Sanctions and Blockades

 In the emerging literature of apologetics trying to preemptively justify Trump's apparent regime-change operation in Venezuela, it has become standard to speak of the South American country as a "failed state." Which it is, in many respects. But the question is: who made it that way? 

We could speak, as so many pundits do, in vague terms about "economic mismanagement." As further clarified in the news articles, this phrase usually translates to something like: "Venezuela shouldn't have let its economy become so dependent on the single export industry of oil." 

Which—coming from the country that sanctioned its oil industry and is now leading an illegal campaign to blockade all oil shipments from the country and seize tankers that don't belong to us, recently undertaking a global chase of a cargo ship to Russia in an effort to expropriate it—is sort of the "stop hitting yourself" version of economic advice. 

It's a bit like kicking a walker out from under an octogenarian and then criticizing them for leaning on it in the first place. 

If Venezuela's oil industry can't take all the blame for the country's economic collapse, we can—with more plausibility—point to the evils of the current government, which is highly repressive and authoritarian. 

But this poses a sort of chicken-and-egg problem. Democratic conditions in Venezuela have deteriorated roughly in tandem with the country's economic health, raising a valid question as to which caused the other. 

It's beyond dispute at this point that Maduro is an illegitimate dictator who jails and tortures his own people and suppresses free elections. What's not so clear is whether he would have gotten away with this for so long if the country's economy hadn't simultaneously been crippled through international sanctions. 

What we seem to be seeing here is a replay of the same old script as in Castro's Cuba and Hussein's Iraq. Economic sanctions operate to starve and collectively punish the civilian population, on the theory that this will prompt revolt against the reigning government. But, just as frequently, it only seems to strengthen the ruling regime's hand, while making them more despotic and paranoid.

We are also witnessing another experiment in sanctions as a tool of regime-change in Iran this week—where the country's economic collapse and rampant inflation have triggered a wave of protests, to which the Islamic regime has responded as usual with deadly force. 

In Iran, as in Venezuela, it cannot be denied that the government is repressive and intensely unsympathetic. But there is some valid question as to whether these governments would be quite so awful—or so able to retain their grip upon a besieged and suffering citizenry—if the U.S. weren't meanwhile willfully starving their economies. 

I was reading Bertrand Russell's prescient 1920 study of Soviet Russia, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, this week, and he makes a point about the international blockade that the Entente imposed against the Soviets at the time that can only bring to mind the fates of Venezuela and Iran today. 

He points out that many of the Bolsheviks' worst repressive policies came about at least in part in reaction (which is not to say wise or just reaction) to the country's economic crisis, which the Allies' policy of blockade in turn had helped to bring about. 

Forced requisitions of food from the peasantry in exchange for valueless, inflated paper currency, for instance, or labor conscription, were certainly blots on a regime that claimed to represent the emancipation of the working people of the world.

But that paper currency wouldn't have been so worthless if not for the Western sanctions; thus the peasantry wouldn't have been so loath to trade with the government; thus workers in Russian cities wouldn't have been so ill-fed; thus the government might not have introduced repressive measures to keep them at their posts instead of fleeing to the countryside in search of food. 

We are witnessing something of the same vicious circle in Venezuela and Iran today. The ruinous economic conditions created by the sanctions generate a pretext for more repressive government measures—which then serve in turn as a rationale for continuing the sanctions. 

Indeed, the economic collapse is itself often held up as a reason to continue the sanctions, since it plainly indicts the economic stewardship of the governments in power. Yet, the economic collapse was the foreseeable and directly-intended consequence of those sanctions in the first place! 

So that's how the game is played. First, use sanctions to make Venezuela a "failed state." Then, U.S. policymakers can turn around and say: since this regime can't manage to feed its own people, clearly it is illegitimate and we can have no truck with them. 

Every failure of industry, every tyrannous regulation brought about by the desperate situation, is used by the Entente as a justification of its policy, as Russell described Western policy toward the Soviets in 1920. 

If a man is deprived of food and drink, he will grow weak, lose his reason, and finally die. This is not usually considered a good reason for inflicting death by starvation. But where nations are concerned, the weakness and struggles are regarded as morally culpable, and are held to justify further punishment.

Is it surprising, Russell then asked, that professions of humanitarian feeling on the part of English people are somewhat coldly received in Soviet Russia?

So too—is it surprising if not everyone in Venezuela and Iran regards us as mere well-intentioned friends of their legitimate democratic aspirations? 

I, too—to be sure—along with most Venezuelans and Iranians—particularly those who have been forced into exile—want to see a change in government in both countries. I want to see them become thriving, prosperous liberal democracies instead of impoverished authoritarian dystopias. 

But there is a question of means and ends to be considered here. Some means—such as collective punishment of a civilian population through a forced demolition of their economy—are simply not legitimate, both because they impose too much suffering along the way and are unlikely actually to yield the result they claim to seek. 

Russell's book is an especially good one for us to consider in this context, because his critique of Western sanctions was not accompanied (as it was in so many other left-wing writers of the time) by any apologetic motive for the Soviet cause. 

His study of Bolshevism accurately diagnosed all the elements in the new regime that would go on to make up the horrors of Stalinism, the terror, the gulag, and the cult of personality. Indeed, he says time and again in the book that the Soviet experiment had failed except as anything other than an old-fashioned Peter the Great–style modernizing autocracy. 

Russell doesn't even regard the regime's specifically economic failures as wholly the fault of Western sanctions. He notes, for instance, that Marxist theory should have anticipated retaliation from capitalist countries as one of the inevitable results of their revolution; for this reason, he observes that Lenin himself didn't seem very interested in ending the Allies' blockade. 

So too, it's possible that Maduro and the Iranian regime do not care over-much about ending sanctions. The misery and poverty of their populations may suit their purposes just fine.

Russell found he could not excuse the crimes and repressions of the Soviet regime, then; but this did not make him any more sympathetic to the Western blockade. 

Likewise with us—we should hold no brief for the authoritarian governments of Venezuela and Iran; nor do we regard sanctions as the sole cause of the disasters overtaking those countries. But that doesn't mean we excuse the sanctions either.

The sanctions don't absolve these governments of their own responsibility for their citizens' misery; but that misery indicts the sanctions too. 

We are meant to believe that all of this war-mongering and sabre-rattling and collective punishment is in some sense ultimately meant to benefit the ordinary people of Venezuela and Iran; yet they are the ones who are suffering most as a result of them—raising the question of just whose "democracy" is being promoted—if the people supposedly meant to enjoy it are being destroyed in its name. 

As Isaiah Berlin put it: "[T]he maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher[.]" In the words of Alexander Herzen (citing Proudhon): "The republic is for man, not man for the republic." 

So too, if all of this campaign of global pressure on Venezuela and Iran (rounded out this morning by the news that Trump has started threatening renewed military action against Iran as well, in response to the protests) is ultimately meant to benefit their own people, they surely cannot be slaughtered and starved in its name!