The growing comparison between today's pressure on Venezuela and the European naval blockade of 1903 is not a rhetorical exaggeration. It is historically and morally accurate.
What is being imposed on Venezuela today – through financial strangulation, de facto blockades and sanctions imposed to paralyze everyday life – is siege warfare in other ways. And siege warfare, which aims to subdue civilians rather than defeat 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. This is collective punishment. And it doesn't work.
The history is unambiguous. Besieged governments do not surrender; They bow down. The elite keep themselves safe. Security services tighten controls. Scarcity becomes a political tool. The population suffers – and the regime survives.
Venezuela fits this pattern perfectly. The notion that greater pressure will somehow force capitulation misunderstands both the Venezuelan state and the dynamics of external pressure. Sanctions do not weaken such governments; They strengthen them, providing a permanent external enemy and a ready explanation for failure.
This should matter to Britain.
Sir Keir Starmer has clearly stated that his foreign policy rests on the defense of human rights, international law and the “rules-based order”. Those principles cannot be implemented selectively. They lose credibility if imposed forcefully in Ukraine, but they quietly fall apart 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, this is an act of war. When it predictably deprives citizens of food, medicine, energy and economic survival, it violates the most basic humanitarian norms that Britain claims to uphold.
This is not a legal problem. This 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 legitimize extreme measures against Venezuela has long since collapsed. It was never a serious analytical framework; This was a political convenience.
The reality is simple. Venezuela is being punished primarily not for its actions, but for its disobedience – for surviving outside Washington's preferred political system.
Strategically, the results are counterproductive.
Every tightening of sanctions and every implicit endorsement of an economic blockade pushes Venezuela closer to Russia and China. This is not an estimate; This is a fact worth noting. When Western markets are closed and Western diplomacy is replaced by force, alternative partners step forward.
If the stated goal is to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Latin America, this policy achieves just the opposite.
Meanwhile, the human cost falls where it always falls: on pensioners, hospital patients and low-income families. Inflation, shortages, crumbling 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 claiming moral seriousness.
There is an alternative, and it is not appeasement.
A compromise approach based on realism rather than moral stance would recognize legitimate concerns while abandoning the fantasy of regime collapse through suffering. It would focus on verifiable commitments, phased relief and international guarantees – not on maximalist demands backed by punishment.
Above all, it would treat Venezuela as a political problem to be solved, not a moral lesson to be imparted.
Britain has a choice. It can continue to pursue a strategy that has failed everywhere, or it can reclaim the language of rule of law, proportionality and diplomacy that once defined its global role.
If Britain wants to be taken seriously as a defender of human rights and the rule of law, it must say clearly that starving a population into submission is unacceptable – whoever proposes it, and wherever it is implemented.
Siege warfare belongs in the history books, not in modern foreign policy.
And Britain should have the courage to say so.