Venezuela's Bigger Problem

[Benton D Struckcheon]

9. No country is an island unto itself, any more than a person is.

Some food Venezuela is going to need to import no matter what. Some materials: if it needs bauxite for aluminum, it will need that from, say, Jamaica. Jamaica will want to get paid.
And so on. You write like these things are a choice. They're not. They arise naturally in the course of living, whether for people or for larger entities, from neighborhoods all the way up to nation-states. At every step of the way the entity in question needs to sell something to someone else in order to get something back it can't make for itself. No one is or ever will be entirely self-sufficient.