Venezuela is back in the international news cycle courtesy of a long-running interventionist script that is played on the world stage year on year and decade after decade. The foreword changes from the global war on terror and search for weapons of mass destruction to sanctioning countries to facilitate democracy for the sake of the people of that very country. Venezuela stands in the same column with years of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and competing claims of legitimacy.

To view Venezuela only through the lens of domestic misrule is to ignore the larger forces that have shaped its trajectory. The country, however, remains economically crippled, socially fractured, and politically frozen. The rot reveals the enduring pattern of external interference in Latin America, ala Africa and the Middle East, to destabilise and gain control of subsurface riches and the application of economic coercion as a tool of foreign policy.

The economic implosion of Venezuela did not happen overnight. Massive oil reserves and their revenues, weak institutional reform, and political polarisation left the country vulnerable. However, the turning point came when domestic politics were internationalised. Claims of legitimacy were rapidly endorsed or rejected by external powers. Sanctions were imposed at an unprecedented breadth, and diplomatic isolation became the primary instrument of pressure. The stated objective was democratic restoration; the outcome was a societal collapse. This pattern is not unfamiliar in Latin America. From Guatemala in the 1950s to Chile in the 1970s, from Nicaragua during the Cold War to more recent episodes in Honduras and Bolivia, interventions have repeatedly disrupted political evolution rather than correcting the course. The justification has swung between anti-communism........

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