Bolton: US May Sanction Foreign Companies for Doing Business With Venezuela

According to John Bolton, the Trump Administration remains committed to imposing regime change in Venezuela. In the near term, this is likely to mean a major new round of sanctions aimed at punishing foreign companies that do business with Venezuela.

This would be a major shift. Current US sanctions are aimed at preventing Venezuela from exporting oil, or at least getting paid for it. The expectation that the US can unilaterally cut the country off from the entire world through sanctions would be a huge escalation.

This is only one of the “series” of measures Bolton said to expect. Bolton is known to favor military options, and talked up the idea of the Monroe Doctrine justifying US intervention “to prevent foreign interference and even recolonization.”

This is a weird way of trying to spin the very interventionist US behavior in Venezuela, which is centered around trying to remove an elected president and replace him with an opposition leader seen more in line with US interests. While the Trump Administration has styled this as part of a global war on socialism, it’s also hard to deny that it amounts to US foreign interference in a major way.