American Sanctions Are Now Benefiting Countries

The sanctions worked on Syria, to give the first example to come to mind.

Is there somewhere I can go, a website perhaps, where I can sign up for America to sanction me? This sounds like a great deal and I don’t want to miss out.

What country has not made mistakes?
This time Venezuela has the US gunning for it directly.

It’s worth pointing out that the 2025 / 26 statistics are projections and 2024 will still be subject to revision for a while (not sure about what the standard is, but it should be something like up to 3 years if our practice is any guide [which usually it is]). Comparison with the August CEPAL release (source of these data) shows that the scale of revisions is fairly significant.

For broader context, working through the various year over year changes CEPAL published, I make 2024 Venezuelan GDP something on the order of 30% of 2014 levels in constant dollar terms. Brutal.

Personally I worry a lot less about whether sanctions achieve the immediate policy objective (spoiler: they rarely do) than I do longer-term unintended consequences. As an example, Russia continuing to sustain the conflict, at great expense, by completely retooling their economy worries me a lot less than future regime succession in a Russia where the best way of keeping the economy turning over enough to stay atop the greasy pole of leadership is continuing to crank out war materiel.

Sanctions are meant to inflict pain. Pain can bend someone else to your will, as long as bending to your will is an acceptable alternative.

But when you make the choice between pain and your continued existence itself, for groups at least, then it makes sense to bear the pain and work on mitigating it. When the alternative to the pain is “we want to destroy you”, as with Russia and Venezuela, then dealing with and mitigating the pain is better.

But this is typical Rightist thinking: the response to failure is to double-down even more. Not to try to put yourself into the others’ shoes and imagine how you might respond if the situation was flipped, oh no, that would be too close to that dreaded “empathy” thingy.

I mean . . . Yeah, Venezuela’s economy has been growing again in the last couple of years. But it sure isn’t where it was before the sanctions. It feels like part of it is just dead cat bounce . . . like, we’ve figured out how far down sanctions can drive a country, and that’s where.

Not all. For instance, Venezuela is now pretty much food self sufficient, partly because of increased food production . . . partly because of lower population because so many people left. But that increased local food production is a testament to both the government and the communal movement. And, there isn’t a lot of homelessness and a lot less shanty towns than there used to be, thanks to the massive government house building program. Lot of people with cheap homes. And there are programs to make sure that food being produced actually gets to people for cheap. The communard movement are trying to push into other kinds of production, sort of grass roots import substitution, but their success has been limited so far. The fact is that it’s hard to do import substitution while you’re actually under sanctions. The actual experience of poverty in Venezuela is not mostly as bad as it would be after that kind of sanctions in most other countries at that income level . . . but it’s still pretty bad.

It’s easy to say “Oh, they can just buy Chinese and sell their oil to the Chinese” but it does not yet work like that. Maybe it does for Russia, because they’re a close alliance with a big land border and Russia is really important to China so the government damn well makes sure it does work like that. But for Venezuela, as far as I can tell it’s hard for them to buy much even from Chinese companies. Not because there is no way to make financial transfers, but because those Chinese companies still have exposure to American banks, and the American government can and will steal a bunch of their money from those banks in the guise of “fines” if they defy the illegal sanctions. So most companies world wide won’t take the risk of that happening. The tip of the iceberg, brute inability to do financial transactions without the US-ruled system, may be gone, but the rest of the iceberg, the exposure of nearly all sizable companies to the US-and-British banking system, is still very much there. Venezuela has been able to do some trade, but it’s hard, limited, and expensive.

So overall, I think the thesis that US sanctions are actually beneficial is, well, false. It may apply to ONE country, Russia. Russia is huge, very capable of self-reliance for many key things, already had some manufacturing base, and has China as a very staunch ally willing to do what it takes to keep trade going. They’ve been able to use the push of sanctions to swap ineffective neoliberalism for a much more productive import-substitution approach because they have so much of what they need to do that. For everyone else, not so much; maybe in the future but we aren’t there yet.

I agree there’s been a phase change, which probably explains why JSOC assets have been doing multiple rotations through the region. (I think they and covert options rather than Big Army/BigNavy are the centre of gravity here.)

It may seem odd, but the big thing I find most objectionable about this is how greased the policy slide appears to have become. Back when I was wee, I remember there being a lot more reticence about pulling these types of policy levers; today, it seems like sanctioning a country is just another Tuesday. As you’ve noted previously in other contexts, none of this is cost-free and there really seems to be little to no appreciation of that. Putting go-fast boats carrying drugs on the bottom I really don’t have a problem with – messing with international trade just because it sounds tough and is easy given current perceived relative power strikes me as foolishly short-sighted.

More broadly, I don’t think it’s quite that Europe and American don’t matter much any more. I think they still matter, *but*: a) they have yet to fully grasp how much less they matter than they did (and, in particular, how much they will in the future), and b) blind to the previous point(s), they keep acting in ways that materially diminish the amount they matter. My view, the “spread” between Europe and the US in this domain is going to be central to determining our grand strategy. The UK’s clearly cast their lot and are not to be trusted; what the grownups in the Euro zone (I hope there actually are some) do will likely be determinative.*

* My assumption is that we don’t have sufficient freedom of action to do a full East Asian pivot, which is what I’d really like to see us do.

