In “The U.S. Cannot Uphold the Fiction That Juan Guaidó Is the President of Venezuela,” (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Oct. 8), William Neuman makes a blunt, but accurate, observation about U.S. policy in Venezuela: It’s incoherent and frankly detached from reality.
But Venezuela is hardly an anomaly. U.S. foreign policy is often stuck in an immovable vortex, with inertia and an unwillingness to admit failure the defining features. The foreign policy establishment is either incapable of adapting to situations or is too confident of its ability to will things into existence.
While it doesn’t hurt to be ambitious, it also doesn’t hurt to understand the limits of your power. The U.S. remains the most powerful nation in the world, with boundless economic potential and a military second to none, but other countries have independent agency, their own core interests and the resiliency to ensure that those interests are protected.
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