Ricardo Hausmann Jose Ramon Morales-ArillaCAMBRIDGE ― Imagine you are driving down a road and arrive at a junction. You are not sure where to go, so you turn right. After some time, the road becomes unpaved, bumpy, and steep. The first thought that comes to mind is that you should have gone left. But, truth be told, you do not know if that would have led to a dead-end street. This is how many within and outside Venezuela feel about the country today. After all, former U.S. President Donald Trump's strategy of maximum pressure on the dictatorship, reflected in myriad sanctions imposed on the country, neither restored democracy nor addressed the country's catastrophic economic and humanitarian crisis. According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela's GDP in 2020 was over 75 percent below its 2013 level ― a globally unprecedented peacetime collapse (and worse than the impact of most wars). Small wonder that over five million people, some 15 percent of the population, have left the country since 2015.