This is all well and good with Kozloff. His analysis is essentially Marxist -- he sees trade as a one-way street that helps the rich and hurts the poor. His book is filled with the sort of new-lefty rhetoric I had thought went out in the 1970s. He applauds the Venezuelan president's idea for an alternative trade association -- meaning one not aligned with the US -- that, in Chavez's tedious phraseology, would be a "socially oriented trade bloc rather than one strictly based on the logic of deregulated profit maximization."
But neither Kozloff nor Chavez can escape the fact that the 1970s are over. Socialism hasn't worked; it's kaput. Free-market medicine (which Kozloff refers to by the more sinister-sounding "neo liberalism") hasn't always worked, but it's worked better than anything else.
And in fact, Kozloff's fantasy of a US threatened by left-wing Latinos is a vestige of a world that was dominated by a Moscow-Washington rivalry -- a world that no longer exists. The only way Venezuela could truly stop supplying the US with oil (which trades in a global market) would be to stop selling it to everyone, which isn't in the cards.
The right question to ask is not what the US has to fear from Chavez, but rather what Venezuelans have to fear from Chavez. The answer would seem to be plenty. He has militarized the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic institutions.
Chavez's rhetoric has provided a pleasing distraction to the country's poor, but it has not eradicated poverty. The real riddle of Venezuela today, as it was a generation ago, is why, despite its bountiful oil reserves, its fertile plains and its democratic traditions, it has been persistently unable to make an economic leap similar to that of Chile or of the various success stories in Asia. And writers who serve as cheerleaders for the failed idea of blaming the US are anything but Venezuela's friends.
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