Washington resets the strategic calculus with disruptive acts
Published in The Australian, 7 January 2026.
Too often, Western analysis of the Trump administration collapses into caricature: incoherent, narcissistic, strategically illiterate and dangerously disruptive of a benign “rules-based order”. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela will likely get the same treatment.
Such commentary cannot get past its own sense of cultural offence at Donald Trump’s style and rhetoric to seriously engage with the substance of what is unfolding. It fails to separate the noise from the sound and mistakes discomfort for insight.
Worse, it assumes that because Trump offends liberal sensibilities, he must therefore lack strategic understanding. That assumption is wrong.
The actions taken against the Maduro regime by the Trump administration should not be understood as the misguided and impulsive theatrics of a narcissistic president but as a deliberate execution of stated US strategy and as a signal that this administration means what it says.
What Trump understands is that America’s adversaries have spent decades learning how to play the global system as it actually exists, not as Western capitals wish it to be. They exploit legalism, institutional inertia, moral hesitation and escalation aversion to entrench power, launder legitimacy and shift facts on the ground.
They do so patiently, asymmetrically and with ruthless clarity about interests.
Trump’s objective is not to preserve a failing system in its degrading form but to disrupt it and reset the cost calculus.
The reason America’s adversaries react most sharply to his actions is precisely because they recognise the threat he presents to their operating model.
Trump’s 2025 national security strategy explicitly warned that decades of inaction had allowed “non-hemispheric competitors to make inroads into the hemisphere”, describing this failure as “another great American strategic mistake”. Unlike many such documents, this was not rhetorical scene-setting. It was a statement of intent and it is now being enforced.
The strategy identifies China as the US’s principal strategic rival and makes clear that their competition is not confined to the Indo-Pacific or Europe. It is global, cumulative and systemic.
Influence banked in Caracas weakens deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Energy leverage secured in Latin America cushions coercion elsewhere. Diplomatic cover traded in New York is cashed in Geneva, The Hague and the South China Sea. Strategic rivalry does not respect geography.
Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro became a textbook case of this dynamic. What began as domestic authoritarian decay metastasised into something far more dangerous: a platform for external powers to project influence into the Western hemisphere, erode US credibility and entrench a network of criminality, repression and geopolitical alignment hostile to American and allied interests.
China’s role was central. Beijing invested more than $60bn into Venezuela through loans, infrastructure projects, military co-operation and diplomatic backing.
These were not commercially rational decisions. Nearly half of all Chinese lending in Latin America and the Caribbean ended up concentrated in a country whose economy collapsed by roughly 75 per cent between 2014 and 2021 and that suspended repayments in 2020. Any claim that China persisted for domestic financial reasons collapses under scrutiny.
China stayed because Venezuela delivered strategic returns.
First, it advanced Beijing’s longstanding ambition to weaken US influence in the Western hemisphere and promote a multipolar order less constrained by Western norms. Second, it offered privileged access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves, insulating China from future energy shocks or Western pressure. Third, it secured an all-weather political ally.
Maduro’s government reliably supported Beijing’s positions on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea while rejecting scrutiny of China’s human rights record. This was ideological alignment in service of power. These positions should matter to Indo-Pacific allies, especially Australia. Every authoritarian vote mobilised in support of China’s territorial claims chips away at the rules-based order on which regional stability depends.
The notion that Venezuela is somehow irrelevant to Asia misunderstands how strategic competition works in practice.
Trump’s national security strategy thankfully makes clear that the US will no longer tolerate hostile powers using weak states, criminal networks or ideological fellow travellers to undermine American security from within its own hemisphere.
What distinguishes this administration is that it has moved from diagnosis to execution.
That credibility matters because our adversaries take words seriously, even if we do not. Xi Jinping has been explicit about China’s intent to revise the international order and reunify Taiwan, by force if necessary. Vladimir Putin told the world, repeatedly, that Ukraine was not a real state before he invaded it. Iran’s leadership openly proclaims its goal of destroying Israel and exporting revolution.
These statements were not bluster; they were warnings. The West ignored too many of them, to its cost.
The same standard should now be applied in reverse. When the Trump administration states it will secure the hemisphere, dismantle narco-terrorist networks and confront regimes that function as strategic assets for adversaries, it should be assumed to mean exactly that. The Maduro operation demonstrates that this is not theoretical positioning
This brings us to the unresolved moral and strategic question at the heart of the international system: why are dictators and transnational criminals so often afforded protections that shield them from accountability? Sovereignty was never intended as a blanket immunity for mass repression, electoral theft, narco-terrorism or strategic subversion. Yet international norms and institutions increasingly have been manipulated to delay justice, dilute sanctions and normalise impunity. The result has been neither stability nor peace but the entrenchment of regimes that externalise their dysfunction and invite hostile powers into positions of influence.
For the US, continuing to tolerate that system would directly contradict its own strategy and undermine its credibility with allies, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. Partners facing coercion from China need confidence that Washington will enforce red lines, not merely articulate them.
Strategic credibility is indivisible. If the US tolerates criminalised authoritarian regimes from it neighbours, its deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific weakens.
The message now being sent is sharper: alignment with America’s adversaries, sustained repression and criminal governance carry consequences. Not eventually; not rhetorically. In practice.
This is not about regime change as an abstract objective. It is about restoring the principle that power does not grant permanent immunity and that strategic competition has rules that must be enforced if stability is to endure.
The real question, then, is not whether the US acted consistently with its strategy. It did. The more uncomfortable question, particularly for those still clinging to cartoonish readings of American power under Trump, is whether they are prepared to recognise that the global system has been gamed for years and that disruption, not complacency, is now the price of restoring balance.
