The Wall Street Journalfollows up on its earlier reporting on the Venezuela embargo with another story on the likely effects of the administration’s escalation of the economic war:

The sanctions could have a dramatic impact on Venezuela’s already-collapsing economy, said Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist.

He said the little trade that Venezuela currently carries out with countries such as India and Malaysia could be undercut. U.S. financial institutions could be forced to further restrict transactions with businesses in Venezuela because of their interactions with the government in an economy with a large state influence, Mr. Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez has been consistently warningabout the damaging effects of sanctions on the Venezuelan economy all year, and he has soundedthe alarm about the increasing risk of famine. Venezuela was already on track to suffer what could be the worst famine on record in our hemisphere, and these new measures will make things even worse. Starving the government of its revenues is bound to have a deleterious effect on the entire economy, especially when the government has such a large role in the economy. Causing the economy to contract even more and even faster than it was contracting before now is a disaster for the population.

By causing extra hardship for the population, the administration is actually undermining opposition to the government:

The new U.S. sanctions could weaken efforts to remove Mr. Maduro inside Venezuela by deepening a humanitarian crisis that has forced millions of people to flee, said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the policy group Washington Office on Latin America, which supports negotiations and a new election.

“This is going to cause more economic difficulty for average people and what that does is it undermines mobilization against the regime,” he said.

As we have seen in other countries living under sanctions, ordinary people are so preoccupied with providing for themselves and their families that they have neither time nor resources to engage in political action. Since the U.S. is contributing to their misery, many people in Venezuela will probably be less inclined to support the outcome that Washington wants. Insofar as the opposition is identified with the sanctions, that is likely to hurt them politically. Sanctions usually do not weaken a regime internally, and instead it is the regime’s opponents that are harmed the most. As Rodriguez said in an FTarticle earlier this year:

“People thought that if you create an economic crisis you would bring down the government,” said Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at Torino Capital. “In democracies, that does happen but it’s not what happens in a dictatorship. The poorer the country is, the fewer resources there are, the more powerful the government becomes versus the rest of society.”

Perversely, the sanctions that regime changers want to use to collapse a government usually end up strangling the people while leaving the regime in place. The country as a whole is much worse off, but the people in power hang on.

While the administration tries to claim that the new measures won’t affect the private sector, Venezuelan businessmen don’t buy it:

An executive at a Venezuelan company said that he believed that the sanctions would have a negative impact on what is left of the private sector.

He said the plunge in oil revenues would lead to even less public spending and a further fall in demand. The government, which controls some raw materials, would be less able to supply private firms. Meanwhile, the costs of financing would rise, he said, and more companies that are vital in the supply chain would close.

The administration’s exemptions are mostly for public relations purposes to make the policy seem less destructive than it really is. We know from their Iran policy that these exemptions don’t work properly because of a lack of financing for payment and because fear of being penalized outweighs the benefit of doing business in the targeted country.

A negotiated solution to the crisis seems to be the only way forward that is likely to be successful, but the Trump administration’s action is a direct attack on the Norwegian-mediated dialogue currently taking place between the government and the opposition:

“He seems determined to sabotage them,” Phil Gunson, a Venezuela expert at the International Crisis Group, said of Mr. Bolton’s opposition to the negotiations and possible elections. “More than an ultimatum to Maduro, this sounds like an ultimatum to the opposition leadership.”

The administration seeks to undermine these negotiations because they stand a chance, however remote, that diplomacy can resolve something that their heavy-handed policy of sanctions and threats cannot. They would rather push Venezuela into the abyss for the sake of their disastrous regime change policy than accept a negotiated compromise that might offer the country some relief.

The Guardianreports on Bolton’s announcement of the new embargo on Venezuela at the Lima Group conference, and includes comments from regional experts on the likely consequences:

Some fear the latest sanctions will further aggravate an already dire humanitarian situation which has already forced millions to flee Venezuela, while others believe they will alienate Guaidó’s European backers who believe a negotiated solution is possible.

Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House thinktank, said Trump’s latest gambit was designed to achieve nothing but Maduro’s immediate downfall.

“This is intended to bring this government to its knees and to bring in Guaidó. That’s it … But it will not work. It will actually make Maduro’s government what it always wanted to be: a martyr,” Sabatini said.

