It seems an unlikely coincidence that just hours after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with a special Chinese delegation his country was bombed by the United States.
For months the US and Donald Trump have been sounding warnings about the increasing ties of Latin America to Beijing and trying to effect a diplomatic recalibration.
Now it’s using force to back up its campaign.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio explicitly said overnight that one of the goals of the intervention was to curb investment from US adversaries — including China — in Venezuela’s oil industry.
“This is the Western Hemisphere,” he said. “This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
Beijing is Venezuela’s number one oil customer, with more than 80 per cent of Caracas’s oil exported to China each year.
While China isn’t reliant on that oil — it only makes up about 4 per cent of the country’s imports — it is the basis of what the two nations have described as an “all-weather, all-conditions strategic partnership”.
And given Trump has already said he’ll continue selling the oil to China, it exposes an unequivocal message to Beijing — this move is about power and re-establishing US dominance in the region.
The implications could affect the entire ongoing economic and geopolitical power balance in the Western Hemisphere.
China supplanting US influence in South America
Beijing’s reach across Latin America has expanded at a rapid rate over the past two decades, cementing itself as a serious all-round competitor to the US and, in some countries, the clear winner.
It has displaced Washington as the biggest trading partner in places such as Brazil, Chile and Peru.
It is even the second-largest trading partner with one of the US’s closet allies in the region, neighbouring Mexico.
China has established, or controls, at least a dozen major ports in the region, including a mega-port in Peru and a massive space-tracking station in Bolivia.
China’s premier telecommunications company, Huawei, which has been mostly spurned by the West, is now present in most Latin American countries.
Security ties have also been deepened by partnerships in countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, which buy Chinese military hardware including aircraft, assault rifles and radar equipment.
And if you look specifically at Venezuela, China has emerged as the country’s number one oil importer and in return has poured tens of billions of dollars into oil-for-loans deals — mainly for energy and infrastructure, filling critical voids and increasing reliance on Beijing.
It’s a loan model used widely by China across the Americas.
The US has been openly critical of China’s growing influence in the region and has successfully persuaded several Latin American countries to scale back their economic ties with Beijing.
For example, in early 2025 Panama formally withdrew from China’s Belt and Road initiative after a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But still China has been undeterred and recently openly revealed its ambitions to further displace US power.
A rarely issued Chinese government policy paper on Latin American and the Caribbean was released just last month and cited how a “significant shift is taking place in the international balance of power” — terminology China equates with an end to US global supremacy.
But the events of the last few days have shaken China’s claim.
China accuses US of ‘imperialist expansion’
Trump has expressed unwavering ambitions for America’s global power projection in the Western Hemisphere and it carries an underlying warning to China that the region is closed to outside powers.
This verbal, and now military threat, is likely to force other Latin American countries to review their ties with China.
And they’d be understandably worried about their own future and security.
Because despite all its rhetoric and political support, Beijing was unable to shield Maduro from being captured by the United States or offer Caracas anything to defend itself.
China now could risk being seen as a backer that is more symbolic rather than substantive, especially when an aggressive America is hovering.
Instead, it’s likely China will use this attack to present itself as the only global powerhouse that adheres to international law and upholding a rules-based order.
Chinese state media has been busy framing this attack as a “resource-grabbing power play” which will result in the US ceding moral high ground.
“By any definition, the US military operation amounts to an invasion,” the China Daily wrote on Monday.
“What the world is witnessing is not a rules-based order, but colonial pillaging.”
The government mouthpiece also published a chilling warning to other countries in region.
“For other countries in the Americas this is not retrenchment but imperialist expansion — an aggressive reassertion of arrogant conceit,” the China Daily editorial said.
“Venezuela is unlikely to be the last victim if this logic is allowed to prevail.”
While that might be true, with Trump already suggesting there could be military action in other countries, China’s allies would be questioning how far the friendship would stretch in the face of America’s military might. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-06/us-venezuela-strike-to-get-china-out-of-latin-america/106201438)
