Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington's efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute—if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering—is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it—with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.

The Central Role of Sanctions in Projecting Imperial Coercive Power

Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony. Coercive economic measures, commonly called “sanctions,” were first deployed by Franklin D. Roosevelt against Mexico in the 1930s. They were used by Dwight D. Eisenhower to pressure Guatemala in 1954 and then—most drastically—against Cuba by both Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in 1960. Today, one-third of the world’s nations are under US sanctions.

Sanctions—a form of collective punishment—are held by legal experts to be contrary to international law. Paradoxically, not only does Washington disregard international law in imposing sanctions, but the US then behaves as if they are applying the law when, for example, they pirate a ship delivering humanitarian supplies to a sanctioned country.

The shared strategic objective of the bipartisan Washington consensus is the projection of US hemispheric dominance.

Use of sanctions has accelerated because successive administrations have seen their unique advantages. Compared with “forever wars,” they are more easily justified to US voters as cost free and as not imperiling US lives. If sanctions are the precursor to military intervention—as in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and, of course, Venezuela in 2026—the interventions have usually been limited, with few US casualties.

Yet sanctions are very potent: Between 2010 and 2021, they caused around 560,000 deaths globally each year—more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat.

While sanctions are made more palatable by being described as “targeted” at governments or individuals seen as undesirable by Washington, in practice the “targeting” is deliberately far wider. Sanctions do most damage to the poorest sectors of societies—the sectors most likely to support progressive governments. The barely veiled message is that only by withdrawing this support will such communities be able to prosper and avoid the threat of even greater US intervention.

The frequent description of sanctions as “targeted” carries another implication—that they are intended to have a precise and conclusive effect. However, while sanctions cause severe economic damage, there is little evidence that they achieve intended regime change. Even so, sanctions on countries which refuse to change are maintained and—very frequently—intensified. Democrats are as guilty of this folly as Republicans.

Indeed, US sanctions have imperial utility through their “demonstration effect”: attempting to cripple progressive alternatives to the neoliberal world order. Recently subjected to draconian sanctions, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel proclaimed, “Cuba is not a failed state; Cuba is a besieged state.” Still, infant mortality in Cuba is lower than among African Americans.

Transitioning to “Democracy” in Venezuela

In the case of Venezuela, the Democrats have criticized the Republicans from the right, complaining that the cudgel of imperial power against essentially defenseless small states has not been wielded with sufficient malice.

Washington has imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela since 2015 in efforts to asphyxiate its Bolivarian Revolution. The transparently false rationale for continuing sanctions is that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. Although the threat is obviously the other way around, mainstream Democrats have not exposed this lie. How could they, when it originated with President Barack Obama and was subsequently echoed by President Joe Biden and then Trump?

Despite the horrific toll of an estimated 100,000 excess deaths attributed to US-imposed sanctions, Venezuela has resisted and maintained an unbroken continuity of leadership from Hugo Chávez to Nicolás Maduro and to now Delcy Rodríguez. And that’s the rub for the Democrats.

Ranking Democrat members of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY) and Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), issued a “request [for] a clear explanation” of Trump’s Venezuela policy. Their meek missive came a full five months after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, an operation that resulted in more than 100 collateral deaths. Meanwhile, more than 200 occupants of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have been subjected to extrajudicial murder by the Trump administration.

Yet these inconvenient facts are absent from the June 8 Democratic Party congressional foreign-policy leadership’s statement on Venezuela. Their complaint is that Trump’s White House has failed to sufficiently “exercise its leverage.” As they put it, “As of today, the [state] department has yet to provide any evidence the Trump administration is doing any of this hard work.”

The contradiction of kidnapping a lawful head of state in the name of restoring democracy does not trouble the Democrats. Rather, they “strongly support the Venezuelan people’s right........

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