Considering Oil Sanctions Against Venezuela

Kejal Vyas at The Wall Street Journal says the U.S. government is considering oil sanctions against Venezuela.

The U.S. is evaluating whether to impose tougher sanctions against Venezuela's military and vital oil industry, a senior White House official said Monday, as it seeks to ratchet up pressure on authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro to hold free and fair elections. 

The Trump administration is considering a range of measures including curtailing the flow of Venezuelan oil to the U.S., the official said, in what could be the harshest blow to the country's money supply. No final decision has been made.

This is the nuclear option. Oil is the ironic tether that binds the U.S. and Venezuela together. Hugo Chávez threatened countless times to cut the U.S. off, but there was no way he could do that without destroying himself. Socialism of the 21st century needed the empire to give it life.

Here is a look at Venezuela's oil exports to the U.S.

As Vyas points out, this is about half of Venezuela's oil exports and it has always been difficult to switch because Venezuela's crude is hard to refine. In short, oil sanctions would be devastating. They would also be damaging to the U.S. economy, but that's a separate issue.

The essential question here is the effect on Venezuelans. Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde just finished recommending that the U.S. refrain from any sanction that exacerbates the country's humanitarian crisis. This nuclear option certainly would do so.

I think their suggestions are preferable to this kind of move. Simply saying "We don't recognize Maduro" is pretty minimal without a broader strategy beyond that. There are a number of options before simply dropping the bomb.