Now this sounds like a country with a bona fide inflation problem:

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, on Sunday threatened to deploy troops and expropriate businesses that increase their prices following a steep devaluation of the currency on Friday.

“I want the national guard on the streets with the people to fight against speculation,” said Mr Chávez during his weekly television show, Alo Presidente.

“Go ahead and speculate if you want, but we will take your business away and give it to the workers, to the people,” he said, stating there was no reason for businesses to raise prices.

I’m going to go way out on a limb and say this probably won’t work. Questions of democratic legitimacy aside, the Chavez experience reminds us that aspirations toward social justice will ultimately go unfulfilled absent a backdrop of workable economic policies in a big picture sense.

I think an underrated success of the Obama administration has been the way he pulled us back from the brink of a pointless Cold War dynamic the Bush administration had landed us in in South America. And he did it pretty easily—basically just resolving to stay out of any wars of words with Hugo Chavez, shake hands, and focus on concrete issues. It turns out that for all the huffing and puffing, there’s really no actual conflict between the United States and Latin America’s leftists.

But this seems to have left Chavez a bit adrift and looking to push the envelope. How else to explain the idea of praising Idi Amin in a speech:

About former Ugandan President Idi Amin, Mr Chavez said: “We thought he was a cannibal… I don’t know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot.”

Idi Amin seized power in 1971. About 300,000 people were killed during his eight-year rule.

That’s really not the kind of statement that bolsters one’s confidence in the man’s commitment to liberalism and democracy. I would link to a Human Rights Watch report on Chavez’s impact on Venezuela’s political institutions but everyone knows that HRW is a non-credible group obsessed with unfair slams on Israel so their criticism of Chavez must somehow be part of their vast conspiracy.

I have a new column up at The Daily Beast about the handshake of doom and the need for a shift to a post-Cold War policy toward Latin America:

Nowadays, the Soviets are long gone. And with them, all rationale for looking at the region through this lens. There’s just no way to imagine a military threat to the United States emerging from Latin America. For all the rhetorical heat generated by Chavez’s clashes with the American right, all he really wants from America is for Citgo to sell us oil and gas. And guess what? All we want from Venezuela is the ability to buy oil and gas. Latin America is close by, and, over a century, American meddling in its affairs has generated a lot of ill will. That ill will generates a certain number of movements powered by America-bashing rhetoric. The absolute worst thing we can do is respond by entering into a downward spiral of recriminations and cold shoulders that only builds more ill will. The best approach is to recognize that our interests in Latin America are limited in scope, so we should just do our best to be polite—cooperate with those governments who want to cooperate with us, and shake hands with the rest while perhaps making some small talk.

Instead, conservatives would have us double-down on decades of failed Cuba policy by extending the same treatment to Chavez and perhaps others such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Realistically, all such a policy can achieve is antagonizing other Latin American leaders who don’t have the luxury of imperiously “isolating” their neighbors to create a self-fulfilling prophesy of an anti-American bloc. Look around at reviews of Obama’s performance at the summit, and outside the fever swamps of the American right the only criticism you hear is that the administration isn’t going far enough toward improving relations with Cuba. And that’s about right. After all, what was achieved by excluding Cuba from the meeting of hemispheric leaders? Citizens of all the countries of Americas should hope that the Obama-Chavez greeting won’t be the new president’s last controversial handshake.

A related angle on this, as per Daniel Drezner, is that Obama’s approach to foreign policy is about setting priorities and not wasting national energy and credibility on third-tier things like a spat with Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez is one of a healthy number of leaders around the world who’s been fortunate to have George W. Bush as a high-profile enemy. With the Bush administration pursuing policies of unprecedented unpopularity around the world, a good tiff with Washington has been a surefire popularity-booster in a variety of contexts. But it seems that those days are done in Venezuela:

President Hugo Chávez said Saturday that he was ready to engage in direct talks with President Obama in a bid to repair relations with the United States. The statement marked an evolution in Mr. Chávez’s view of Mr. Obama, whom he described last month as having the “same stench” as his predecessor in the White House.

“Any day is propitious for talking with President Barack Obama,” Mr. Chávez said at a news conference here with foreign journalists ahead of a referendum on Sunday that could open the way for him to hold on to power indefinitely. Mr. Chávez said he would be willing to meet with Mr. Obama before a summit meeting in April of Western Hemisphere nations. The White House has not yet responded.

I’m not sure there’s actually a ton to talk about on the U.S.-Venezuelan diplomatic docket—the Caracas-Washington feud has been something of a conflict about nothing. Certainly I don’t see direct diplomacy on the highest levels as particularly critical, though it would be nice of Chávez and Obama could say “hello” as long as they’re both at the same summit. The main point is that it’s nice to be back in a situation where an improved relationship with the United States is considered a popular policy objective.