Zulfiqar Ali Shirazi
Venezuela is back in the international news cycle courtesy of a long-running interventionist script that is played on the world stage year on year and decade after decade. The foreword changes from the global war on terror and search for weapons of mass destruction to sanctioning countries to facilitate democracy for the sake of the people of that very country. Venezuela stands in the same column with years of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and competing claims of legitimacy.
To view Venezuela only through the lens of domestic misrule is to ignore the larger forces that have shaped its trajectory. The country, however, remains economically crippled, socially fractured, and politically frozen. The rot reveals the enduring pattern of external interference in Latin America, ala Africa and the Middle East, to destabilise and gain control of subsurface riches and the application of economic coercion as a tool of foreign policy.
The economic implosion of Venezuela did not happen overnight. Massive oil reserves and their revenues, weak institutional reform, and political polarisation left the country vulnerable. However, the turning point came when domestic politics were internationalised. Claims of legitimacy were rapidly endorsed or rejected by external powers. Sanctions were imposed at an unprecedented breadth, and diplomatic isolation became the primary instrument of pressure. The stated objective was democratic restoration; the outcome was a societal collapse. This pattern is not unfamiliar in Latin America. From Guatemala in the 1950s to Chile in the 1970s, from Nicaragua during the Cold War to more recent episodes in Honduras and Bolivia, interventions have repeatedly disrupted political evolution rather than correcting the course. The justification has swung between anti-communism yesterday to pro-democracy today, but the methodology has remained consistent: economic pressure, political delegitimisation, and support for parallel power structures. In most cases, institutions were weakened, inequality was reinforced, and social cohesion was fractured. Venezuela follows this historical script with relentless precision. Sanctions are often presented as a bloodless alternative to war, a calibrated tool that targets elites while sparing civilians. When a state is cut off from global banking, insurance, shipping, and energy markets, the impact ripples outward. Hospitals struggle to import equipment, power grids decay for lack of parts, and food chains falter. Inflation becomes unmanageable, not solely because of policy failure but because economic arteries have been deliberately constricted. Venezuela clamours for all of these.
After Venezuela, policy attention is already shifting toward Iran as the next arena where sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and internal pressures may be combined to force political change, yet replicating the Venezuelan model there faces far greater constraints and risks. Unlike Venezuela, Iran is neither militarily hollow nor economically singular; it possesses credible conventional forces, strategic deterrence, and deep integration into regional power balances, makinag sanctions-induced regime collapse far more likely to trigger regional escalation than internal capitulation.
Venezuela’s crisis is not that coercive intervention succeeds, but that it produces prolonged instability at manageable cost only when the target state lacks the capacity to retaliate, a condition Iran does not meet. Cuba is also emerging as another potential flashpoint, increasingly resembling a Cuban Crisis-II, echoing the Cold War confrontation of the 1960s, where persistent U.S. sanctions and political isolation risk once again turning the island into a pressure point of great-power rivalry. Unlike Venezuela’s abrupt collapse, Cuba’s predicament is one of long containment, and any attempt to force rapid political change through external coercion would likely harden internal resistance and restore Cold War-era fault lines in an already fragile global order.
For Pakistan, these developments are shaped by experience, not abstraction. Having long operated under sanctions, geopolitical pressure, and selective moralism, Islamabad’s emphasis on sovereignty, non-intervention, and multilateralism reflects pragmatic self-interest. On Venezuela, Pakistan should adopt a principled and balanced stance; neither defend governance failures nor endorse factions, while firmly opposing external regime engineering and unilateral economic coercion. Political change must remain rooted in domestic constitutional processes, not imposed through externally driven collapse. There is also a broader strategic logic at play. The Global South increasingly views cases like Venezuela as evidence that international law is applied selectively. This perception fuels cynicism and weakens collective responses to genuine violations elsewhere. Pakistan, which frequently calls for adherence to international law in other contexts, cannot afford inconsistency. Its credibility depends on defending principles even when the case is politically inconvenient or geographically distant.
Diplomacy remains the only sustainable path forward in Venezuela. History lacks evidence that sanctions-induced collapse produces stable democracies in the long run. More often, it entrenches hardliners, impoverishes societies, and leaves scars that take generations to heal. Pakistan should therefore support multilateral dialogue initiatives, preferably with regional participation, aimed at negotiated political accommodation rather than zero-sum outcomes. Pakistan’s foreign policy tradition provides a sensible compass. Upholding sovereignty, opposing collective punishment, and strengthening multilateral mechanisms are not signs of passivity. They are acts of strategic foresight. In a fractured world, restraint is not weakness; it is an investment in stability.
What the United States and its allies must not do in Venezuela is to reinforce failures and errors, one leading into another. They must not enforce, confer or withdraw legitimacy through unilateral military actions and declarations, bypassing constitutional processes and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Regime change as an instrument of foreign policy has no legal ground, because once coercion replaces law, the precedent does not remain confined to the target country; it erodes the foundations of international order itself. Venezuela’s story is, in part, a failure of governance, and in part, the absence of the rule of law and agencies responsible for enforcing its implementation. No country has the right to change regimes in other countries on any behest whatsoever. Until interventionism is confronted honestly and international law is applied without exception, it will remain a mockery. For Pakistan, the decision point is clear: stand by international law today, or live without the protection it affords tomorrow.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at zulfiqar.shirazi @gmail.com