Farid Kahhat, a professor of international relations at Lima’s Catholic University, said that while Maduro was to blame for Venezuela’s economic meltdown, “what the US is doing is making things worse – at least in the near future”.

The Trump administration is obviously not concerned about the harm that their sanctions policy has been doing to the people in Venezuela, and they will keep chasing their goal of regime change regardless of how many people are hurt or killed in the process. When sanctions were imposed on Venezuela’s oil sector six months ago, critics of the move warned that the sanctions would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis without dislodging Maduro. Starving people to force a change in government is the wrong thing to do in any case, but we can see that it has also been ineffective in bringing about the regime change that hawks want. We have been pointing out the damage caused by sanctions for all this time, and the Trump administration’s only response to evidence of the ongoing failure of their policy is to intensify the economic warfare that is suffocating the population. A Miami Heraldarticle from March included this quote that has proven to be all too prescient:

The deep and biting economic measures are predicated on the idea that Maduro will fall quickly and interim President Juan Guaidó — recognized by Washington and more than 50 countries — can form a transitional government and call new elections, said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the Crisis Group.

“But what if the plan doesn’t work? Suppose the government holds on and then you’ve duplicated the suffering and you haven’t solved the problem,” he said. “The prospect that it can be apocalyptic but not produce an outcome can be quite scary.”

Even before the newly-announced embargo, U.S. sanctions were causing more misery for the population, and now U.S. policy is going to cause a great deal more suffering by expanding the reach of the economic war.

The Washington Post also reports on the reaction to the embargo:

“There is no doubt that the new sanctions will severely limit the government’s maneuvering power,” said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Caracas polling firm Datanalisis. “But it will also affect the lives of all the residents of Venezuela who will be directly impacted.”

“The most complicated part is that it’s not clear at all that this will help oust Maduro or accelerate the solution to the problem because the key aspects that are holding Maduro to power, the military and territorial control, are firm.”

Put simply, you cannot wage an economic war against a country’s government without waging that war against all of the people in the country. The effects of sanctions do not discriminate, and they tend to fall hardest on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. The Trump administration is gambling with the lives of tens of millions of people on the chance that it might topple the government. In the worst-case scenario, the economic war the U.S. is waging will push the country into a major famine while Maduro clings to power in spite of everything. Like typical regime changers, the administration has not considered how their policy could go wrong, and they have given no thought to the terrible cost that the people will have to pay in the meantime.

The Guardian story concludes:

Sabatini said he was concerned that in its campaign to remove Maduro, the US was relying too much on its stick and not enough on carrots.

“All you have is a stick – and you are beating the hell out of Venezuela and beating your own allies,” he said. “This makes no sense.”

The policy “makes sense” only as a sop to hard-liners in the GOP and as a bid to win votes from Venezuelan expats, and even that last part is a stretch because the policy is proving to be such a destructive failure. The administration’s policy cannot resolve the crisis in Venezuela. It can only bludgeon Venezuelans as it tries to strike down Maduro. The policy has already made things worse, and it promises to do even more of the same in the coming months.

Hal Brands comments on the obstacles confronting advocates of foreign policy restraint. Here I think he makes too much of other political disagreements as a problem:

This creates a serious political problem for the restraint coalition: Supporting the administration on some issues while critiquing it on others is intellectually honest, but makes it hard to build the potent inside influence that sways policy. And as Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, has pointed out, many progressives will bridle at any cooperation with Trump, particularly as the 2020 election approaches. The reverse image of this problem will manifest should a progressive win the White House. The Democratic candidates who are the most sympathetic to progressive retrenchment, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, will be anathema to conservative members of the coalition because of their domestic policy preferences.

