WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) – Among the many goals of last week’s U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was to send a message to China: Stay away from America.
For at least two decades, Beijing has sought to build influence in Latin America, not only to pursue economic opportunities but also to gain a strategic foot in the door of its top geopolitical rival.
China’s advances – from satellite tracking stations in Argentina and ports in Peru to financial aid for Venezuela – have been a source of irritation for US administrations including Donald Trump.
Several Trump administration officials told Reuters that the US president’s move against Maduro was aimed at countering China’s ambitions and that the days of Beijing borrowing to get cheap oil from Venezuela were “gone”.
‘We don’t want you there’
Trump made the message clear Friday by expressing his displeasure with China and Russia as “little neighbors” during a meeting with oil executives.
“I told China and I told Russia, ‘We get along well with you, we like you very much, we don’t want you there, you don’t belong there,'” Trump said. Now, he said, he told China that “we are open for business” and that they “can buy all the oil they want from there or from the United States.”
The success of the January 3 dawn raid, in which American commandos entered Caracas and captured the Venezuelan president and his wife, was a blow to China’s interests and reputation.
Air defenses that were quickly disabled by the U.S. military were supplied by China and Russia, and Trump said 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil, previously bound for Chinese ports, would now be shipped to the U.S. under the sanctions.
Analysts say Maduro’s capture has exposed Beijing’s limited ability to exert its will on the US.
The attack exposed the gulf between China’s “great-power rhetoric and its actual reach” in the Western Hemisphere, said Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
“Beijing can protest diplomatically, but it cannot protect partners or assets once Washington decides to apply direct pressure,” he said.
In a statement to Reuters, the Chinese embassy in Washington said it rejected what it called the United States’ “unilateral, illegal and threatening action”.
“China and Latin American and Caribbean countries maintain friendly exchanges and cooperation. No matter how the situation develops, we will continue to be friends and partners,” said embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
But one administration official said, “China should be concerned about its position in the Western Hemisphere,” adding that its partners in the region increasingly realize that China cannot protect them.
Trump’s Ambiguous China Policy
The Trump administration’s policy toward Beijing appears to be contradictory, with an aim to calm the trade war on the one hand and a more assertive US support for Taiwan on the other.
The operation in Venezuela seems to have tilted US policy in a more rigid direction.
In fact, the timing of the US invasion increased Beijing’s embarrassment.
Hours before his ouster, Maduro met with China’s special envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, in Caracas, his last public appearance before becoming a US prisoner.
The meeting, staged on camera, suggested Beijing was turning a blind eye even as US military forces secretly prepared to launch their operation, another US official said.
“If they had known, they wouldn’t have gone public,” the US official told Reuters.
For years, Beijing has poured money into Venezuela’s oil refineries and infrastructure, providing an economic lifeline after the US and its allies tightened sanctions from 2017.
Along with Russia, China has also provided financial support and equipment for Venezuela’s military, including recently advanced radar arrays capable of detecting U.S. military aircraft. Those systems did nothing to disrupt the raid, which U.S. officials boasted was conducted without harm.
“Any nation around the world that has Chinese defense equipment is examining its air defenses and wondering how protected they really are from the United States,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank.
“They’re also looking at how China’s diplomatic assurances to Iran and Venezuela have resulted in zero meaningful security when U.S. troops arrive.”
China is now studying what went wrong with those defenses so they can shore up their systems, according to a person briefed on the intelligence about their response.
China faces other regional risks
China may soon come under pressure elsewhere in the region.
It has sought to increase its influence in Cuba, and the US suspects Beijing of conducting intelligence gathering there. China denies this, but last year promised better intelligence sharing with Cuba.
In the days following the Venezuela operation, Trump argued that US military intervention in Cuba, suffering from the loss of Venezuelan oil, was perhaps unnecessary because it appeared ready to collapse on itself.
The Trump administration continues to push Chinese companies away from port operations around the Panama Canal, a critical waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
A State Department official said the US was “concerned” about Chinese influence near the canal, but praised Panama’s efforts to curb it by withdrawing from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and accounting for Panamanian port concessions under an agreement with Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison.
China may be on the back foot in the region, but analysts warn that an expansion of US military involvement in Venezuela or a deterioration in the security situation there could open the door for Beijing to reassert itself.
Daniel Russell, a former State Department official at the Asia Society, said a dramatic shift in Washington’s “centered sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere” under Trump could play into China’s hands.
“Beijing wants Washington to acknowledge that Asia is in China’s territory, and there is no doubt that the US is enmeshed in Venezuela,” he said.
(Reporting by Michael Martina, Trevor Hunnicutt and David Brunstrom; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland and Bo Erickson; Editing by Don Durfee and Rod Nickle)
