Over the past two years, Washington has imposed increasingly punitive economic sanctions on Venezuela. These sanctions have restricted the government’s access to external financing, limited its ability to sell assets and, most recently, barred it from trading oil with the United States.

The sanctions were designed to choke off revenues to the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Its architects claimed they would not generate suffering for Venezuelans. The reasoning was that Mr. Maduro would quickly back down, or the military would force him out before the sanctions could begin to have an effect.

That was wrong. Two years in, Mr. Maduro retains his grip on power, and his regime has become even more repressive and ruthless. Venezuela’s crisis now appears to have outlasted President Trump’s short attention span. Life for Venezuelans has gone from bad to worse.

Venezuela was already in a deep humanitarian crisis, following years of mismanagement and corruption under Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Sanctions are now putting the country at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe. In the three months after they were increase d in January, Venezuela imported barely a third of what it imported in the same period last year and less than one-tenth of what it bought from the rest of the world back in 2012. Given that most of the population is already living at near-starvation levels and that the country depends on imports to feed itself, further cuts in foreign purchases risk producing the first Latin American famine in over a century.