History suggests Trump’s snapped back sanctions won’t deliver change in Venezuela

Venezuela’s oil exports held steady in May, despite re-imposed US sanctions. Chatham House research suggests that’s unlikely to change.

Expert comment Published 12 June 2025 4 minute READ

Dr Christopher Sabatini

Senior Research Fellow for Latin America, US and the Americas Programme

Last week came some predictable news: Venezuela’s oil exports remained steady in May, even after US President Donald Trump’s administration reapplied sanctions on President Nicolas Maduro’s government. Evidently shipments to China have staved off the worse effects for now.

Even without China’s help, the sanctions ‘snap back’ at the end of May…was likely doomed.

Energy hungry China will always be willing to open its market to illicit crude – even in the face of Trump’s 24 March threat to apply ‘secondary tariffs’ of 25 per cent on US imports from countries that buy Venezuelan oil. It was never clear how that additional measure would be applied on top of Trump’s existing sanctions regime – fluctuating almost weekly – on the Chinese economy.  

Even without China’s help, the sanctions ‘snap back’ at the end of May – requiring the last US oil producer, Chevron, to shut down oil production in Venezuela – was likely doomed anyway. Forthcoming Chatham House research indicates that sanctions seeking to bring about democratic and human rights improvements in autocratic regimes often fail.

The motive for ‘snapping back’ sanctions

There is clearly division within the Trump administration on sanctions policy. In May, White House envoy Ric Grenell, speaking on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, announced that the US president had approved a 90-day extension for Chevron’s deadline for packing up its operation in Venezuela. 

Immediately afterwards, Secretary of State Marco Rubio contradicted him. In a Tweet, Rubio claimed that decision had not been made. Shortly after, Trump’s decision – if indeed it had ever been taken – was reversed. 

That move was no doubt hurried along when Florida-based Republican representatives Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez threatened to vote against the White House’s ‘big, beautiful’ budget bill if sanctions were not re-imposed. With a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the White House needed those three votes.

Their logic is that the return of full economic sanctions would deny the regime the oil revenue it needed to repress and, implicitly, to survive. 

Explaining the decision to snap back sanctions – a reversal of President Joe Biden’s liberalization efforts and a return to the first Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ policy – Rubio and the White House cited Venezuela’s lack of progress on election reform and ongoing repression in the country. Their logic is that the return of full economic sanctions would deny the regime the oil revenue it needed to repress and, implicitly, to survive. 

News of Venezuela’s steady exports is the first indication that such a policy is unlikely to be effective.

A high failure rate

Indeed, according to a forthcoming Chatham House report, attempts to use unilateral (primarily US) sanctions as a cudgel to promote democracy, human rights and regime change have a high failure rate against autocratic governments like Maduro’s. 

Drawing from data compiled and analysed by Chatham House, between 1950-2023 there have been 436 successful cases where sanctions helped bring about desired impacts in democracy, human rights and regime change. At first glance, such numbers would seem to support the idea that sanctions on Maduro’s regime should continue or even increase. 

But that total is out of 858 sanctions, of which 113 were determined, by the sanctioning country, to have failed – and 309 are ongoing. This includes the old-timer on the block, the US’s 1962 sanctions on Cuba, still in place and even codified into law (twice!) in 1992 and 1996.   

The top five cases where sanctions succeeded in their stated goals of democracy, human rights or regime change were in semi-democratic regimes or regimes that were passing through, or had already successfully passed through, a transition – including Fiji, Poland, Burundi, Cambodia and Chile. In the 113 cases where sanctions failed, four of the top five cases were autocratic regimes: China, Belarus, Myanmar and Cuba*.

The vacuum created by US companies pulling out of these economies permits autocrats to further consolidate power, seizing and redistributing economic assets.

The reasons are obvious, though oddly lost on sanctions advocates. Punitive measures that prohibit Western investment in target countries allow autocrats to argue – convincingly, and without opposition – that sanctions are an extraordinarily hostile act and require an extraordinary response.    

The vacuum created by US companies pulling out of these economies permits autocrats to further consolidate power, seizing and redistributing economic assets and licenses to their allies, both domestic and international, and closing space for independent economic activity – a key driver of democratic change, as noted by John Locke as far back as the 17th Century.

This dynamic of authoritarian consolidation is more feasible today than ever: a core of non-democratic, sanctioned states such as China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia are more than willing to step in and cooperate to fill the investment and trade vacuum left by US sanctions.  

This is precisely what happened in the case of Venezuela this past May. Rather than choking off export markets and revenue for the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan government just replaced US and Indian markets with Chinese ones. And if the coalition of the sanctioned countries continues to expand, there will be more countries willing to not just evade but reward countries that break US sanctions.

None of this is to say, however, that granting unbridled access to US or Western companies without conditions – or conditions that only favour narrow nationalistic economic interests – will promote human rights. But it should inject a dose of caution and concern over the outcome of sanctions applied on non-democratic regimes in the name of political change.

Sanctions can be effective in some circumstances. But Venezuela is a case study in the failure of sanctions as a tool to bring about democratic change. 

After succeeding Hugo Chavez some hoped Maduro, and an economic collapse in which GDP shrank by three quarters, would prove the Chavista regime was brittle and vulnerable to sanctions pressure. But Maduro has proven resilient, surviving three US administrations while developing new economic partnerships in China and beyond.  

To achieve the policy aims Rubio and his allies espouse, new and honest evaluation of the efficacy of how sanctions have been applied is badly needed – especially in a fragmenting world order.

 

 

*Data analysis, with assistance from Harry Bartholomew, draws from Syropoulos, C. et al. (2023), ‘The global sanctions data base – Release 3, Review of International Economics; Felbermayr, G. et al. (2020), ‘The global sanctions data base’, European Economic Review; and Kirikakha, A. et al. (2021), ‘The Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB): an update that includes the years of the Trump presidency’.