The fact that there is a restraint coalition at all suggests that this is not as much of an obstacle as Brands thinks. Conservative and libertarian supporters of restraint are interested in working with progressives toward shared foreign policy goals, and it is because we make changing foreign policy a priority that we aren’t going to let other disagreements get in the way of that. We know better than most that Sanders has been a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen and a leading critic of all unnecessary wars abroad. Warren has likewise been a fierce critic of U.S. support for the Saudi coalition. Opposition to involvement in the war on Yemen has been one of the things uniting antiwar activists on the left and right for the last several years. If one of them became president, conservative and libertarians advocates of restraint would be more than willing to support them on the policies that we agree with despite any other disagreements we might have with the rest of their agenda. Progressives could do the same thing with a Republican administration that actually practices restraint, but the Trump administration doesn’t do that. The only way that U.S. foreign policy is going to be reoriented towards restraint is if supporters of more peaceful and responsible statecraft build up support across the political spectrum so that restraint is always represented no matter which party happens to hold power.

Another one of the obstacles Brands identifies is also exaggerated:

Second, a progressive-conservative coalition is unstable by its very nature, because the differences between the two camps remain so profound.

There is no question that there are differences in emphasis, but antiwar and non-interventionist progressives and conservatives are united by quite a few things. There is a shared interest in holding the government accountable for its foreign policy decisions, democratizing foreign policy, and reasserting Congress’ role in matters of war and peace. There is the shared aversion to coercive and destruction policies of sanctions and military intervention. There is a shared recognition of the damage that indulging reckless clients can do. Supporters of foreign policy restraint are generally in agreement that the U.S. should respect international law, and we agree that the U.S. should seek diplomatic resolutions in our disputes with other states. By and large, advocates of restraint are also in agreement about the importance of arms control treaties and nonproliferation agreements, and that is certainly true of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute. I think we all see the value in keeping New START, and we all agree that reneging on the JCPOA was a terrible mistake. The differences Brands identifies may apply to generic Democrats and Republicans, but they don’t describe us very well at all.

Brands concludes:

Today, the state of U.S. opinion on foreign policy is ambiguous, which has created a window of opportunity for progressive and conservative advocates of restraint. But if a darkening geopolitical horizon, and especially the rise of a new superpower challenger in China, reawakens the globalist inclinations of the American public, that window may not stay open for long.

I’m not sure that there are “globalist inclinations” to be awakened. To the extent that the public favors U.S. engagement overseas, those inclinations have never been dormant, but “globalist inclinations” seems to suggest something more than that. The public is generally in favor of active U.S. engagement in the world, but the form of that engagement matters a great deal. Most Americans are not wedded to the U.S. being the global hegemon, and they strongly prefer engagement through trade and diplomacy. The less militarized, less ambitious foreign policy that supporters of restraint offer is very compatible with these preferences. Public opinion has been moving in the direction of restraint for many years, so that is probably not as much of an obstacle as it seems. There are many obstacles ahead for advocates of restraint, but for the most part they are to be found in the entrenched resistance to changing U.S. foreign policy and the vested interests that want to keep things the way they are.

Kimberly Ann Elliott tries to make sense of the thinking behind Trump’s escalating trade war with China:

But if the plan is to wait until after 2020 to try and conclude a deal with China, why increase the costs that American consumers and farmers will continue paying during the campaign? What is the end game? Apparently top White House advisers aren’t sure either; all except hard-liner Peter Navarro reportedly tried to talk the president out of imposing the latest tariffs. But Trump has been quite clear that he likes tariffs, and infamously claimed that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Maybe he really does believe his own propaganda that China is paying for the tariffs, rather than American companies, farmers and shoppers.

Trump seems to recognize that a strong economy and booming stock market are his best arguments for reelection next year. So why is he putting both at risk with this seemingly endless trade war?

It is always a safe bet that the president doesn’t make well-informed decisions, and it is usually the case that there is no discernible “plan” being implemented. Trump is as impulsive as he is ignorant, and that leads him to sabotage his own stated policy goals through petulant and provocative actions that will backfire on him. He also doesn’t seem to grasp that there are consequences to escalation by the U.S. Trump hasn’t been able or willing to see the connection between his “maximum pressure” campaign and the rising tensions with Iran, and he doesn’t see how ramping up the trade war with threats of additional tariffs predictably leads to an adverse Chinese response.

