Washington resets the strategic calculus with disruptive acts
Too often, Western analysis of the Trump administration collapses into caricature: incoherent, narcissistic, strategically illiterate and dangerously disruptive of a benign “rules-based order”. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela will likely get the same treatment.
Such commentary cannot get past its own sense of cultural offence at Donald Trump’s style and rhetoric to seriously engage with the substance of what is unfolding. It fails to separate the noise from the sound and mistakes discomfort for insight.
Worse, it assumes that because Trump offends liberal sensibilities, he must therefore lack strategic understanding. That assumption is wrong.
The actions taken against the Maduro regime by the Trump administration should not be understood as the misguided and impulsive theatrics of a narcissistic president but as a deliberate execution of stated US strategy and as a signal that this administration means what it says.
What Trump understands is that America’s adversaries have spent decades learning how to play the global system as it actually exists, not as Western capitals wish it to be. They exploit legalism, institutional inertia, moral hesitation and escalation aversion to entrench power, launder legitimacy and shift facts on the ground.
They do so patiently, asymmetrically and with ruthless clarity about interests.
Trump’s objective is not to preserve a failing system in its degrading form but to disrupt it and reset the cost calculus.
The reason America’s adversaries react most sharply to his actions is precisely because they recognise the threat he presents to their operating model.
Trump’s 2025 national security strategy explicitly warned that decades of inaction had allowed “non-hemispheric competitors to make inroads into the hemisphere”, describing this failure as “another great American strategic mistake”. Unlike many such documents, this was not rhetorical scene-setting. It was a statement of intent and it is now being enforced.
The strategy identifies China as the US’s principal strategic rival and makes clear that their competition is not confined to the Indo-Pacific or Europe. It is global, cumulative and systemic.
Influence banked in Caracas weakens deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Energy leverage secured in Latin America cushions coercion elsewhere. Diplomatic cover traded in New York is cashed in Geneva, The Hague and the South China Sea. Strategic rivalry does not respect geography.
Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro became a textbook case of this dynamic. What began as domestic authoritarian decay metastasised into something far more dangerous: a platform for external powers to project influence into the Western hemisphere, erode US credibility and entrench a network of criminality, repression and geopolitical alignment hostile to American and allied interests.
China’s role was central. Beijing invested more than $60bn into Venezuela through loans, infrastructure projects, military co-operation and diplomatic backing.
These were not commercially rational decisions. Nearly half of all Chinese lending in Latin America and the Caribbean ended up concentrated in a country whose economy collapsed by roughly 75 per cent between 2014 and 2021 and that suspended repayments in 2020. Any claim that China persisted for domestic financial reasons collapses under scrutiny.
China stayed because Venezuela delivered strategic returns.
First, it advanced Beijing’s longstanding ambition to weaken US influence in the Western hemisphere and promote a multipolar order less constrained by Western norms. Second, it offered privileged access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, insulating China from future energy shocks or Western pressure. Third, it secured an all-weather political ally.
Maduro’s government reliably supported Beijing’s positions on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea while rejecting scrutiny of China’s human rights record. This was ideological alignment in service of power. These positions should matter to Indo-Pacific allies, especially Australia. Every authoritarian vote mobilised in support of China’s territorial claims chips away at the rules-based order on which regional stability depends.
The notion that Venezuela is somehow irrelevant to Asia misunderstands how strategic competition works in practice.
Trump’s national security strategy thankfully makes clear that the US will no longer tolerate hostile powers using weak states, criminal networks or ideological fellow travellers to undermine American security from within its own hemisphere.
What distinguishes this administration is that it has moved from diagnosis to execution.
That credibility matters because our adversaries take words seriously, even if we do not. Xi Jinping has been explicit about China’s intent to revise the international order and reunify Taiwan, by force if necessary. Vladimir Putin told the world, repeatedly, that Ukraine was not a real state before he invaded it. Iran’s leadership openly proclaims its goal of destroying Israel and exporting revolution.
These statements were not bluster; they were warnings. The West ignored too many of them, to its cost.
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