How Trump's Venezuela Strategy Could Strengthen Maduro

The current U.S. approach to Venezuela is a deliberate financial strangulation strategy, as we have previously noted, with the objective of degrading Maduro’s ability to fund his patronage network and parallel economic networks. This week’s escalation in the form of asset seizures and tanker interdictions is designed to raise transaction costs prohibitively, if it doesn’t backfire first. This is classic soft regime change logic that assumes–perhaps erroneously–that this economic pain will fragment the elite faster…