Because Trump’s approach to diplomacy and trade is zero-sum and all-or-nothing, he isn’t satisfied with anything less than the other side’s capitulation, and when that capitulation doesn’t happen he resorts to applying more pressure. Especially in the case of the trade war, the more pressure he tries to apply the more damage he ends up doing to the U.S. Insofar as Trump genuinely doesn’t understand who ends up paying the cost of his tariffs, he cannot be dissuaded from threatening to increase them because he doesn’t know that he is cutting himself off at the knees in doing so. The president has picked a fight in this trade war that he can’t really win, and he is one of the only people who seems to be unaware that he has already lost.

John Limbert comments on the Trump administration’s sanctions on Zarif and their bankrupt Iran policy as a whole:

The administration is not punishing an individual. It is rejecting the entire idea of diplomacy. Of course, it is no secret that Trump and company despise the practice of diplomacy, with its careful choice of language, and its emphasis on listening, empathy, and credibility. Like Casey Stengel’s 1963 Mets, they don’t know how to play the game and have chosen chest-beating and self-righteousness instead. Zarif may have a terrible case to argue, but he argues it as a professional.

We learned that Senator Rand Paul recently invited Zarif to meet President Trump at the White House. As Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser.” So far, there’s no sign the Iranians are ready for such a meeting. What did the president expect? Does he not realize the depth of mistrust that exists when his Secretary of State issues surrender demands to the Iranians and his national security advisor is a paid shill for the same Iranian opposition group that paralyzed the supreme leader’s right arm in an assassination attempt?

Limbert is right about all this, and I agree with him when he laments that there are no adults in charge capable of conducting a more rational and responsible foreign policy. Trump’s disdain for diplomacy has been obvious since the beginning of his presidency, and that disdain is one reason why his major foreign policy and trade initiatives fail to achieve their stated goals and lead to escalation and crisis. Trump and the officials around him are incapable or unwilling to see things as the other government sees them, they refuse to show the other government respect, and they are completely inflexible in their maximalist demands. There is no possibility of diplomatic progress when the Trump administration’s answer for everything is always more pressure, whether in the form of sanctions, tariffs, or both. All of this is on display with Trump’s Iran policy, which has amounted to breaking our government’s promises, betraying Iran’s trust, waging unjustified economic war against them, and pursuing a policy of regime change in all but name. Iran’s leaders have no incentive to talk to a deal-breaking, untrustworthy, aggressive government that seeks their destruction, and the Zarif sanctions confirm that the administration never really wanted to talk in the first place.

In addition to all that, there is a basic failure to understand the Iranian government’s behavior that distorts the Trump administration’s perception. I have recently been reading Gerard Toal’s Near Abroad, a very interesting study of the 2008 war with Georgia and the conflict in Ukraine and how these conflicts have been interpreted by the many political actors involved. There is one observation from the book that he made about how some Westerners see Russia that could just as easily be applied to how they see Iran. Toal writes:

Because most analysts are foreign to the state and culture under consideration, and because they have limited or no direct access to the private deliberations of state leaders, there is a general tendency to attribute observable public behavior to innate dispositional features of that leader, regime, or country. What this essentializing tendency does is systematically downplay, marginalize, and ignore the situational, contextual, and spatial factors that may account for state behavior.

He continues a little later:

This general habit is important for what it neglects. First, it tends to discount the detailed, empirical, contextual circumstance of a crisis. Contra Kagan, the details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s invasions are very significant….the practice provides little to no room for situational interpretations of foreign policy actions or efforts to see events through an adversary’s eyes. What leaders actually say about why they acted tends to be discounted or rewritten to conform to existing presumptions about their character, regime, and state. (p. 26)

Toal has more to say about this, but for our purposes this is enough to understand what he means. We have seen this habit in the way that Trump administration officials willfully misinterpret every Iranian action according to their assumptions and prejudices about why their government acts the way that it does. If Iran starts to exceed the limits set by the JCPOA, they assume that the “only” explanation for it is that they are seeking nuclear weapons. If Iran seizes an oil tanker after one of theirs was also seized, they ignore the context and assume that this is simply proof of the “revolutionary” regime’s malign nature. Despite deliberately provoking and threatening Iran for more than a year, the Trump administration casts everything Iran does as “aggression” because they insist on seeing Iran as the aggressor no matter what. Likewise, the Trump administration refuses to see that Iran has developed its missile program for defensive purposes following their experience in the war with Iraq, and instead portray every Iranian missile test as having something to do with developing ICBMs that Iran doesn’t have and isn’t trying to build.

