Rejecting Measures That Harm Civilians

The growing comparison between today’s pressure on Venezuela and the 1903 European naval blockade is not rhetorical excess. It is historically and morally precise.

What is being imposed on Venezuela today — through financial strangulation, de facto blockades, and sanctions designed to paralyse everyday life — is siege warfare by other means. And siege warfare, aimed at breaking civilians rather than defeating armies, is a medieval practice that has no place in the 21st century.

Economic coercion that deliberately inflicts suffering on a population is not diplomacy. It is collective punishment. And it does not work.

History is unambiguous. Governments under siege do not surrender; they hunker down. Elites insulate themselves. Security services tighten control. Scarcity becomes a political tool. The population suffers — and the regime survives.

Venezuela fits this pattern exactly. The assumption that more pressure will somehow force capitulation misunderstands both the Venezuelan state and the dynamics of external coercion. Sanctions do not weaken such governments; they entrench them, providing a permanent external enemy and a ready-made explanation for failure.

This should matter to Britain.

Sir Keir Starmer has been explicit that his foreign policy rests on human rights, international law, and the defence of a “rules-based order.” Those principles cannot be applied selectively. They lose credibility if they are invoked forcefully in Ukraine but quietly set aside when economic warfare targets a politically inconvenient government elsewhere.

A blockade — whether formal or informal, maritime or financial — is not a technical policy instrument. Under international law, it is an act of war. When it predictably deprives civilians of food, medicine, energy, and economic survival, it violates the most basic humanitarian norms Britain claims to uphold.

That is not a legal quibble. It is the moral core of the issue.

Defenders of the current strategy often reach for familiar justifications: drugs, criminal networks, regional instability. But the “narco-state” narrative used to legitimise extreme measures against Venezuela has long since collapsed. It was never a serious analytical framework; it was a political convenience.

The reality is simpler. Venezuela is being punished not primarily for its actions, but for its defiance — for surviving outside Washington’s preferred political order.

Strategically, the consequences are counterproductive.

Every tightened sanction and every implicit endorsement of economic siege pushes Venezuela further toward Russia and China. This is not conjecture; it is observable fact. When Western markets are closed and Western diplomacy is replaced by coercion, alternative partners step in.

If the stated goal is to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Latin America, this policy achieves precisely the opposite.

Meanwhile, the human cost falls where it always does: on pensioners, hospital patients, and low-income families. Inflation, shortages, collapsing public services — these are not abstract macroeconomic effects. They are daily realities imposed in the name of “values.”

That contradiction should trouble any British government that claims moral seriousness.

There is an alternative, and it is not appeasement.

A negotiated approach, grounded in realism rather than moral posturing, would recognise legitimate concerns while abandoning the fantasy of regime collapse through suffering. It would focus on verifiable commitments, phased relief, and international guarantees — not maximalist demands backed by punishment.

Above all, it would treat Venezuela as a political problem to be resolved, not a moral lesson to be inflicted.

Britain faces a choice. It can continue to follow a strategy that has failed everywhere it has been tried, or it can reclaim the language of law, proportionality, and diplomacy that once defined its global role.

If the UK wishes to be taken seriously as a defender of human rights and the rule of law, it must say plainly that starving a population into submission is unacceptable — whoever proposes it, and wherever it is applied.

Siege warfare belongs in history books, not modern foreign policy.

And Britain should have the courage to say so.