In this week’s magazine’s editorial, “Night Falls on Venezuela,” we took 1,200 words or so to describe the desperate state into which the country has fallen. To sum up: The people of Venezuela are starving to death. Bands of hungry looters roam the streets of its cities, the currency is worthless, and no one can create wealth thanks to incompetent and corrupt regulators backed by the regime.
The governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro have ruined the nation’s economy in the time-honored way: by controlling it. What money the government has comes from the state-owned oil company; it funds a police state solely concerned with protecting the totalitarian party of Chavismo and destroying its enemies. The democratic opposition has either been brutalized into silence or bought off. The few still willing openly to oppose Maduro are fractured by ideological differences and exhausted by poverty.
We reluctantly concluded that the only way to help the people of Venezuela is to cut off Maduro’s sole source of money, oil:
We realize, of course, that very few in the U.S. government are contemplating this step. It would be a difficult and costly one on both sides. Citgo—the Houston-based subsidiary of PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company—would in effect be shut down, costing thousands of jobs on America’s Gulf Coast and raising gas prices everywhere. But it’s the only way to bring Maduro down and give Venezuelans the chance to live.
There may be a less costly way, though, to rattle and embarrass Maduro’s regime, even if it won’t threaten its existence. It’s an unconventional idea—and maybe “unconventional” is another word for crazy—but either word might fairly describe the current U.S. administration.
If Maduro’s government is starving its people, and if there is no feasible way to remove him and no one yet ready to take his place, the United States and its allies can aid Venezuelans directly by coordinating a massive humanitarian airlift. A forcible transport of food and medical supplies to, say, the country’s five largest cities—Caracas, Maracaibo, Maracay, Valencia, and Barquisimeto—would accomplish at least three aims at once. If nothing else, a large-scale and sustained airlift would (1) save some not insignificant number of people from starvation. It would also (2) humiliate a detestable regime that cherishes international prestige. And (3) an airlift led by the United States and joined by Canada, Britain, the E.U. states, and perhaps other allies—the whole operation carried out by the U.S. military—would convey an unforgettable message of friendship to the persecuted and oppressed of Venezuela.
Such an aggressive humanitarian intervention, effected against the will of the Maduro government, comes with risks. Government forces might try to stop it, just as the Soviets wouldn’t allow aid to West Berlin in 1948 and 1949, and as Burma wouldn’t allow humanitarian aid deliveries after the cyclone of 2008. If Maduro were to stop a U.S.-led humanitarian airlift, the policy should be to overrule him, as President Truman overruled the Soviets. An airlift to Venezuela would have to be what Larry Minear has called “coercive humanitarianism.”
It might be a wild idea. Perhaps the saner move would be the more immediately consequential one of embargoing the country’s oil. But either is better than watching another generation of Venezuelans starve.
