ABSTRACT

We argued in chapter 3 that the United States came to the realization that the best way to hold Venezuela back was to hold itself back as well. The rise of this “talk softly, sanction softly” foreign policy is not easy to explain with a Realist perspective. It emerged around 2006, a time when potential security threats stemming from Venezuela were expanding, rather than contracting. Invoking oil dependence, as the previous chapter did, does help explain a more conciliatory, less alarmist approach toward a midlevel security threat, but then again, as the previous chapter also showed, there are multiple ways of interpreting this dependency, each leading to different policy recommendations.