Interpreting another state’s actions in reductive, essentializing ways is useful for vilification and propaganda purposes, but it guarantees misunderstanding why the other state acts the way it does and it usually leads to taking provocative and destabilizing actions that predictably cause the other state to react badly. Hawks that fall into the habit that Toal describes consistently fail to understand the other state’s view of the world, and so they continually blunder ahead into avoidable crises and conflicts.

The Wall Street Journalreports on the Trump administration’s plan to impose a total economic embargo on Venezuela:

The Trump administration is moving to impose a total economic embargo against the government of Venezuela, a significant escalation of pressure against the regime of President Nicolás Maduro and countries including Russia and China that continue to support him, a senior administration official said.

President Trump late Monday signed an executive order freezing all government assets and prohibiting transactions with it, unless specifically exempted, the first action of its kind against a government in the Western Hemisphere in more than 30 years. The move places Venezuela on a par with North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba, the only other countries currently under such stringent U.S. measures.

This is the “blockade” that Trump hinted at last week. It is a drastic escalation of the economic war that the U.S. is already waging against the country, and it will do tremendous harm to the civilian population. Economic embargoes are very effective in depriving ordinary people of necessities and cutting them off from the outside world. As the Cuba embargo has proven, they do not lead to the overthrow or weakening of the government. On the contrary, the more isolated and cut off from the rest of the world a country becomes the more power that gives a government and its cronies.

Trump’s despicable embargo is not the military blockade that he seemed to be suggesting last week, but it is no less destructive and horrible in its effects. By doing this, the president is dooming countless innocent people in Venezuela to die from hunger and preventable disease. The U.S. government is deliberately employing starvation as a weapon to pursue regime change in a neighboring country. There are few more reprehensible and unjust actions that our government can take against another country.

We know from the administration’s use of sanctions against Iran that humanitarian trade will be strangled by these measures. There is no way that the civilian population won’t be harmed by embargoing all business with the government, especially when it is the government that pays to bring in imports. The article concludes:

Outside observers also warn that sweeping sanctions and secondary sanctions on Venezuela could exacerbate the economic crisis and lend Mr. Maduro ammunition to blame Washington for the nation’s woes.

The action the U.S. is set to take grants some 21 exemptions to international and nongovernmental organizations for services such as humanitarian goods, mail, food, medicine and the internet.

However, experts said that this rarely works in practice.

“The administration hasn’t been very good at dedicating financial lines that would allow the purchase of food and medicine in sanctioned countries,” said Jeffrey Schott, an economic-sanctions expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank. “In practice, we still block food and medicine because the parties in the targeted regime that want to import it can’t get financing.”

As Brian Hook said about Iran, “The burden is not on the United States to identify the safe channels.” The Trump administration won’t feel any obligation to identify safe channels for humanitarian trade with Venezuela, either. Sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector were already propelling Venezuela towards a famine. A total embargo accelerates that process. Trump’s Venezuela policy amounts to starving the Venezuelan people to death to save them. It is criminal and outrageous, and Congress and the public must fight back against it.

Andrew Bacevich calls for reckoning with the consequences of American colonial empire in the Philippines:

Yet the Philippines represented an altogether different case. By no stretch of the imagination did the archipelago fall within “our backyard.” Furthermore, the Filipinos had no desire to trade Spanish rule for American rule and violently resisted occupation by U.S. forces. The notably dirty Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902—a conflict almost entirely expunged from American memory today—resulted in something like 200,000 Filipino deaths and ended in a U.S. victory not yet memorialized on the National Mall in Washington.

