Opinion: Pompeo reaches the dead end of Trump’s Venezuela policy
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a news conference Sunday at a warehouse where international humanitarian aid for Venezuela is being stored near a cross-border bridge in Cucuta, Colombia. By Francisco Toro Francisco Toro Email Bio April 15 at 2:41 PM On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did something odd: Standing next to Colombia’s president at the Venezuelan border in front of a shipment of U.S.
It’s no longer a fresh insight to say that the administration’s Venezuela strategy has stalled, or even that it’s now in grave danger of failing. As expected, U.S. oil sanctions have hit Venezuela’s export earnings hard. That shut off a major source of revenue Maduro was using both to keep Venezuelans alive and to fund the repressive apparatus that keeps him in power .
Pompeo and Trump were repeatedly warned, back in January, that by switching diplomatic recognition to Guaidó, they could be heading into this kind of dead end. For hundreds of years, standard diplomatic practice has been to recognize governments on the basis of fact, not law.
To Pompeo, and to his boss, flouting the diplomatic rule-book was a feature of this Venezuela policy, not a bug. But his speech on the Colombian border on Sunday lays bare the limitations of this approach. The diplomatic rule-book wasn’t written by a bunch of liberals on CNN to thwart the designs of the Trump administration. It developed gradually over a very long time to codify hard-learned diplomatic lessons. You ignore it at your peril.
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