How the US Failed at its Foreign Policy Toward Venezuela

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US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Venezuela confirmed this week the overt efforts over the last year of the US government to carry out a coup dâĂ©tat against president NicolĂĄs Maduro
By Vijay Prashad, Ărika Ortega Sanoja – Aug 08, 2020
On August 4, 2020, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was US State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who has had a longâand controversialâcareer in the formation of US foreign policy, was assaulted by almost all the members of the Senate committee. The senators, almost without exception, suggested that Abrams had beenâsince 2019âresponsible for a failed US attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President NicolĂĄs Maduro.
From 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 US policy, namely to overthrowâwith force if necessaryâthe government of President Maduro. Murphy laid out the timeline of Trumpâs policy, which began with the recognition of minor Venezuelan politician Juan GuaidĂł as president of Venezuela in January 2019 to the current moment, including how the United Statesâin Murphyâs wordsââtried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year.â
Abrams was unfazed. âObviously we hope that [Maduro] will not survive the year and we are working hard to make that happen,â he said. The policyâincluding âa kind of coupââremains intact. Abrams has now added another file to his post: he will be Trumpâs special representative on Iran; the man who failed to conduct regime change in Venezuela is now going to deepen US attempts to overthrow the government in Iran.
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Venezuelan Reaction
A clip from Murphyâs commentsâincluding the âkind of coupâ sentenceâcirculated widely on social media inside Venezuela. Senior members of the Venezuelan governmentâincluding Vice President Delcy RodrĂguez and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreazaâshared it. It was also shared by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who acidly noted that Senator Murphy âis surely a good person, but he doesnât even understand what he is acknowledging.â What he is saying is that the US government has tried to do a coup in Venezuela. This is what created outrage in the country.
We asked Foreign Minister Arreaza to comment about Murphyâs use of the term âcoupâ in his statement about US policy vis-Ă -vis Venezuela. Arreaza told us the following: âUS spokespersons continue to openly admit to their crimes and illegal aggressions against the Venezuelan people.â It is not only Murphyâa liberal Democratâwho used the language of a âcoup.â Trumpâs former national security adviserâJohn Boltonârecounts in his book how Trump had said that, per John Kelly, âit would be âcoolâ to invade Venezuelaâ; Trump also said that Venezuela is âreally part of the United States.â Speaking of Murphyâs comment and Boltonâs book, Arreaza said, âthese confessions are priceless evidence for the complaint we raised at the International Criminal Court.â
Even members of the Venezuelan opposition, such as Enrique Ochoa Antich, said that the open way in which Abrams and the US senators spoke of armed action against Venezuela âis painful and unacceptable.â The entire Trump-Bolton-Abrams policy, he said, has failed to dent the government of Maduro.
Illegal
Ecuadorâs Correa correctly said that Murphy did not know what he had acknowledged. It is rare for a US politician to care when they say things that violate international law. Murphyâs casual statement about a âcoupâ 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 explicitly outlaw a coup:
âNo 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.â (Article 19)
âNo 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.â (Article 20)
There is no need to interpret these articles, because they are written very plainly. They say that not only is âarmed forceâ forbidden as a âform of interference,â but so is the âuse of coercive measures of an economic or political characterâ 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. But this has been the behavior of the US government since at least 1954, when the Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the government of Jacobo Ărbenz of Guatemala.
Failure
The US 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.
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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 US government has denied Venezuela access to IMF funds, charged the leadership in Venezuela of drug-trafficking (with a hallucinatory indictment), and sent a carrier group to tighten the embargo on the country; none of these policies have succeeded, despite the full weight of the US 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.
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 US government to run a full blockade of Venezuelan ports.
The Trump administration is unwilling to go that far. Such a policy, Abrams said, would be an âact of war.â Trump wants a war, but not an open war; the US military knows that it might be able to flatten Caracas, but it would not be able to win a war against the Venezuelan people.
Featured image:Â US State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams announcing sanctions of Venezuelan government officials. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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.
Ărika Ortega Sanoja is a Venezuelan journalist.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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 Booksand the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A Peopleâs History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGĂŒn.