Despite how shocking last week’s US airstrike on Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro’s abduction were, it was actually not surprising.
In fact, US military interventions in Latin America, as an American analyst colorfully put it, “is as American as baseball and apple pie.” We need not, however, detail all those past interventions here.
Suffice it to say that President Donald Trump’s Venezuelan muscle-flex stands out for being carried out without artifice, without convincing official explanations and without any real attempt to finesse the attacks with some form of international law.
All of which wrecks the commonly held notion that the US is the world’s policeman.
“America once acted like the world’s policeman. Now it’s a mafia,” as one critical American political analyst observed of transactional Trump’s shameless lust for Venezuela’s crude oil and his proud declaration of what effectively was an armed abduction of Maduro.
Still, whatever damning epithets there are in the wake of Trump’s naked assertion of the primacy of US interests in the Caribbean Basin, international political observers basically saw what was coming in November when Trump unveiled his administration’s national security strategy.
Foreign policy experts say the Venezuela attack gives concrete form to that security playbook which paints the Western Hemisphere as the US’ strategic priority and its foremost national security concern.
Broadly, the Americans have divided the world into five strategic circles, with the Western Hemisphere receiving the greatest emphasis.
Asia, particularly the Indo-Pacific, came next in what political analysts broadly characterized as America’s “spheres of influence” doctrine, a revival of the American colonial “Monroe Doctrine” playbook.
With the US declaring “hemispheric hegemony,” the Trump administration explicitly rejected “non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere.”
Powerful China is identified as a “non-hemispheric” rival, a fact relatable and relevant to us.
Bluntly, the new US security strategy strongly emphasizes the need to counter China’s influential presence in Latin America.
China has long boosted its diplomacy, investments in and trade with various Latin American countries for years, challenging the US in its own backyard.
Oil-rich Venezuela specifically fits the bill. Venezuela is one of China’s key “all-weather” strategic partners in the region, which both China’s Xi Jinping and Maduro officially adopted in a 2023 meeting.
Venezuela is also the fourth-biggest recipient of loans from Chinese official lenders, reportedly receiving about $106 billion between 2000 and 2023. In 2024, Venezuela’s debts to China were thought to total about $10 billion.
Venezuela also for years faced American sanctions, drastically reducing its oil exports and nearly decimating its oil industry. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil deposits and its heavy crude oil is the type of oil American refineries favor.
Trump had said after Maduro’s ouster that the US would “run” Venezuela and its oil sector and he wants US oil companies to gamble billions to rehabilitate its oil industry, even without assurances of political stability.
Analysts, meanwhile, say Maduro’s ouster disrupts China’s energy plans since it imports most of Venezuela’s crude after the US imposed sanctions.
However, Venezuelan crude represents a small fraction of China’s oil needs and China can easily replace it from other sources.
Anyway, all of these are preliminary notes on a yet fast developing story with substantial consequences, including one which soberly warns that the two chief hallmarks of US meddling in the last century had been short-term military successes and long-term strategic failures.