The US Raid on Venezuela: The View From Beijing

By: Griffin Allen | The Diplomat |

The recent capture of Nicolas Maduro serves as a stark warning to Chinese leaders about U.S. capabilities and resolve – a warning that is likely to bolster, rather than undermine, deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. While it’s not possible to know what’s in the mind of Xi Jinping, the United States’ capture of Maduro should give Xi Jinping pause as he sets his sights on Taiwan.

Fears that the capture of Maduro will encourage China to do something similar in Taiwan are overblown. First, and most importantly, China doesn’t need to use U.S. action as a pretext to act aggressively toward Taiwan. China has worked hard to build a rationale for action against Taiwan by portraying it as a Chinese “internal affair.” To that end, it has conditioned its diplomatic relationships on acceptance of its “One China Principle.” As a result, due to China’s distortion of the reality in the Strait, China claims not to need to justify its intervention in Taiwan. 

As far as Beijing is concerned, international law does not apply; cross-strait relations and U.S.-Venezuela ties are in no way analogous. For Beijing to say otherwise would be to undermine its own arguments regarding Taiwan. At most, the U.S. action against Maduro provides Beijing with fodder for propaganda and an imperfect view of how the international community reacts to leadership decapitation operations. Taiwan is far more central to global supply chains and strategic stability than Venezuela, and the international response would reflect that.

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