Former deputy national-security adviser and U.S. special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams has a must-read piece in National Review on President Biden’s betrayal of the domestic opposition to Venezuelan socialist authoritarian Nicolás Maduro. Abrams lays bare the lunacy of the Biden administration’s Venezuela policy.

And he’s not alone in this sentiment. Heritage Foundation Latin America researcher Mateo Haydar says, “While the Biden administration wages war on American energy, its latest oil concessions will further enrich a prime U.S. enemy while it kidnaps Americans, including at least two veterans and several civilians, and harbors terrorist groups like Hezbollah. The administration knows perfectly well that current negotiations in Mexico City will not lead to a democratic transition, but it continues to use this as a pretext for concessions, which also include $3 billion frozen in foreign bank accounts that will return to Maduro through a ‘U.N. fund’ with little oversight.”

It’s also worth noting that Caracas’s sanctions reprieve will come at the expense of key U.S. ally Guyana. Guyana, a small, poor, yet oil-rich Anglophone Caribbean country southeast of Venezuela, has immense strategic value to the United States in a region that has been moving away from Washington as of late.

Unfortunately, rather than aiding Guyanese development, the U.S. vetoed a loan at the Inter-American Development Bank that would have enabled Guyanese oil exploration and exportation, which could have eventually brought down worldwide prices and boosted the impoverished nation’s finances. Now, Beijing is doing everything it can to pick up the ball where we dropped it while we’re getting in bed with one of our chief adversaries in the Western Hemisphere. The imbecility of all this is confounding.