Trump’s Venezuela Attack May Give China Cover on Taiwan

China is deeply sensitive to regime change narratives. For decades, Beijing has made active diplomatic efforts to prevent externally imposed leadership transitions, viewing them as threats not just to international stability but also to the legitimacy of its own system.

This is why China supported Bashar al-Assad throughout the Syrian civil war, backed Russia’s framing of Ukraine, and consistently used its U.N. Security Council veto to block interventions justified on humanitarian or democratic grounds. For Beijing, the principle is existential: If great powers can remove governments that they deem illegitimate, then no government is safe—including its own.

Chinese officials may see the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela on Jan. 3 as further evidence that the United States is willing to advance regime change as policy—a threat that some in Trump’s administration have previously made about China’s ruling party itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken openly about the Chinese Communist Party as a “potent and dangerous near-peer adversary.”

But there’s one government that China is keenly interested in supplanting itself: Taipei. Some observers are drawing parallels between U.S. operations in Venezuela and the potential for conflict over Taiwan. The implications cut in multiple directions, and Beijing will parse each one carefully.

Venezuela may signal U.S. willingness to use force in the event of an escalation over Taiwan. China could view the strike as evidence that U.S. defense commitments are credible—paradoxically reinforcing deterrence. Chinese strategists often debate whether the United States—casualty-averse, politically divided, stretched thin globally—would actually intervene to defend Taiwan.

Venezuela, like Iran, may signal that Trump’s threats are real. It demonstrates that he is willing to act decisively, unilaterally, and with significant military force when he determines that a threshold has been crossed. The fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own envoy, Qiu Xiaoqi, was in Caracas when the strike happened underscores Washington’s willingness to act regardless of Chinese equities.

But Trump also demands trade-offs. Venezuela offered a relatively low-cost, high-reward operation in the United States’ backyard. Taiwan would be an entirely different calculus—direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed peer competitor across the Pacific. Despite ongoing U.S. defense sales to Taiwan, it remains difficult to assess whether Trump would actually follow through.

At the same time, Beijing may use Venezuela to argue that the United States’ Taiwan position is part of a broader pattern of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of states that it disfavors. Venezuela gives China powerful rhetorical ammunition: Washington claims to defend the “rules-based order” while bypassing the U.N., ignoring international law, and extracting heads of state that it deems illegitimate. If the United States can do this in the Western Hemisphere, what constrains it from doing the same in the Western Pacific under the guise of “defending Taiwan”?

While the Venezuela strike is the largest among recent sovereignty-related disruptions, it is not the only one. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in late December has also created concerns in Beijing over growing trends in self-determination movements, as have developments in Yemen. From a Chinese viewpoint, any major movement that undermines status quo norms around sovereignty creates the potential to spark separatism—including in Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.

Perhaps the most consequential implication is how Venezuela may shape China’s regional posture. The United States has long invoked the Monroe Doctrine—the principle that the Western Hemisphere falls within the United States’ sphere of influence, where external interference is unwelcome and U.S. intervention is justified. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy specifically outlines a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, explicitly outlined as a “potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests” with the objective of denying “non-Hemispheric competitors” the ability to challenge U.S. dominance in the region.

In his press conference on Jan. 3, Trump dubbed this renewed approach “the Donroe Doctrine.” Venezuela is Monroe Doctrine logic made kinetic.

The framing parallels are striking. Beijing argues that Taiwan is a domestic sovereignty issue, not an international one—and that any foreign intervention is therefore illegitimate. The Trump administration has now applied remarkably similar logic to Venezuela. Rubio has argued that the operation was not military action against a sovereign state but a law enforcement matter—the execution of an arrest warrant against a so-called “narco-terrorist” who happened to be a head of state. While Trump does not claim Venezuela as part of the United States (as is the case with China’s claim on Taiwan), he announced on Jan. 3 that the United States will “run” Venezuela moving forward until there is a transition.

Under this framing, the operation in Venezuela is a domestic U.S. security issue, not an act of war. Beijing will see the irony immediately: Washington rejects China’s “domestic issue” framing on Taiwan while claiming its own “domestic issue” justification for regime change in the Western Hemisphere. This gives China a ready-made rhetorical counterpunch—and may embolden Beijing to argue that if the United States can reframe military intervention as law enforcement, then so can China when it moves on what it considers a renegade province.

On the other hand, China may frame U.S. actions as blatant sovereignty violations and imperial overreach—rhetoric that is likely to resonate in regions with bitter memories of U.S. military intervention, from Latin America to the Middle East. But this argument risks backfiring among nations in China’s own neighborhood that see uncomfortable parallels to Beijing’s behavior in the region.

If Washington can claim the right to remove governments that it deems threatening within its neighborhood, what prevents China from asserting the same prerogative, its own “Monroe Doctrine” for the Asia-Pacific region, in its near abroad? This framing would apply not only to Taiwan but also to issues such as the South China Sea or disputes with any regional actor that Beijing views as a U.S. proxy. Venezuela does not create this Chinese aspiration—it has existed for years—but it provides legitimizing cover for an expansion of regional influence.

The United States has just demonstrated that great powers act in their spheres of influence, and legal niceties follow. The difference is that China is likely to work through existing multilateral frameworks to deepen its influence and avoid the overt use of military force—a key difference.

Pundits in Washington may argue that the cases are fundamentally different. Venezuela’s Maduro was an illegitimate leader running a so-called narco-state; Taiwan is a democracy threatened by an authoritarian neighbor. But in practice, the distinction collapses. Both are cases of a great power asserting its prerogatives in its sphere of influence, dressing up power projection in legal language. Both sides can justify their actions as domestic political issues. But the rest of the world sees both conflicts as military intervention—short and simple. All the rhetorical shaping over justification for the use of force will be received by the international community as war, nothing else.

Venezuela does create a more complex environment for answering the Taiwan question. It also reshapes the context in which that question will be contested. For Beijing, the lesson is double-edged. On one hand, the Trump administration has demonstrated that it will act swiftly, decisively, and without legal constraint when it determines its interests are at stake, even without sufficient consideration of a medium-term plan. That is a data point that Chinese war planners cannot ignore.

On the other hand, Washington has now surrendered the normative high ground that it once used to constrain Chinese behavior. Future U.S. appeals to international law, to the rules-based order, to the illegitimacy of unilateral force will be met with another example of intervention. First Iraq, then Venezuela.

If the conclusion is that power is the only language that Washington speaks, then Beijing may decide to answer in kind. The Venezuela operation sends a message. The problem with messages is that the sender does not control how they are received.