WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th August, 2020) The US strategy to immediately recognize Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaido and impose heavy sanctions on Caracas has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, Senator Chris Murphy said during a hearing on Tuesday.
"Our policy has been misguided by fundamentally flawed assumptions from the very beginning," Murphy said. "Our Venezuela policy over the last year and a half has been an unmitigated disaster. And if we aren't honest about that, then we can't self-correct."
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Murphy added, was easily able to portray the unelected opposition official as a US puppet.
"We have to admit that our big play recognizing Guaido right out of the gate and then moving quickly to implement sanctions just didn't work," the senator said. "All it did was harden Russia and Cuba's role in Venezuela and allow Maduro to paint Guaido as an American patsy."
Murphy said that Washington could have used the prospect of US recognition as leverage and spent more time trying to get European allies and other partners on the same page. Moreover, Murphy said that Washington could have spent more time trying to talk to China and Russia early.
"But all we did was play all our cards on day one and it didn't work," he said. "It's just been an embarrassing mistake after mistake since."
The Trump administration, he added, thought having Guaido declare himself as interim president and putting aid on the border would be enough to force a change in government.
"Then, we tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year and it blew up in our face when all the generals that were supposed to break with Maduro decided to stick with him in the end," he continued. "We undermined Norway's talks last summer and then in March we released a transition framework that frankly is almost a carbon copy of the very one that was in front of the parties last year."
Murphy said the US now faces an election in the Latin American country, scheduled to take place in December, which the opposition refused to enter.
"We are going to be in a position where we are recognizing someone as a leader of Venezuela who doesn't control the government, who doesn't run the military and doesn't even hold office," he said. "We don't do this in other places. Nobody knows the name of the guy who finished second in the 2018 Russian presidential election. We don't recognize that person as the president of Russia no matter how corrupt those elections are, because doing that makes us look weak... if we can't actually do anything about it."
Venezuela has been suffering from a severe political crisis after Guaido proclaimed himself interim president, contesting the re-election of Maduro last year.
The self-proclaimed interim president immediately received support on the part of the United States and European countries, which have also denounced Maduro's re-election. China, Cuba, Russia and a number of other countries have endorsed Maduro as Venezuela's only legitimate president.