Carborundum said, “Putting go-fast boats carrying drugs on the bottom I really don’t have a problem with” — Just for the record, there are no “go-fast boats carrying drugs on the bottom”. Or at least, not where the Americans are pretending to look for them. It’s a lie, it’s obviously a lie, it’s only barely even pretending not to be a lie.

So first, Venezuela has little involvement in the drug trade to the US, even in terms of cocaine. In terms of fentanyl, which the Americans were also talking about, it’s about as close to zero as . . . when Trump was lying about Canada and fentanyl. The US’ own agencies agree that this is true; so does the UN. Second, the supposed cartel that Maduro supposedly is at the head of, doesn’t exist. Third, if there were actual drugs on the boats, there would be no point sinking them with all hands, they could just do the normal thing–board them and grab the drugs, then display the drugs for the TV cameras along with the handcuffed “bad guys”. It would have been a big media victory. They sink them with all hands precisely because they know they’re just fishermen. All the few survivors have turned out to be fishermen, and the fewer survivors there are inconveniently pointing out who they actually are, the better for the Trumpies. So. There are no drug boats and the Trumpies are massacring those people precisely because they are inconveniently innocent.

Some other people have been calling Venezuela a “pawn”. This is a gross mischaracterization. I would agree that any help China or Russia give Venezuela will be distinctly limited, and far from enough to let them push back very hard against the US. But Venezuela did not start the Bolivarian revolution at the behest of China or Russia. They are their own thing, the Venezuelans have their own ideas and their own willpower. The US has been trying to crush Venezuela in part because of oil, but also to a strong degree because Venezuela’s political project since Hugo Chavez was first elected has been one of the best political projects in the world, and one fundamentally hostile to imperialism, neoliberalism, and even capitalism. If Venezuela was allowed to succeed, and enough other countries imitated it, that could bring down the whole vicious international order. And the fact is that while the US can certainly damage Venezuela greatly, and already has, it cannot actually conquer Venezuela.

Further, it may end up actually strengthening the revolution. Its tactics short of invasion are largely about strangling trade. But the right wing opposition in Venezuela is dominated by a comprador class of importers in the cities, and by big plantation landowners in the countryside. The importers don’t make things themselves and are, obviously, deeply dependent on imports, so their position will weaken. The people who will build national production are going to be disproportionately the Bolivarian socialists; anyone else will be a national bourgeoisie likely to be less happy with US domination than the comprador right are. In the countryside, the landowners have long been in a war with campesinos over land; their tactics have included mobilizing paramilitary groups to assassinate campesino leaders and so forth. In a state of near war, with the military arming those same campesinos and small farmers as militia, the big landowners will find themselves outgunned. So the Bolivarians, the communard movement and so on, will probably be strengthened as the US pressure continues. On the other hand, if there’s an actual invasion, everyone will just hate the US for invading, and hate the right wing opposition for inviting the invasion, so again the Bolivarians will be strengthened. And, such an invasion will fail. So I really don’t think the US is going to be able to destroy Venezuelan emancipatory politics, or put its puppets in charge of the place. If it’s willing to keep a military blockade going for a long time it can certainly do massive economic damage. But that will have a lot of other political impacts, in the region and worldwide. And it’ll cost a mint.

@Carborundum.
All the survivors so far have been fishermen. As to your image of the boats, don’t forget they’ve blown up a lot of boats, not just the one or two there’s been pictures of in the news. And none of the boats were capable of reaching the US. And the facts of the matter in terms of drug smuggling to the US are as I have stated them. To be more precise, both UN and US reports say 5% or less of cocaine smuggled to the US comes from Venezuela (and none is actually produced there). And of course, zero percent of fentanyl, which isn’t really smuggled anyway, or fentanyl precursor chemicals, which mostly come either from China or are made domestically and are legal anyway.

I’m willing to believe not all the boats were fishing boats. Maybe a couple were smuggling refugees. And there have been reports that debris found from one boat did include marijuana; apparently, some marijuana does go from Venezuela to Europe, probably by stages. If you favour slaughtering people for being refugees or for smuggling marijuana then yes, I’m happy that you’re not in any situation where you get to make life or death decisions.

But much more, if you believe in slaughtering people that YOU DON’T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHO THEY ARE, just on spec, then I’m very happy that you are not in such a position. Ministers should believe in the rule of law. If you think someone is a criminal, you catch them and charge them with a crime and try them in a court of law and determine whether there’s actually enough evidence to conclude that they’re guilty of something. Tough-guy posturing about blowing up randos because it makes you hot to imagine you’ve killed a bad guy is self-indulgent bullshit. It makes the world a worse place so you can have a wank.

Bottom line, I think one can make a moral argument against killing these guys, but I don’t find it particularly compelling.

Putting aside the debate as to whether or not they are cartel members transporting drugs, assuming they are do you really believe any drugs they may be transporting are both fentanyl and headed for the United States thus a matter of urgent anbd pressing national security all things considered? That’s the claim and on its face it is a bald-faced lie.

Also, where is any sense of personal responsibility and accountability? Trump is selling his aggression to the MAGA base by claiming MAGA is being poisoned with fentanyl. In otherwords, MAGA is not responsible for its choices that have led to their drug addictions. It’s ALL the fault of the cartels. Talk about snowflakes. That takes the cake/flake.

The irony is, by Trump’s gutting of the EPA and the FDA, HE is poisoning America and Americans. Since he took office, the number of bad air days where I reside is off the charts. Industry now knows it can pollute the air and water and food supply without consequence and that is exactly what it’s doing.