Trump’s Big Boast About His Venezuela Policy Misses The Mark

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the deadly raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was critical to American influence and success, in part because the U.S. could gain access to the country’s vast amount of oil. Another key benefit, according to Trump: reining in China.

“If we didn’t do this,” Trump said Friday, referring to the U.S. military swooping in to seize Maduro and his dubious claims that the U.S. will now “run” the South American nation, “China would have been there and Russia would have been there.”

The State Department promoted his message, which echoes the president’s talk of a “Donroe Doctrine” — a Trump-era interpretation of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which positioned the U.S. as the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, resisting any attempts at European colonialism.

The underlying logic is that such a position will leave the U.S. better off relative to its rivals, which in this era primarily means Beijing. But experts increasingly doubt the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy will weaken China — and see signs he may end up benefiting it.

Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, which have been underutilized for years. Over the past two decades, China has increasingly collaborated with Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, both heavy skeptics of the U.S.; all told, Beijing has pumped some $100 billion into Venezuela, chiefly in pursuit of access to oil to support its roaring domestic needs. But amid mismanagement and mounting American sanctions, Venezuela’s production has actually plummeted, with even its most productive period in 2025 providing less than half of its daily output in the mid-2000s.

“This relationship was nowhere near an energy supply game-changer for Beijing,” Melanie Hart, an analyst at the Atlantic Council think tank, recently wrote. She noted that China has continued to receive Venezuelan oil, which helped repay the amount provided to the country, but those supplies now account for only a minuscule share of the energy China consumes.

Andrew Small, an expert on Asia policy at the German Marshall Fund think tank, told HuffPost the Venezuela gamble had, for China, been “probably the single biggest failure of any set of overseas investments or commitments they’ve made in the last 25 years.”

“It was a huge disaster and they’ve been basically trying to recoup what they can in the period since then,” Small said.

The U.S. involvement in Venezuela could change things for China, though. Increasing American involvement could, as Trump and his aides pledge, overhaul or at least significantly alter the Venezuelan oil industry, setting the stage for Beijing to wind down its own investment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping may be “offloading a declining asset at an opportune time,” Hart wrote.

Beijing now has a relatively small amount of outstanding loans to Venezuela, around $10 billion, which it may simply be able to write off, Small said.

When Trump gathered leading executives from American oil companies at the White House to discuss Venezuela on Friday, the business figures were clear about their hesitation to get involved there. Darren Woods, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, called the country “uninvestable.” (Trump has since threatened the energy giant with retribution.)

“Oil majors were just confirming what Beijing already knew: Venezuela’s oil sector is a declining asset,” Hart told HuffPost.

Still, Trump addressed China and Russia during his comments, seemingly courting them as customers for his envisioned U.S.-Venezuela oil project: “China can buy all the oil they want from us, there or in the United States. Russia can get all the oil they need from us,” the president said.

Chinese oil supplies seem unlikely to be at risk. Meanwhile, China could even identify an eventual upside to the situation — should Trump’s plans bear fruit — by looking to a past example of U.S. policy maneuvers that ultimately benefited it, Small said: the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ultimately, the post-invasion development of Iraq’s significant oil reserves involved “primarily Chinese companies [that were] willing to go in,” he said. In contrast, U.S. firms were more cautious, as they tend to be when instability is common and there is a significant potential for violence or unexpected moves by local authorities.

Beyond economics, China seems unlikely to suffer as a result of the Trump administration’s shock move against Maduro.

Venezuela has been the largest purchaser of Chinese military equipment in Latin America, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed body. Some observers have said the U.S. military’s successful infiltration of the country to abduct Maduro has sent a major signal of how advanced and effective the U.S. is and how unreliable Chinese defense systems are.

Yet Small said Chinese officials viewed the air defense and other systems they provide to countries like Venezuela as “not fantastic,” treating the matter as inconsequential, not as a measure of Chinese capabilities or Beijing’s own ability to defend itself.

Ideologically, the U.S. flexing its muscles and humbling a regime defiant toward Washington has hurt a years-long effort by Xi, Small noted: a bid to rally nations by suggesting close ties with China will help them tell American officials they cannot be pushed around. That effect is deeper because other governments opposed to the U.S. — like the regime in Iran, which is facing huge internal unrest — appear to be weakening too.

Still, the Trump administration’s broader approach to global affairs could permit gains for China that offset any drop in prestige.

The administration has made significant concessions in its trade war with China. And Small noted that Trump continues to rely on a small circle of advisors in policymaking, rather than seeking wide-ranging analysis and deliberation among government experts that could produce the most rigorously tested policy moves. He tied that to the president’s decision in December to permit the tech company Nvidia to sell artificial intelligence chips to China, ending limits on chip exports imposed by the Biden administration, a step many analysts say could enable major technological advancements by Beijing.

“I went down the list of [Trump administration] arguments — I cannot see how any of them have any credibility. I find it unfathomable from a national security and wider strategic interest perspective,” Small said.

Writing in The New York Times this weekend, Rush Doshi, a Biden-era China policy official at the White House, argued Trump is, overall, ceding significant ground to the U.S.’s core competitor in global politics as Trump focuses on Venezuela and other projects tied to his “Donroe Doctrine.”

“In the 18th century, China and Russia myopically built spheres of influence on the Eurasian steppe while Britain won the century by perfecting the steam engine. In the 19th century, Europeans fixated on the scramble for Africa while the United States leaped ahead by inventing electrification and mass manufacturing,” Doshi wrote. “Now the United States risks distracting itself by trying to govern Venezuela and seize Greenland while China is dedicating vast sums to winning the technologies of the future, from artificial intelligence and robotics to quantum computing and biotechnology.”