Author: Daniel Larison

Marco Rubio demands that the US fully embraces the policy that already failed and caused massive suffering:

To regain foreign policy coherence on Venezuela, we must return to the maximum pressure campaign of the Trump administration.

It is a sign of how deranged the Venezuela hawks are that Biden’s extremely modest easing of sanctions causes them to charge him with appeasement. The devastating sectoral sanctions that have been wrecking Venezuela’s economy for the last four years are still in place. There has been almost no change from Trump-era Venezuela policy, but Rubio disingenuously blames the destructive consequences of the policy he championed on the slight, insignificant changes that have been made to it under Biden. The US hasn’t really departed from the “maximum pressure” campaign, and the real insanity is thinking that the solution to the failure of that campaign is to intensify it.

Rubio complains that Maduro has “tightened” his grip on power, but makes it seem as if this is the result of reducing pressure rather than the effect of the pressure campaign itself. He calls attention to the massive exodus of millions of people from Venezuela, but then pretends that the collective punishment that he supports inflicting on these people is not one of the major causes for their flight. Like every sanctions hawk before him, Rubio feigns concern for the population that his preferred policy has been impoverishing and brutalizing for years.

The senator has a big stake in this policy, as he was one of the leading supporters of Trump’s economic war on Venezuela and he has been one of its most fanatical defenders ever since. His op-ed proves that he can’t be trusted to give an honest assessment of Venezuela policy under either Trump or Biden.

In fact, he can’t even be trusted to get basic facts right. For instance, he claims that Maduro and his allies “stole power from Juan Guaidó in 2019,” which would have been quite a trick since they were already in power and he was a little-known legislator at the time. The more accurate way to describe what happened was that the US and its allies pretended that Guaidó was the president when he had no power and then persisted in this fantasy until the opposition gave up on it. Guaidó never had any power for anyone else to steal. The hawks’ hare-brained idea of trying to force regime change failed with ruinous consequences for the people of Venezuela, who continue to suffer under the sanctions that Rubio celebrates.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The Biden administration is making a huge mistake:

President Biden has approved the provision of U.S. cluster munitions for Ukraine, with drawdown of the weapons from Defense Department stocks due to be announced Friday.

The move, which will bypass U.S. law prohibiting the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent, comes amid concerns about Kyiv’s lagging counteroffensive against entrenched Russian troops and dwindling Western stocks of conventional artillery.

Cluster munitions are an inherently indiscriminate weapon, and they pose an ongoing threat to the civilian population of a country long after the war is over. There is no good reason to provide or use these weapons. This decision will likely come back to bite the administration in more ways than one.

Even if the munitions that the U.S. provides have a dud rate of 2% or less, that still guarantees that there will be more unexploded ordnance lying around after these weapons are used than there would have been without them. Ukrainian civilians and soldiers will be among those getting maimed and killed by these weapons. Ukraine will already have a huge job of removing mines ahead of it once the war is over, and this will make that effort even more difficult and dangerous. Foreign Policyquotes Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, as saying, “There’s a civilian impact that we know about. Right now, Ukraine is full of bomblets coming from Russian cluster [bombs] but also minefields. The unexploded ordnance is terrible there. So using U.S. cluster [bombs] is just going to add to the problem.”

The supposed benefits of providing these weapons are not as great as advertised, either. As Daryl Kimball has explained many times in recent days, the utility of these weapons has been exaggerated. He wrote this for Just Security earlier this week:

The effectiveness of cluster munitions is significantly oversold. Kyiv has already allegedly used cluster munitions in Eastern Ukraine in 2022, and the use of the weapon did not deliver results that could not have been produced by alternative munitions, and their use of these weapons put civilians in Ukraine at much greater risk. When Russia was reported to have used cluster munitions in Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, condemned the move saying that cluster munitions are “banned under the Geneva Convention” and have “no place on the battlefield.”

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The growing enthusiasm for a military option in Mexico just shows how addicted to military intervention many Republicans are.

Ron DeSantis is trying to catch up with the other Republican hawks that want to attack Mexico:

DeSantis, who’s trailing Trump in national polls by wide margins, is promising to send Navy and Coast Guard resources to block fentanyl-related Chinese precursor chemicals from reaching Mexican ports, "if the Mexican government drags its feet" in assisting.

DeSantis also says that he would “reserve the right to operate across the border to secure our territory from Mexican cartel activities,” which is another way of saying that he would order incursions into Mexican territory without its government’s permission. These are exceptionally bad ideas for all the reasons I have discussed before. Aggressive policies like these are very likely to backfire on the United States by provoking more violence in border communities and greater instability leading to increased migration. They would definitely poison our relationship with Mexico for decades to come. What makes these proposals even worse is that they seek to apply a more militarized solution to a drug war that has been failing for generations. We know in advance that they aren’t going to make a dent in the distribution and use of fentanyl.

Trying to cut off chemical supplies with a blockade of ports would not only be an act of war against Mexico, but it would also require a huge commitment of ships and personnel to try to enforce it. Even if the Mexican government were willing to cooperate (and they wouldn’t be), it would be a major undertaking that would eat up limited Navy and Coast Guard resources on a fool’s errand. It’s bad enough to commit unprovoked acts of war against a neighboring country, but to do it with no possibility of achieving the desired goals would be moronic.