Bacevich is right when he says that the Philippine War has been “almost entirely expunged from American memory today.” It is significant that one of the only times in recent years that the Philippine War was remembered was so that it could provide fodder for the counterinsurgency fad among pro-war pundits. Max Boot was one of the chief advocates for counterinsurgency warfare, and he has cited the brutal occupation campaign in the Philippines as an example of how to win such wars. Greg Bankoff counted the costs of the “small war” in the Philippines that Boot praised in his book The Savage Wars of Peace, and he described them in this response to a positive review of the book back in 2002:

Start with the description of the war itself as “small.” Granted, the United States suffered only some 7,000 casualties, dead and wounded. But estimates of Filipino mortality range from 200,000 persons upward. This is hardly small, especially considering that the total Filipino population at the time was around seven million. Nor is it accurate to say the war ended in 1902, unless one accepts the terms of President Theodore Roosevelt’s November 1902 Brigandage Act, which redefined any band of more than three men as bandits and subjected them to 20 years imprisonment or the death penalty. In fact, guerrilla warfare continued until 1907, waged by popular revolutionary leaders who refused to accept the colonial yoke anew — men such as Luciano San Miguel (who died on the battlefield of Corral-na-Bato in March 1903), Macario Sakay (who was hanged on September 13, 1907) and Julian Montalan (who was sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled to Palawan until 1921). No, the war did not actually end in 1902, but the U.S. colonial authorities conveniently branded everything subsequent to that as ladronism, simple thievery.

Bankoff warned later in the same piece that “a distorted reconstruction of that past is likely to preview an equally distorted future.” Looking back seventeen years later at our multiple protracted wars, all of them enthusiastically supported by Boot and fellow neo-imperialists, we have to conclude that the future was horribly distorted in part by this willingness to lionize and whitewash the Philippine War as a model for U.S. foreign policy. Like that war, our ongoing wars have inflicted horrific losses on the local populations, they are completely divorced from the security of the United States, and the people we are fighting are fighting us because our forces are in their country.

If Boot’s distorted history has contributed to the distortion of our foreign policy, we could do worse than to begin by finding better reconstructions of the past. Daniel Immerwahr has done some important work in studying the consequences of our colonial empire on the people in the territories that our government took over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His book How to Hide an Empire recounts the history of how the U.S. obtained its overseas territories, how it abused them, and how it has created a very different kind of empire over the last seventy years.

Immerwahr recounts some of the opposition to the Philippine War from members of the Anti-Imperialist League:

As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party–hardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crow–could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was “criminal aggression,” the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of “greedy commercialism” and sure to ruin the country. “No nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” it warned. “Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.” (p. 95)

He also describes the tactics that U.S. forces used in the war:

Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.

The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not at fellow Americans, but as irksome “natives.” (p. 96)

If we hope to change U.S. foreign policy and repudiate empire, we have to remember first how we acquired it and the Americans that organized to oppose it.

P.S. Another similarity between the Philippine War and the wars of the last two decades is the length of the actual fighting. Immerwahr writes:

Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought. (p. 107)

The New York Times‘ hit piecemasquerading as a profile of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard begins with several paragraphs that unintentionally make the case for the Congresswoman from Hawaii:

Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its citizens to remember that.

She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign. She talks about the horror.

She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed its original atrocity.

“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.
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Ms. Gabbard, 38, was a soldier in Iraq and currently serves as a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, which she cites to temper her message: Get out of foreign wars. Leave other countries alone. Not everyone wants democracy.

If you’re a regular reader, you are probably already familiar with Gabbard’s opposition to what she calls regime change wars. Her presidential campaign is primarily a vehicle for delivering a scathing critique of U.S. foreign policy failures, and that is what she has been campaigning on. She is not strictly antiwar, but she is very much against wars for regime change because she recognizes that they have nothing to do with U.S. security. She is one of the most consistent and vocalcritics of the Trump administration’s extremely close relationship with Saudi Arabia and its support for the war on Yemen. More than any other candidate, she denounces the relationship with the Saudis in the strongest terms. The other night in the debate, she correctly called out the Trump administration for lending support to Al Qaeda through our government’s support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen. The Saudi coalition and its proxies fight alongside AQAP members, recruit them, and arm them. That has beendocumented by the Associated Press and others. Gabbard is telling the truth about this, but like everything else related to Yemen it is ignored.

If you knew nothing about her before reading the Times‘ profile, you wouldn’t have learned any of this. The title of the profile is “Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We’re Doomed,” and the profile plays up Gabbard’s supposed emphasis on “doom” while having virtually nothing accurate to say about the substance of her foreign policy views. The profile does make room for quoting Clinton Watts, who unfairly and maliciously dubs her “the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat” and an “agent of influence” for Russia, and claims that she thinks “the U.S. should withdraw from the world.” None of this is backed up by anything, and all of it is false. Whatever one thinks about Gabbard or her policy views, it is irresponsible for a major newspaper to print such unsubstantiated smears.

