its-foreign-policy-toward-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=54295","title":{"rendered":"How the U.S. Failed at Its Foreign Policy Toward Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vijay Prashad and \u00c9rika Ortega-Sanoja
\nAugust 10, 2020 – venezuelanalysis.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair (CounterPunch)<\/a>On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing<\/a> on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who has had a long\u2014and controversial\u2014career in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, was assaulted by almost all the members of the Senate committee. The senators, almost without exception, suggested that Abrams had been\u2014since 2019\u2014responsible for a failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.
\n
\nFrom Republican Senator Mitt Romney to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, Abrams received a severe tongue-lashing. There was no disagreement in the committee about the goals of U.S. policy, namely to overthrow\u2014with force if necessary\u2014the government of President Maduro. Murphy laid out the timeline of Trump\u2019s policy, which began with the recognition of minor Venezuelan politician Juan Guaid\u00f3 as president of Venezuela in January 2019 to the current moment, including how the United States\u2014in Murphy\u2019s words\u2014\u201ctried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abrams was unfazed. \u201cObviously we hope that [Maduro] will not survive the year and we are working hard to make that happen,\u201d he said<\/a>. The policy\u2014including \u201ca kind of coup\u201d\u2014remains intact. Abrams has now added another file to his post: he will be Trump\u2019s special representative on Iran; the man who failed to conduct regime change in Venezuela is now going to deepen U.S. attempts to overthrow the government in Iran.<\/p>\n

Venezuelan Reaction<\/strong><\/p>\n

A clip<\/a> from Murphy\u2019s comments\u2014including the \u201ckind of coup\u201d sentence\u2014circulated widely on social media inside Venezuela. Senior members of the Venezuelan government\u2014including Vice President Delcy Rodr\u00edguez<\/a> and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza<\/a>\u2014shared it. It was also shared by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa<\/a>, who acidly noted that Senator Murphy \u201cis surely a good person, but he doesn\u2019t even understand what he is acknowledging.\u201d What he is saying is that the U.S. government has tried to do a coup in Venezuela. This is what created outrage in the country.<\/p>\n

We asked Foreign Minister Arreaza to comment about Murphy\u2019s use of the term \u201ccoup\u201d in his statement about U.S. policy vis-\u00e0-vis Venezuela. Arreaza told us the following: \u201cU.S. spokespersons continue to openly admit to their crimes and illegal aggressions against the Venezuelan people.\u201d It is not only Murphy\u2014a liberal Democrat\u2014who used the language of a \u201ccoup.\u201d Trump\u2019s former national security adviser\u2014John Bolton\u2014recounts in his book<\/a> how Trump had said that, per John Kelly<\/a>, \u201cit would be \u2018cool\u2019 to invade Venezuela\u201d; Trump also said that Venezuela is<\/a> \u201creally part of the United States.\u201d Speaking of Murphy\u2019s comment and Bolton\u2019s book, Arreaza said, \u201cthese confessions are priceless evidence for the complaint we raised at the International Criminal Court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even members of the Venezuelan opposition, such as Enrique Ochoa Antich, said that the open way in which Abrams and the U.S. senators spoke of armed action against Venezuela \u201cis painful and unacceptable.\u201d The entire Trump-Bolton-Abrams policy, he said, has failed to dent the government of Maduro.<\/p>\n

Illegal<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ecuador\u2019s Correa correctly said that Murphy did not know what he had acknowledged. It is rare for a U.S. politician to care when they say things that violate international law. Murphy\u2019s casual statement about a \u201ccoup\u201d is in clear violation of the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), of which the United States is a member. Two articles from Chapter IV of the OAS charter<\/a> explicitly outlaw a coup:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.\u201d (Article 19)<\/p>\n

\u201cNo State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind.\u201d (Article 20)<\/p>\n

There is no need to interpret these articles, because they are written very plainly. They say that not only is \u201carmed force\u201d forbidden as a \u201cform of interference,\u201d but so is the \u201cuse of coercive measures of an economic or political character\u201d to violate the sovereignty of a country. The tenor of the Senate hearing was in total violation of the spirit and letter of the OAS charter and the Charter of the United Nations<\/a>. But this has been the behavior of the U.S. government since at least 1954, when the Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the government of Jacobo \u00c1rbenz of Guatemala.<\/p>\n

Failure<\/strong><\/p>\n

The U.S. senators certainly attacked Abrams for his failure. But what was the failure that bothered them? Not the failure to abide by the laws and conventions signed by the United States; that was not the problem.<\/p>\n

Universally, the senators attacked Abrams for not being able to succeed with his coup plans. They gave him advice about how to better overthrow the government of Maduro. Thus far, the U.S. government has denied Venezuela access to IMF funds, charged the leadership in Venezuela of drug-trafficking (with a hallucinatory<\/a> indictment), and sent a carrier group to tighten the embargo on the country; none of these policies<\/a> have succeeded, despite the full weight of the U.S. government behind them. Rather than concede that the government of Maduro has popular support, the United States wants to pursue its policy with even more draconian methods.<\/p>\n

The United States is currently conducting a hybrid war, which includes an economic war (sanctions and sabotage) and an information war (coloring the government as authoritarian). Some senators wanted the Trump administration to go beyond this highly destructive form of warfare. They wanted the U.S. government to run a full blockade of Venezuelan ports.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration is unwilling to go that far. Such a policy, Abrams said, would be an \u201cact of war.\u201d Trump wants a war, but not an open war; the U.S. military knows that it might be able to flatten Caracas, but it would not be able to win a war against the Venezuelan people.<\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. \u00c9rika Ortega Sanoja is a Venezuelan journalist.<\/p>\n

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books<\/a> and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/a>. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations<\/a> and The Poorer Nations<\/a>. His latest book is Washington Bullets<\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. \u00c9rika Ortega Sanoja is a Venezuelan journalist.<\/em> <\/p>\n

Source: www.counterpunch.org\/2020\/08\/10\/how-the-u-s-failed-at-its-foreign-policy-toward-venezuela\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Vijay Prashad and \u00c9rika Ortega-Sanoja August 10, 2020 – venezuelanalysis.com On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who has had a long\u2014and controversial\u2014career in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, was assaulted by … Continue reading How the U.S. Failed at Its Foreign Policy Toward Venezuela<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5,1103,39,109],"tags":[85,1496],"class_list":["post-54295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","category-international","category-oil-and-gas","category-usa","category-venezuela","tag-abuse","tag-coups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54295"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54297,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54295\/revisions\/54297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}