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To all the Corbynites filling Twitter with claims that US sanctions caused Venezuela’s collapse, let me politely explain why you are idiots.
Donald Trump imposed financial sanctions in late 2017. Venezuela’s economic collapse began in... 2010, under Chavez.
Before that, US sanctions were largely limited to specific measures targeted at specific people for specific crimes, including drug-running, human rights abuses and failure to act against terrorism. See fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF…
America didn’t target the economy as a whole largely out of sympathy for the Venezuelan people, but also because Chávez and Maduro were doing a damn fine job of destroying it on their own
But wait! you inevitably say. Saudi Arabia is just as bad! Why pick on Chávez? It’s because they don’t like socialism, isn’t it? They couldn’t bear to see this beautiful experiment succeed.
There’s an element of truth to that. But it’s not really a mystery why the US took against Chavez. There was the whole ‘accusing them of fomenting a coup against him’ which the US actually didn’t engage with (and flagged up to the Chavez regime).
Or the time when Chavez buddied up with Saddam. Or when Maduro literally accused America of giving Chavez cancer.
Tl;dr America has interfered with other countries before. Its recent sanctions have almost certainly intensified the existing crisis. But other countries have had similar sanctions or far worse without turning into the global poster child for economic calamity.
