https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/26/opinion/trump-maduro-venezuela/
Is Venezuela the new Taiwan?
The Trump administration has falsely accused President Nicolás Maduro of direct involvement with the country’s drug cartels. China is coming to his defense.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - August 26, 2025
American warships are taking up positions near the shore of a dangerous enemy nation. Are they in the Black Sea, near Crimea and the Russia-Ukraine border? No. Perhaps the Taiwan Strait? Wrong again. This potent show of military power is unfolding off the coast of Venezuela.
No one knows what the more than 4,000 combat-ready soldiers and Marines aboard the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson will be ordered to do. They are equipped for amphibious landings. If they are sent ashore, war could break out. That would outrage many in Latin America and give China a new strategic opportunity — without bringing any benefit to the United States.
President Trump has repeatedly asserted that violent Venezuelan drug gangs are active in American cities. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says they are “operating with impunity in international waters, simply exporting to the United States poison that is killing, that is destroying communities.” The Trump administration insists that Venezuela’s government controls these gangs.
In May, Trump claimed that a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua is government-sponsored. US intelligence agencies launched an investigation. Their report concluded that Venezuela’s government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” Trump responded by firing the analysts who produced that report. Any attack by the United States on Venezuela based on its government’s supposed support for drug trafficking, then, would be based on a discredited fantasy.
Venezuela once seemed to be a promising democracy, but the white elite that dominated politics was thrown out of power in 1999 when a fiery populist, Hugo Chavez, was elected president. His outspokenly anti-American and anti-capitalist views, along with his support for leftist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, landed him on Washington’s enemy list. The hostility intensified after Chávez died in 2013 and was succeeded by one of his equally radical followers, Nicolás Maduro.
The United States has been seeking to disrupt or depose Maduro almost from the moment he took power. And decades of sanctions and misrule have made Venezuela so poor and unstable that its citizens have fled by the millions.
In 2020 a squad of armed commandos landed on a Venezuelan beach in an apparent effort to kill or capture Maduro. They failed, and the US government denied that it had supported their mission. Maduro’s ability to hang onto power — despite stolen elections, increasing poverty, and massive refugee outflows — is maddening to some in Washington.
Trump is among them. In August, he doubled the official reward for Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. Maduro replied to what he called “extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats” by announcing that he was mobilizing 4.5 million militia members to resist a possible US invasion.
So why is Trump escalating tensions with Venezuela? Nothing the United States could do there would seriously reduce drug traffic in American cities, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
American troops storming ashore in Latin America would be a mind-boggling throwback to the days of gunboat diplomacy. During the first half of the 20th century, American troops landed in Mexico, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Memories of those interventions burn in Latin America’s collective soul. Any US military operation in Venezuela would outrage millions.
As Trump may have realized, a “splendid little war” in Venezuela — or anywhere — would divert public attention away from domestic embarrassments like the Epstein list. That would be the only conceivable benefit of an invasion.
But a lesser-known consequence of Trump’s recklessness with Venezuela is that every American escalation pushes Maduro’s government closer to China.
In an earlier era, Latin American countries had to submit to the United States because they had no alternative. That has changed. As the United States threatens Venezuela, China embraces it.
Over the last 20 years, China has invested more in Venezuela than in any other country in the Western hemisphere — a total of about $67 billion. Some of that money pays for domestic programs, like housing and rail construction. China is also prospecting for minerals in Venezuela and presumably has its eye on Venezuelan oil.
This burgeoning friendship produced an unprecedented response from Beijing after the United States sent warships toward Venezuela. “China opposes any move that violates the purposes and principles of the UN charter and a country’s sovereignty and security,” a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry said. “We oppose the use or threat of force in international relations and the interference of external forces in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext.”
Those words echoed phrases that the United States has used to warn China against interfering in the Philippines or other Pacific nations. They may mark the first time in history that China has warned the United States not to intervene in the Caribbean. Much has been said and written about the possibility of a US-China confrontation over Taiwan. Venezuela could become another flashpoint.
Trump came to office pledging to resolve global conflicts. In Venezuela he is doing the opposite: creating a volatile crisis where none existed.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.