Author: Patryk Litwiński

The past two decades have witnessed the systematic consolidation of Beijing’s presence in Latin America, enabled by Washington’s prolonged strategic reorientation toward the Middle East. China capitalized on this window to build a dense web of economic, financial, and infrastructure ties that – deeply embedded in the United States’ immediate neighborhood – has now reached a scale perceived in Washington as a tangible strategic threat. This assessment is reflected in the new U.S. National Security Strategy, which constitutes a clear response to these dynamics by reordering America’s global security priorities around the Western Hemisphere. The White House has thus restored the region’s status as an area of non-negotiable importance to U.S. security – both geographically and systemically.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. intervention in Caracas should not be read merely as a reaction to Venezuela’s internal political crisis. Rather, it carried a strategic ordering function: it targeted a state of particular significance to the regional balance of power and, simultaneously, a critical node of China’s engagement in the Western Hemisphere. Washington’s actions delineated the boundaries of permissible external influence and integrated Latin America policy into the broader architecture of U.S. security. As a result, Venezuela has become not only the object of intervention but also a regional reference point – underscoring the hemisphere’s emergence as a theater of systemic confrontation between Washington as the hegemon and Beijing as a revisionist power.

Venezuela Through the Lens of Two Great Powers

The U.S. operation “Absolute Resolve” constituted a direct implementation of the trajectory set out in the U.S. National Security Strategy, which effectively introduced the so-called “Trump Corollary” into the classical Monroe Doctrine. Its core assumption is explicit: actors from outside the Western Hemisphere should neither own nor exercise control over assets of strategic significance in the region. From Washington’s perspective, the presence of such actors has ceased to be treated as an element of economic competition and has instead been reclassified as a security threat. This position was articulated most succinctly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who stated:

“This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live o and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.” [1][2][3].

So defined, this doctrine represents a direct response by Washington to signals emanating from Beijing in recent months. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has publicly emphasized that Latin America and the Caribbean are not anyone’s “backyard.” From Beijing’s perspective, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela undermines the prevailing logic of China’s presence in Latin America as articulated in the third China’s Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean. Published in December 2025 – thus after the release of the U.S. National Security Strategy – the document frames the region not as a traditional sphere of influence, but as a key component of the “Global South.” Within this framework, China, consistently positioning itself as the Global South’s advocate, defines Latin America as an “essential force in the process toward a multipolar world and economic globalization.” Beijing thus casts itself as a development partner offering deepened cooperation and an alternative to an international order associated with “hegemonism” and “power politics” – terms that in Chinese discourse are systematically applied to U.S. actions. In this way, China’s presence in the region is embedded within a broader normative and systemic contestation of the U.S. security architecture [3][4].

The U.S. intervention in Caracas symbolized an effort to reassert clear red lines in response to Beijing’s increasingly assertive signaling. The capture of Nicolás Maduro carried global significance, underscoring Washington’s willingness to employ force against regimes openly aligned with China when deemed necessary to protect U.S. strategic interests. Venezuela remains the largest recipient of Chinese financing in the region: between 2000 and 2023, it received more than USD 106 billion in loans secured by long-term oil deliveries, of which China imported nearly 80 percent. The structure of this relationship – reinforced by the elevation of bilateral ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2023 – positioned Caracas not only as a critical pillar of China’s energy security strategy, but also as a political foothold for Beijing in the Western Hemisphere. In parallel, Venezuela has become the largest recipient of Chinese and Russian arms in Latin America, clearly indicating that China’s sustained economic engagement has increasingly and structurally spilled over into the security domain [5][6][7].

U.S. actions in Venezuela impose both direct costs and broader structural consequences on China, striking at the underlying logic of Beijing’s power projection in the region. For years, Caracas functioned as a nexus linking financing with energy security: the debt-repayment-through-oil model enabled China simultaneously to secure access to hydrocarbons and to entrench its capital presence. Washington’s effective takeover of control over this arrangement undermines its credibility, heightening the risk of lasting losses to Chinese claims and constraining Beijing’s room for maneuver below the threshold of open confrontation in the Western Hemisphere. At a systemic level, this signals U.S. readiness to harden the protection of critical commodity and financial flows, thereby increasing the vulnerability of China’s strategy built around credit provision, infrastructure investment, and long-term commodity contracts. Potential Chinese countermeasures are therefore likely to concentrate in domains where Beijing retains structural advantages – most notably in rare earths and other critical minerals supply chains – allowing for pressure on sensitive segments of the U.S. economy, given that approximately 70 percent of U.S. rare earth imports between 2020 and 2023 originated from China [3][8].

The Historical Evolution of China’s Strategic Expansion in Latin America

China capitalized on the gradual reallocation of U.S. strategic attention following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when Washington’s priorities became dominated by the global war on terror and prolonged engagement in the Middle East. As a result, Latin America steadily declined in the United States’ operational and political hierarchy, remaining perceived as a relatively stable security hinterland. This emerging strategic vacuum created favorable conditions for external actors operating below the threshold of open confrontation – conditions that Beijing methodically and consistently exploited by expanding its economic and infrastructure footprint across the region.