Any interruption that a blockade achieved would be limited and temporary, and narco-traffickers would find other sources to make their product in any case. Drug use can’t be bludgeoned out of existence through the threat and use of force. The growing enthusiasm for a military option in Mexico just shows how addicted to military intervention many Republicans are. If they can’t get a new war with Iran or China right now, they will have to get their fix by striking out at Mexico.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Some House Democrats, including Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have called on the Biden administration to provide sanctions relief for Venezuela:

A group of House Democrats called on the Biden administration to ease sanctions on Venezuela, make more aid available and assess the conditions necessary for a possible re-establishment of diplomatic relations in an effort to alleviate the economic crisis there.

This is the second appeal for Venezuela sanctions relief from House Democrats in recent months. The signatories of the May letter urged the administration to lift sanctions on both Venezuela and Cuba and framed it as a way to ease the migration crisis at the border. The new appeal focuses on Venezuela policy and the destructive effects of U.S. sanctions on that country.

Continue reading “End the Senseless Economic War on Venezuela”

Nikki Haley asks silly questions:

4. Why is China infiltrating the Western Hemisphere?

It’s not just the spy base in Cuba. Beijing is trying to turn almost every country in the Western Hemisphere against us, often using economic bribery. We need to get Chinese influence out of our backyard.

Haley is a politician and would never be confused for a good foreign policy analyst, but even for a presidential candidate trying to whip up the crowd this is ridiculous stuff. Is the United States “infiltrating” the Eastern Hemisphere when it sends its ships into the western Pacific? Are we “infiltrating” a different hemisphere when our government reaches agreements with China’s neighbors? No, that’s an absurd way of thinking about international affairs.

Neighboring countries in the Americas are not our property, hard as that may be for some people in this country to believe. China isn’t “infiltrating” anything when it does business and makes agreements with them. As for turning them against us, I can’t think of anything more likely to turn our neighbors against us than trying to lord it over them and demand that they cut off ties with one of their major trading partners because Washington says so. Haley’s would-be neo-imperialism is so crude here that it would probably embarrass Max Boot.

I don’t know how the U.S. would go about “getting” Chinese influence out of the entire hemisphere, and I suspect Haley doesn’t, either, because it isn’t possible and it isn’t a reasonable goal. It is the sort of mindless demagoguery that we can expect as the U.S.-China rivalry intensifies, and if left unchecked it will sooner or later lead to some very nasty policies directed against our neighbors in the name of combating “Chinese influence.”

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison writes at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in Antiwar.com, the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Francisco Rodriguez reports the findings of a new paper on the destructive effects of sanctions:

The evidence decisively shows that sanctions make living conditions worse in target countries. I looked at 32 academic papers that estimated their effect. Of these, 30 found consistently negative effects on measures ranging from poverty, inequality and growth to health conditions and human rights.

The magnitude of the harm is dramatic. One study estimated that sanctions would lead to a decline in a state’s gross domestic product by as much as 26 per cent – equivalent to that in the Great Depression. Another found falls in female life expectancy of 1.4 years – similar to the estimated effect on global mortality of the pandemic. In many cases, the harm is similar to that suffered during armed conflicts, making economic sanctions possibly the deadliest weapon used by western powers [bold mine-DL].

Economic warfare is warfare, but it is rarely treated as such when policymakers are debating whether they should employ this weapon. The U.S. has engaged in armed conflict reflexively over the last thirty years, and it has been even more cavalier in waging economic war. Policymakers know in advance that economic warfare won’t achieve anything useful, but many still endorse waging economic war because they don’t take its deadly consequences seriously and because they take for granted that the US has the right to inflict punishment on target states at will. Their desire to be seen “doing something” about some international problem counts for more in their minds than the lives and welfare of innocent people.

Sanctions advocates often present using this weapon as a peaceful alternative to war rather than acknowledging that it is a different form of warfare, and they do this to make an indiscriminate and cruel policy seem humane by comparison. The illusion that economic warfare is a humane option makes it much easier for politicians and policymakers to endorse it, and the fact that the costs are borne by people in the targeted country makes it politically safe for them to support. When confronted with the overwhelming evidence of the harm that sanctions cause, they will usually deny that their policy harms ordinary people and insist that it somehow magically only hurts the targeted government.

In his paper, Rodriguez marvels at how such obviously harmful and failed policies continue:

The evidence surveyed in this paper shows that economic sanctions are associated with declines in living standards and severely impact the most vulnerable groups in target countries. It is hard to think of other cases of policy interventions that continue to be pursued despite the accumulation of a similar array of evidence of their adverse effects on vulnerable populations [bold mine-DL]. This is perhaps even more surprising in light of the extremely spotty record of economic sanctions in terms of achieving their intended objectives of inducing changes in the conduct of targeted states.

If broad sanctions were judged solely by their results, it is hard to see why a rational policymaker would ever support them. The proof that they do far more harm than good is extensive and well-established by now, and their lack of success in changing regime behavior is proverbial. The trick is that sanctions are usually judged by the intentions of their senders rather than by the effects that they have in the real world.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison writes at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in Antiwar.com, the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.