July’s elections in Venezuela represent the culmination of President Biden’s failed Venezuela policy. To understand why his strategy failed in Venezuela, it is clarifying to consider his similarly ineffective approach to Iran. His administration’s policies in both countries reflect analogous strategies: easing of economic and financial pressure, relabeling sanctions relief as humanitarian relief, and the reliance on good faith diplomacy without strict accountability measures. Typically associated with President Biden’s Iran policy, the same Biden playbook has been applied to Venezuela.

Years of sanctions relief, presented as humanitarian aid and paired with empty promises of facilitating constructive dialogue between Nicolás Maduro and his opposition, have led to another round of foreseeable election fraud by Maduro. For example, in June of 2022 the U.S. eased sanctions for European oil companies to conduct the debt-for-oil swaps Maduro desperately needed, ostensibly in the name of “encouraging political dialogue” with his opposition. In October 2023, the Biden Administration significantly eased sanctions, allowing Venezuela to sell its oil to the West until April 2024. This set of sanctions relief, not unlike the September 2023 U.S.-Iran hostage for $6 billion of sanctions relief deal a month earlier, saw U.S.-Venezuelan hostages returned to the U.S for cash. Both deals were made within the larger context of an inherited Obama era strategic framework, which seeks diplomatic regional accommodations with adversarial powers abroad as its overriding concern.

In response to President Biden’s goodwilled diplomatic efforts, in May 2024, Venezuela revoked its invitation to the EU to observe its upcoming election. In July 2024, the Maduro-controlled supreme court banned the opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from running. In the end, Maduro stole the election and has so far succeeded in violently quashing internal dissent.

The bulk of sanctions were initially introduced by Trump in August 2017 and significantly expanded in January 2019 in response to Maduro’s fraudulent electoral victory of 2018. Not unlike Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran, these sanctions were deployed to pressure Maduro and ultimately bring about his removal. In the case of the Biden Administration, the Trump Administration’s sticks were turned into carrots, and Maduro sensed weakness. Setting aside the details of negotiations and specific sanctions imposed or revoked, a basic game theory analysis would have predicted the outcome: the United States eased its maximum pressure campaign in exchange for symbolic agreements without creating any leverage to punish Maduro if he chose to steal the election. Ultimately, Maduro and his allies pocketed the relief funds and stole the election anyway, knowing that the worst the Biden Administration would do was reinstate the policies President Biden inherited from President Trump.

In the context of an election year, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan cannot afford to embarrass Vice President Harris. Rather than restarting the Trump Administration’s maximum pressure approach, and thus admitting a mistake and giving Republicans the opportunity to criticize their policy reversal. The politically expedient course of action is now to downplay the crisis in Venezuela as a regional issue, and outsource this crisis to the symbolic proceduralism of international institutions alongside other regional governments. The surge in already astronomical levels of Venezuelan migration may arrive before November, yet the Biden Administration likely calculates these migrants will arrive after.

One would expect that, during a massive migration crisis at the U.S. southern border, the United States would exert serious pressure on a narco-regime that regularly hosts adversaries, including jihadist terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Russian military and intelligence operators. Today, Venezuela’s oil exports amount to 760,000 barrels per day (bpd). Crucially for Maduro, half of these shipments are supported by U.S. licenses and have destinations in the U.S. and Europe. Most of the other oil flows to China, which like Iranian oil, has not been subject to sanctions enforcement. In comparison, when Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, Venezuela’s oil exports were at a multi-decade low, averaging 448,000 bpd.

Americans should be concerned about the strengthening of hostile nations within the Western Hemisphere, especially in the context of an intensifying great power competition with China, Russia, and Iran. While other Latin American nations like Mexico should continue to be our first national security priority south of our border, Venezuela under Maduro also presents a unique threat to the American homeland. Like the lead up to the Cuban Missile crisis, problems ignored south of our border remain dormant until they escalate into crises that demand urgent attention, often at a point when our options become even more limited and the stakes are much higher.