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In February 2019, US President Donald Trump told an enthusiastic crowd in Miami that “all options are on the table” to pressure the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. This phrase, often repeated by Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, summarized the US strategy of applying “maximum pressure” on the Maduro regime. The Trump administration believed that imposing individual and sectoral sanctions, indicting the regime’s leadership, and threatening military intervention would cause the Venezuelan government to crumble.
Weeks earlier, in January, Juan Guaidó, the speaker of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, had been sworn in as the interim president of Venezuela. He was immediately recognized by over 50 countries, most of which were leading democracies in Europe and the Americas. Neither the Venezuelan opposition nor its foreign allies recognized the May 2018 presidential election in which Maduro won a second term. The National Constituent Assembly, a supra-constitutional entity packed with regime loyalists, had called and organized the elections, provoking an opposition boycott. Most opposition parties had been banned, and their candidates were persecuted.
The United States quickly imposed harsh economic sanctions after recognizing Guaidó, aiming to suffocate the Maduro regime’s sources of income. State-controlled oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) was no longer able to sell oil to Citgo, its subsidiary in the United States. These measures added to sanctions imposed in August 2017 that prohibited the Venezuelan government from borrowing in US financial markets, and to a number of individual sanctions imposed over the past several years, freezing the assets of top government officials and regime allies and banning them from entering the United States. Sanctions were eventually also extended to third-country companies trading with PDVSA, closing off most possibilities for Venezuela to sell crude oil, which had accounted for around 97 percent of its dollar revenue stream.
The goal of the sanctions was to pressure the military and other levers of power to withdraw support for Maduro and transfer power to the National Assembly, the last democratically elected institution in the country. The refrain that “all options” were on the table signaled that the Trump administration was willing to go beyond sanctions; the threat of military intervention was intended to prompt the Venezuelan army to oust Maduro. But the strategy of maximum pressure failed...