Like every politician, Gabbard is wrong about some things. Her embrace of Egypt’s dictatorship as an “ally” is misguided, but then so is U.S. policy towards Egypt. She has a tendency to take the anti-terrorist rhetoric of authoritarian states at face value, and that can leave her with a blind spot for the abuses and crimes those states commit. Her critics charge that she doesn’t criticize Assad and the Syrian government for their war crimes, and this is one of the only things from her record that the profile specifically mentions. But this attack requires ignoring things that Gabbard has said about Syria:

“You’re putting words in my mouth that I’ve never said,” Gabbard told McCain.

“An enemy of the United States is someone who threatens our safety and our security. There is no disputing the fact that Bashar al-Assad in Syria is a brutal dictator. There’s no disputing the fact that he has used chemical weapons and other weapons against his people,” she continued.

“This is not something that I’m disputing, nor am I apologizing or defending these actions,” the lawmaker said [bold mine-DL]. “My point is that the reality we are facing here is that since the United States started waging a covert regime change war in Syria starting in 2011, the lives of the Syrian people have not been improved.”

A fair assessment of Gabbard’s position on Syria would have acknowledged that she has addressed these attacks before, and it would have offered her or her campaign the opportunity to state what her position is instead of relying on the accusations of her detractors. There is none of that in this article.

Harry Kazianis speaks for many of us when he responded to the article:

This article is total trash and is every reason why so many Americans are fed up with outlets like the @nytimes (on the left and right): https://t.co/PVgAMr0VyJ

— Harry Kazianis (@GrecianFormula) August 2, 2019

It is strange that the Times bothered to profile a candidate polling at around 1-2% in the Democratic primaries. It makes more sense when we realize that the purpose of the article is to try to put Gabbard and other critics of U.S. foreign policy in the worst light possible. The author of the article, Nellie Bowles, tries very hard to make it seem as if Gabbard’s recognition of past U.S. crimes and disastrous wars is somehow a bad thing, but it doesn’t work. The funny thing is that a profile that is clearly intended to vilify her will just boost her candidacy and increase her visibility across the country.

When Trump said he was considering a blockade of Venezuela yesterday, it was possible to dismiss it as a meaningless statement that would have no policy implications. Unfortunately, Trump seems to have meant what he said:

Donald Trump is serious about a possible U.S. blockade of Venezuela, a senior administration official said Friday, saying that the country’s president Nicolas Maduro has a short window to voluntarily leave power.

It sounds like the Trump administration is moving towards military intervention against Venezuela after all. Ever since the failed would-be coup at the end of April, it seemed as if Trump had written off Venezuela and had turned his attention elsewhere. Now it appears that the U.S. could begin imposing a military blockade of the country in the coming months. The humanitarian implications of a blockade alone make it completely unjustifiable. Set aside for a moment the fact that blockading Venezuela serves no U.S. interests and would have no international legitimacy or support, and just consider that it would speed up and exacerbate a likely famine that our government’s sanctions have already hastened. Blockading a country suffering from a major economic and humanitarian crisis would be criminal, and it would inflict even more misery and death on tens of millions of innocent people.

The article adds:

But the official said Trump’s statement should be taken seriously and is the direction U.S. policy is headed with regard to Venezuela. The official asked not to be identified as a condition of participation in a briefing for reporters.

It was just a little over six months ago that the U.S. recklessly took sides in Venezuela’s internal political crisis. Since the start of the regime change policy, the U.S. has imposed cruel sanctions that inflict collective punishment on the population, and it is now heading towards unjustified and illegal military action. This is where misguided meddling in the internal affairs of other countries usually leads, and this is why the U.S. should stay out of the political disputes of other countries.

Congress and the public must oppose any attempt at a blockade by the Trump administration. A blockade of Venezuela won’t make the U.S. or the region more secure, and it is a stepping stone on the path to launching attacks on the Venezuelan government and possible invasion. For the sake of the people of Venezuela, regional stability, and our own interests, we must reject a blockade of Venezuela.

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