Far from deterring China and Russia, the operation signals that brute force, not international law, now defines American action
US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth was in a belligerently high mood after the Pentagon’s successful operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in the dead of night.
After all, the guy managed not to leak the US war plan in unsecure chat groups before the raid in Caracas, as he did with the US bombing of Houthi militias in Yemen in March. Remember that one?
Maybe I have a warped sense of humour, but I still find this passage from the chief editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, among the funniest in the annals of US journalism. “The world found out shortly before 2pm eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen,” he wrote. “I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, had texted me the war plan at 11.44am. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets and timing.”
Needless to say, defence officials are supposed to use secure channels to communicate. Such a failure would have been a career-ending moment for any US general or admiral, or rather, any US personnel in military uniform, if not worse.
But in the world of US President Donald Trump, normal professional standards and international norms don’t apply, and Hegseth suffered no serious consequences for a potentially fatal mistake.
The Trump administration has publicly praised the US press for withholding reports ahead of the Caracas raid, as several newspapers apparently knew about it beforehand. Did someone leak the plan, again?
It was, indeed, a very proud moment for Hegseth, a former co-host of a current affairs programme on Fox News. Speaking at Newport News Shipbuilding, the United States’ largest military shipyard, he said countries like Russia and China would “not dare” test the US following Maduro’s capture.
“We’re re-establishing deterrence that’s so absolute and so unquestioned that our enemies will not dare to test us,” Hegseth said. “They’re noticing American power. They’re noticing American strength. They’re noticing American clarity and leadership.”
Actually, while they publicly condemned the US operation, the Russians and Chinese probably have a very different take. The attack on Venezuela, as a topic, garnered hundreds of millions of views on Weibo. Many draw the obvious conclusion that it could be used as a military template against the island of Taiwan.
Chinese analysts interviewed by the Post agreed. Among them was mainland aviation analyst Fu Qianshao, who implied separatist leaders in Taiwan could face a similar fate. “The US operation to capture Maduro should become a clear warning to Taiwan’s leadership,” he said. “Taiwan must consider whether it could evade a similar action if the PLA were to carry it out.”
It’s not just mainland Chinese. Taiwanese leaders may have put on a brave face, but some experts on the island are warning that something like Maduro’s capture could happen to them.
According to Su Tzu-yun of the Taiwanese government-funded Institute for National Defence and Security Research, Beijing had long sought to map Taiwan’s leadership movements and command vulnerabilities through infiltration and intelligence collection.
Chen Kuo-ming, editor of the Taipei-based Defence International magazine, warned Beijing could learn from the US “decapitation-style” operation by exploiting “any window created by a shift in US focus towards South America to intensify military pressure or harassment against Taiwan”.
Meanwhile, Hegseth has openly mocked the ineffectiveness of Russia’s air defences deployed by Venezuela.
Trump said the United States would “run” Venezuela, and US oil companies would take over its primary natural resource, which is the largest oil reserves in the world. He has also ruled out holding elections for now and refused to support opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner who has long supported US military intervention.
According to numerous reports and the Ukrainian government, Moscow has repeatedly tried to kill or capture the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, since 2022.
What Washington has done shows Americans are just better at kidnapping heads of state than Russians. Trump has repeatedly warned of military actions in Mexico and Colombia, and doubled down on taking over Greenland from Denmark.
But what about that rules-based international order? It’s now more like the law of the jungle. You can be pretty sure that the Russians are reaching similar conclusions as the Chinese.
Seeing what Trump wants to do in the western hemisphere, might not Russian President Vladimir Putin claim the same carte blanche across the former Soviet Union?
