A distinguished Venezuelan economist is warning that the Trump administration’s decision to impose an oil export embargo via a military blockade could cause “the first famine in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.” Francisco Rodríguez, who teaches at the University of Denver and is an analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is also calculating that a U.S. invasion of his home country could produce as many as 2000 American casualties, “with Venezuelan military and civilian casualties in the tens of thousands.” Whatever Trump’s new regime change war is, one thing it will not be is a cakewalk.

Rodríguez is not a partisan who is distorting the truth to defend Nicolas Maduro’s illegitimate government. In fact, his comprehensive work, The Collapse of Venezuela, discloses that in the past he had even advised the opposition to Maduro’s controversial predecessor, Hugo Chavez. But his hard-headed realistic views, backed by academic analysis, are more sad proof that the U.S. mainstream media has largely botched its coverage of Venezuela’s crisis, and is now raising the risk of a replay of America’s catastrophic 2003 invasion of........

© New Republic