Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro
Photo:
LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILORIA/REUTERS
In negotiating with oil-producing dictators, the Biden Administration has a consistent strategy: Make concessions in hope the other side will return the favor. It hasn’t worked with Iran, and now the White House is trying with the thugs who run Venezuela. What could go wrong?
The U.S. lifted Trump-era sanctions on Caracas over the weekend, renewing a license for
to pump oil again in its joint ventures with the state-owned oil company PdVSA. The U.S. will also unfreeze $3 billion in Venezuelan assets for what it says will be “humanitarian” needs. In exchange, dictator
Nicolás Maduro
is promising to negotiate free and fair elections in talks with the opposition in Mexico City.
Venezuela once produced 3.4 million barrels of oil a day and was the richest nation in Latin America. But two decades of socialism have degraded petroleum infrastructure and exiled human capital. PdVSA now pumps fewer than 700,000 barrels a day, and Mr. Maduro relies on narcotics trafficking to pay his military.
Mr. Maduro wants to produce more oil, and the Biden Administration also wants more oil to replace Russian supplies reduced by the Ukraine war. Easing permitting rules on U.S. federal land offends the Democratic Party’s climate donors. So the Administration has gone hat in hand to OPEC and the Saudis and now Venezuela. It’s mind-boggling to see the U.S. go begging to dictators when the U.S. has huge untapped reserves.
Oil analysts say that even with new licenses Venezuelan output is unlikely to increase by more than about 0.2% of world demand in the next year or two. So the Administration now says the sanctions relief for Caracas is unrelated to oil and instead is a carrot for talking with the opposition about returning to democracy.
Venezuela has made similar overtures before, only to rig the next…
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