President Joe Biden’s reported desire to lower gas prices by easing sanctions on Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro’s regime drew a stern rebuke from one of Biden’s top Senate allies just as U.S. officials moved to ban imports of Russian oil.
“Nicolas Maduro is a cancer to our hemisphere and we should not breathe new life into his reign of torture and murder,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said late Monday. “As such, I would strongly oppose any action that fills the pockets of regime oligarchs with oil profits while Maduro continues to deprive Venezuelans of basic human rights, freedoms, and even food.”
Venezuela has labored under intense economic sanctions since 2019, when then-President Donald Trump recognized a top opposition lawmaker as the legitimate president of Venezuela under the national constitution after Maduro claimed victory in elections widely condemned as fraudulent. Maduro, who managed to remain in power with the assistance of Russia and China, has taken the war in Ukraine as an occasion to campaign for the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil.
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“Here lies the oil of Venezuela, which is available for whomever wants to produce and buy it, be it an investor from Asia, Europe or the United States,” Maduro said last week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine under the protection of Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal, which he invoked to deter a Western military effort to protect Ukraine from the Russian onslaught. Biden’s team, taking that nuclear threat seriously, countered by imposing crippling economic sanctions on Russia but hesitated to blackball Russia’s energy exports.
“If we really wanted to shut down Russian oil exports, we could try to do that — we could try to shut down their exports to Europe and Asia too,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, another New Jersey Democrat, said Monday on the Yahoo! News Skullduggery podcast. “But that would absolutely have a huge impact on global energy prices and gas prices in our country … Some of my Republican colleagues have been urging Biden to do that while preparing to then blame Biden for the inevitable rise in gas prices.”
Biden is expected to announce a ban on U.S. imports of Russian oil, which Malinowski said would have mere “symbolic” value in comparison to sanctions that target the global market for Russian energy. The news of Biden’s intention coincided with a new statement from the Republican National Committee that condemned the administration’s energy policies.
“Under Joe Biden, families are paying more for gas than ever before,” the RNC said. “After killing American energy independence, Biden is turning to our adversaries abroad for America’s energy needs. American families are feeling the pain at the pump, and Biden and the Democrats do not care and are making it worse.”
Venezuelan oil might hold the potential to offset the loss of Russian oil, but Menendez’s rebuke could complicate Biden’s plans to resolve the economic and political dilemmas flowing from the war in Ukraine.
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“The Biden administration’s efforts to unify the entire world against a murderous tyrant in Moscow should not be undercut by propping up a dictator under investigation for crimes against humanity in Caracas,” Menendez said. “The democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people, much like the resolve and courage of the people of Ukraine, are worth much more than a few thousand barrels of oil.”
