The China Connection !
On Saturday, a U.S. Army Delta Force unit took Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife into United States custody after raiding a Venezuelan Presidential compound. Maduro will be formally charged with drug trafficking and involvement with designated terrorist organisations. While these charges may be proven in a court of law, what is not up for debate is Maduro’s ties with China, linking him to Iran and North Korea. Venezuela, under Maduro’s leadership, had become a bad actor in world affairs. Venezuela had recognised a Palestinian State on 27 April 2009 and had since given succour to the Arab nationalist terrorists of October 7 2023.
While all this and more would validate the action taken by the Trump administration, these are not the motivations that led to Maduro’s overthrow. It was the China connection that tipped the scales and assured his removal from power.
Maduro had become a liability in regional power politics as China spread its influence throughout South and Central America, with its repercussions for the wider geopolitical confrontation between China and the United States. The political and economic map of Asia and the Middle East illustrates the complex tapestry now unfolding between a rising China and a somewhat ambivalent American superpower.
China seeks to harness a nonideological foreign policy to harvest countries harbouring doubts about the continued American hegemony in the 21st century. One such country was Maduro’s Venezuela, which believed America no longer had the will to dominate world affairs as it had done since the end of World War II.
America and the West, in general, have adopted a self-defeating policy that holds that state policy should transcend the national interest. This is the opposite of China’s obsession with its national interest being paramount in all its decision-making.
The United States, under President Donald Trump, while isolationist by ideology, is interventionist in practice when pragmatism demands it.
This is what we just witnessed in Venezuela on Saturday—a shot across China’s bow. More to come. Hold onto your hats!
Spot on. Thank you for making this clear and succinct, as I did not know the reason.
Postscript to the above article. Oil is another major factor in Trump’s decision to remove Maduro. In short, it comes down to Light Crude and Heavy Crude. America has an abundance of expensive Light Crude, while Venezuela has the largest Heavy Crude reserves in the world. I will endeavour to write an article on its Geo-Political importance sometime in the future.