On Sunday, Nicolás Maduro did what dictators do. He lied, cheated, and stole another election.
When Venezuelans went to the polls, they had no meaningful chance of ending Chavismo’s stranglehold on their country. But their efforts were nothing short of heroic: Media reports say that they braved threats of violence and faced gunfire as they lined up to vote. Exit polls indicate that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won. Maria Corina Machado, the opposition leader so feared by Maduro that the government blocked her from running, said that González had won 70 percent of the vote.
Maduro claimed victory, and his government’s electoral council published a result claiming that the Venezuelan leader had beat his opponent by seven points.
Now the Biden administration must carefully consider its next steps. It is waiting for the electoral council to publish precinct-level results (or not) and for statements of concern to come in from other governments. There have been a few such statements already, including from Javier Milei and, surprisingly, from the leftist president of Chile, Gabriel Boric.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed “serious concern” about the election result, but his cautious approach stops far short of describing reality: This was a stolen election that merits an immediate, strong, and unequivocal response. Unfortunately, it does not look like one is on the way.
By waiting for the international community to react, and for the Maduro regime to publish the election results, the administration is just placing a fig leaf on its latest failed foreign policy.
The Biden administration has chosen to enable the regime for three years through sanctions relief.
In the most worrying development of that policy, last year, it issued a waiver for existing sanctions targeting transactions involving Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. While the White House moved to rescind the broader waiver in April, citing the regime’s disqualification of Machado, the damage had been done. It also still allowed for narrower waivers to be issued to specific companies.
Administration officials argue that their deal is what got election observers into the country in the first place and made it possible for exit polls to be compiled.
But looking at the broad sweep of Biden’s staggeringly naïve outreach to Venezuela now, it’s more obvious than ever that extending any form of relief to Maduro has done more harm than good.
When it agreed to waive the sanctions, and to release certain Maduro allies as part of a prisoner swap last year, the U.S. signaled that it could find a way to work with the strongman and even that it assesses that he may possibly be a good-faith interlocutor. Former climate envoy John Kerry personified this approach when he shook Maduro’s hand, laughing with him, on the sidelines of a climate conference in 2022.
But Maduro was never the partner that Biden officials deluded themselves into believing he could be. And once again, developments abroad have overtaken this administration’s ability to execute competent policies that advance the national interest.
It’s time for a course correction. In addition to reversing its appeasement of Maduro, the administration can do the right thing by throwing America’s full support behind the Venezuelan people as they embark in the coming days on what will hopefully become an existential challenge to the regime.