The growing comparison between today’s pressure on Venezuela and the European naval blockade of 1903 is not rhetorical excess. It is historically and morally accurate.
What is being imposed on Venezuela today – through financial strangulation, de facto blockades and sanctions designed to paralyze everyday life – is a siege war by other means. And siege warfare, aimed at crushing civilians rather than defeating armies, is a medieval practice that has no place in the 21st century.
Economic coercion that intentionally inflicts suffering on a population is not diplomacy. It is a collective punishment. And it doesn’t work.
The story is clear. Besieged governments do not surrender; they hide away. Elites isolate themselves. Security services are tightening control. Scarcity becomes a political instrument. The population suffers – and the regime survives.
Venezuela fits this pattern exactly. The assumption that more pressure will somehow lead to surrender misunderstands both the Venezuelan state and the dynamics of external coercion. Sanctions do not weaken such governments; They entrench them and provide a permanent external enemy and a ready-made explanation for failure.
This should matter to Britain.
Sir Keir Starmer has made it clear that his foreign policy is based on human rights, international law and the defense of a “rules-based order”. These principles cannot be applied selectively. They lose credibility when they are used forcefully in Ukraine but are quietly set aside when the economic war targets a politically inconvenient government elsewhere.
A blockade – whether formal or informal, maritime or financial – is not a technical political tool. According to international law, this is an act of war. If it predictably deprives civilians of food, medicine, energy and economic survival, it violates the most basic humanitarian norms that Britain supposedly upholds.
This is not a legal dispute. It is the moral core of the problem.
Defenders of the current strategy often resort to familiar justifications: drugs, criminal networks, regional instability. But the “drug state” narrative that legitimized extreme measures against Venezuela has long since collapsed. It was never a serious analytical framework; it was a political convenience.
Reality is simpler. Venezuela is being punished not primarily for its actions, but for its resistance – for surviving outside Washington’s preferred political order.
Strategically speaking, the consequences are counterproductive.
Any tightening of sanctions and any tacit endorsement of an economic siege pushes Venezuela further towards Russia and China. This is not a guess; it is an observable fact. When Western markets close and Western diplomacy is replaced by coercion, alternative partners step in.
If the stated goal is to limit the influence of Russia and China in Latin America, this policy achieves exactly the opposite.
Meanwhile, the human cost is falling where it always does: among retirees, hospital patients and low-income families. Inflation, shortages, collapse of public services – these are not abstract macroeconomic effects. They are everyday realities imposed in the name of “values.”
This contradiction should worry any British government that claims moral seriousness.
There is an alternative, and it is not an appeasement.
A negotiating approach based on realism rather than moral posturing would acknowledge legitimate concerns while abandoning the fantasy of regime collapse through suffering. The focus would be on verifiable commitments, gradual relief and international guarantees – not maximalist demands backed by penalties.
Above all, it would treat Venezuela as a political problem to be solved rather than a moral lesson to be taught.
Britain faces a choice. It can continue to pursue a strategy that has failed everywhere, or it can reclaim the language of law, proportionality and diplomacy that once defined its global role.
If the UK wants to be taken seriously as a defender of human rights and the rule of law, it must say clearly that starving a population into submission is unacceptable – whoever proposes it and wherever it is applied.
Siege warfare belongs in the history books, not in modern foreign policy.
And Britain should have the courage to say so.
