With Trump’s disruptive “Liberation Day” tariffs, 2025 was widely seen as an unusually turbulent year. That assessment proved premature. The year 2026 began with a far more dramatic jolt: US forces struck Venezuela and captured then-President Nicolás Maduro. Much ink has already been spilled on the international law violations allegedly involved. That debate, however, misses the more strategically salient question — what this episode means for China, the United States’ principal systemic rival.
The immediate reaction among pundits was predictable. Many rushed to argue that the US action would embolden China to take similar steps against Taiwan. This view is widespread, but fundamentally flawed, because it misunderstands how Beijing conceptualizes Taiwan. China has never regarded Taiwan as an international law issue. Since 1949, the People’s Republic of China has consistently framed Taiwan as a “renegade province” and an “inalienable part of China,” not as a sovereign equal. From Beijing’s perspective, Taiwan is an internal matter, not a case of cross-border intervention. As such, Trump’s move in Venezuela does not supply China with additional legal or political justification — unless Beijing were prepared to reclassify Taiwan as a sovereign state in the same sense that the United States treats Venezuela. That is precisely what China will never do.
This position was reaffirmed unambiguously by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on January 9 in direct response to the comment that US strikes in Venezuela might provide inspirations to China on Taiwan: “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The Taiwan issue is purely China’s internal affair. Resolving the Taiwan issue is the Chinese people’s own business, and external interference is not allowed.”
Even at the operational level, the Venezuela analogy collapses. Venezuela, like all dictatorships, is a highly personalized regime; Taiwan, by contrast, is a mature democracy with institutionalized succession. Capturing President Lai Ching-te, even if it were possible, would not deliver political control. China would simply face another democratically elected leader — very likely one with an even harder line. Decapitation strategies work poorly against pluralistic systems, and Beijing knows this.
A more serious critique is that the capture of Maduro marks the final collapse of the United States’ moral authority and the effective end of an international order grounded in sovereignty and the rule of law. But this lament assumes an international system that has long since ceased to exist. The erosion did not begin in Caracas in 2026. It was already broken when China trashed the South China Sea arbitration award as “waste paper” in 2016, and earlier still when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Great powers have repeatedly demonstrated that when core interests are at stake, legal restraints are conditional.
What is new is not the breakdown of the system, but rather the rise of China as the first state since the end of the Cold War to be both willing and able to challenge US primacy. The Soviet Union largely remained outside the US-designed international system. China chose a different strategy. Since regaining its UN seat in 1971 and joining the World Trade Organization three decades later, Beijing has embedded itself deeply within US-created institutions, using their rules, procedures and disciplines to fuel its own rise — while simultaneously positioning itself for eventual displacement of US leadership from within.
This is the context in which then-director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Yang Jiechi’s blunt remark to then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and then-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Anchorage, Alaska, five years ago should be understood. When Yang said the United States lacked the “qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” he was articulating a deeply held belief in Beijing that Washington’s best days are behind it. In Chinese elite discourse, the highly inept Biden presidency only reinforced this perception. Against that backdrop, words alone were never going to restore deterrence. To command China’s attention, the United States had to demonstrate capacity and resolve. Venezuela offered a low-risk, high-visibility opportunity to do exactly that.
The demonstration of power was aimed not only at Beijing but also at US allies. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim — “speak softly and carry a big stick” — assumed that allies would respond to quiet leadership backed by latent power. That assumption no longer holds. In recent years, many US allies have chosen to “pool markets, technology, military capability, and industrial capacity” — not “as partners” with the United States as suggested by Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi — but with China, or at least hedge by doing so with both sides simultaneously. Lip service to Washington has coexisted comfortably with deepening economic — and sometimes political — alignment with Beijing.
Trump’s second term reflects a recognition that this equilibrium had become unsustainable. For most countries, the “big stick” has been economic: tariffs, export controls and industrial policy, as seen after Liberation Day. For Venezuela, economic pressure failed. The response was to escalate to the military stick — to hammer down a nail that keeps sticking out like a middle finger.
It is comforting to believe that the United States can continue to lead primarily through moral authority. The problem is that China has dramatically raised the material incentives for defection. Many states have grown accustomed to enjoying US security guarantees while simultaneously reaping Chinese economic rewards. Trump’s moves over the past year — from reciprocal tariffs to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and now Venezuela — illustrate the limits of that strategy. At some point, the choice can no longer be deferred.
Critics warn that such belligerence pushes the world toward war. History suggests the opposite lesson. It was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, rather than his successor Winston Churchill’s confrontation, that emboldened German leader Adolf Hitler before the Second World War. China’s initiatives — whether framed as a “community of shared future for mankind” or otherwise — seek to bind countries into a China-centric order by entangling their interests and fates. The United States’ response disrupts this logic by forcing clearer choices. Precisely because it is disruptive, it is also effective.
Seen through this lens, the US action in Venezuela is not about destroying international law. It is about stress-testing and hardening it in anticipation of an eventual systemic showdown with China. A rules-based order that cannot survive contact with power politics is not resilient. The Venezuela episode suggests that Washington has concluded that preserving the system may now require demonstrating, rather than denying, the realities of power on which it ultimately rests.
