The U.S. will “keep on blowing boats up,” White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said, “until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” He didn’t.
The U.S. thought that this June’s devastating bombing of Iran coupled with assassinations would cause political and military officials to defect to the opposition and the people to rise up against their government. It didn’t.
Even in Venezuela, the limits of military action were revealed, as the U.S. managed to capture President Maduro and decapitate the government but didn’t even try to change the regime, presumably because doing so would have unleashed chaos.
Behind the spectacular military action that gets all the attention on TV is the hidden hand of economic warfare that seems to be carrying the largest load of recent campaigns to change the governments of U.S. adversaries.
There was a three-way race with no clear favorite in the recent election in Honduras. Trump wanted the right-wing, free-market candidate, Nasry “Tito” Asfura, to win. So, he launched an economic missile, or missive in this case, warning, “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.” Trump interfered in, and influenced, Honduras’ election with the economic threat of abandonment.
Economic warfare also played a decisive role in Venezuela. The U.S. has been a continuous and persistent bankroller of the Venezuelan opposition. But, more importantly, the U.S. has economically held Venezuelan voters hostage. In the last Venezuelan election, which the U.S. and others say Maduro stole, America’s crippling sanctions played a massive role in interfering with and influencing the vote in the opposition’s favor. At the time, Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me that the sanctions “prevent the country from having democratic elections, because there is overwhelming evidence that the harsh collective punishment of the sanctions will continue until Venezuela gets rid of its current government.”
Those sanctions, clearly to be kept in place until Venezuelans elect a non-Chavista government approved by the United States, have caused enormous suffering, leading to the “worst depression, without a war, in world history,” and causing tens of thousands of deaths.
In the current crisis, though military action took the lead, economic action followed crucially and necessarily in its wake. Maduro is gone, but his regime and its inner core remain in power in Venezuela. Unable to successfully support a coup or to pull off military regime change, the U.S. settled for a thuggish side dish of military coercion with a large helping of economic coercion.
After a night of bombing, economic warfare took over. With the Trump administration assessing that, cut off from its oil income, Venezuela had only a couple of weeks before it was unable to pay its debts, they economically blackmailed the government. The Trump administration informed acting President Delcy Rodriguez that all American demands had to be fully met before the U.S. would allow Venezuela to pump another drop of oil. Those demands were largely economic, including severing economic ties with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba as well as an agreement from Venezuela that it would partner exclusively with the U.S. on oil production and favor the U.S. in oil sales.
The White House would “execute on a deal to take all the oil,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained. The U.S. would control and sell Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely,” added Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
With Venezuelan oil being blocked from going to Cuba, the economic war on Cuba has intensified. Perhaps more than any other country, Cuba has felt the power and pain of U.S. economic warfare. On January 25, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower suggested that the U.S. Navy “quarantine” Cuba. In the most honest explanation of America’s weaponized economy, Eisenhower set out the policy that “if they are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”
Less than a year later, in October, the U.S. banned exports to Cuba except food and medicine, planting the seed of the embargo that grips Cuba to this day. In February 1962, President John Kennedy would water that seed and lock the people of Cuba under a full economic embargo. With growing cruelty, in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson moved to include food and medicine in the embargo. By 2018, that embargo had cost Cuba $130 billion, according to the UN.
With the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998, Cuba found a friend in the region. In exchange for a massive number of Cuban doctors being sent to Venezuela to help the poor, Venezuela sent cheap oil to Cuba. With the U.S. now “taking all” Venezuela’s oil and “overseeing” its sale, it is that last lifeline to Cuba that is now being cut. Venezuela, Rubio declared, has “to declare its independence from Cuba.” “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Trump posted. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
The U.S. assesses that military action on Cuba will not be necessary because economic weapons will be sufficient. “I don’t think we need any action,” Trump said. “Cuba has no income now. They got all their income… from the Venezuelan oil…. Cuba looks like it is ready to fall.”
Iran, too, has felt the pain of U.S. sanctions. The cruel conundrum in the current crisis is that the U.S. caused terrible hardship with the crippling sanctions it imposed on Iran, leading to the people taking to the streets to demand economic reforms that the Iranian regime is incapable of making without the removal of the sanctions. But Iran cannot escape the sanctions without concessions that are existential for the survival of the regime and the state. Economics becomes the weapon for foreign policy and regime change.
Had Trump not unilaterally and illegally exited the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, sanctions would have been eased, the reformers would not have been discredited, and there might have been no protests in the street.
It has never been a secret that the U.S. has weaponized the dollar. Unlike military interventions, in which the other side, though weaker, can resist, inflict damage, and wage protracted war, the U.S. is the only nation that can impose sanctions while being immune to retaliatory economic penalties. It is one-sided warfare. But it doesn’t always work, and it increases the pressure and momentum for the Global South, the global majority, to flee from the American dollar and toward multipolar organizations like BRICS+ and the SCO.
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