China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 provided the decisive impulse for its systemic expansion in the region, granting Beijing full access to global trade flows. Latin America was subsequently identified as a critical resource base for the Chinese economy, with trade, capital, and infrastructure investment serving as instruments for the durable anchoring of China’s interests. Between 2000 and 2008, China – Latin America trade grew at an average annual rate of 31 percent, positioning the region as one of the pillars of China’s commodity and energy security [9].

On this basis, Beijing has gradually constructed a dense web of institutional linkages, culminating in comprehensive strategic partnerships with key regional states such as Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Designed to outlast domestic political cycles, these relationships have provided China with continuity of influence and stability in the pursuit of its interests, regardless of internal political realignments in partner countries. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has served as the organizing framework for this expansion, which now encompasses 22 of the region’s 33 countries – underscoring that China’s engagement is not a patchwork of isolated investments, but a coherent strategy integrating Latin America into its wider economic ecosystem [10].

The current phase of China’s regional strategy aligns with the concept of so-called “New Infrastructure,” developed in China since around 2019 as part of a long-term technological strategy. In practical terms, Chinese capital has been deliberately redirected toward innovative sectors poised to shape the architecture of the global economy in the coming decades – most notably telecommunications, financial technologies, and renewable energy.

This transformation had already acquired significant momentum by 2022, when projects aligned with the New Infrastructure concept accounted for nearly 60 percent of announced Chinese investments and more than half of the annual capital inflows from the PRC. These figures confirm that Beijing has emerged as a key investor in the region’s critical technological and digital assets. A particularly salient role is played by electromobility, where China is building integrated value chains – from battery cells to finished vehicles – especially in Mexico and Brazil, while simultaneously imposing its own technological standards in flagship infrastructure projects such as the Bogotá metro. Taken together, these dynamics point to a clear reorientation of China’s presence in the region: from a predominantly commodity- and trade-based engagement toward sectors central to long-term systemic competition. Beijing is now prioritizing domains that will determine future economic and technological advantage, embedding its activity in a logic of strategic positioning rather than short-term market expansion [11].

The momentum of this transformation is corroborated by macroeconomic indicators. China has overtaken the United States as the largest trading partner for much of Latin America, ranking second across the region as a whole. Projected trade growth to USD 700 billion by 2035 suggests that Latin America is no longer merely an export market, but is becoming a foundational pillar of Beijing’s global economic architecture. This trajectory was further consolidated in 2025, when the New Infrastructure concept was politically reinforced and reframed in the narrative of the government led by Premier Li Qiang – not as a tool for short-term growth stimulation, but as a cornerstone of China’s future strategic advantage [9][12][13].

Hemispheric Bottlenecks

Latin America has emerged as a critical testing ground for Beijing’s diversification of structural risks. By simultaneously securing access to raw materials and expanding its own technological ecosystems, the region has acquired the status of a strategic hub. A natural consequence of this evolution has been the effort to reduce dependence on U.S.-controlled infrastructure – most notably the Panama Canal, a key chokepoint of global trade. Rather than directly challenging U.S. dominance over the Canal, Beijing has adopted an indirect strategy: the systematic development of alternatives capable of bypassing this route in times of tension or crisis.

In this context, the port of Chancay in Peru, inaugurated in November 2024, has assumed particular significance. Chancay established a direct maritime connection with East Asia, reducing transit times by more than ten days and eliminating the need to transit the Panama Canal. As such, it constitutes tangible evidence that China’s presence in the region has evolved from adaptive economic expansion toward the deliberate shaping of an alternative architecture of global trade routes – underscoring the region’s growing strategic importance [14].

The strategic weight of the Chancay project is further amplified by the fact that the port is under the full control of the state-owned giant COSCO Shipping, which holds exclusive operational rights. This marks a shift from China acting as a user of existing infrastructure toward a model in which it becomes the owner, operator, and manager of critical assets. This logic is reinforced by Beijing’s promotion of so-called bioceanic transport corridors, designed to link Brazil’s Atlantic hinterland with Peru’s Pacific coast, where the port of Chancay serves as the terminal hub. For China, such an arrangement carries clear strategic value, enabling the direct transport of commodities to Pacific ports while bypassing the Panama Canal and reducing the risk of supply paralysis in the event of its disruption.

Combined with the broader expansion of port infrastructure, this concept facilitates the emergence of an alternative logistics architecture that is more resilient to strategic pressure from the United States. In geopolitical terms, it challenges Washington’s long-standing role as the guarantor of global maritime security and freedom of trade – particularly striking given that this reconfiguration is unfolding in the United States’ immediate neighborhood.

China’s expanding infrastructure footprint in the region has increasingly challenged the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere. In this assessment, the Panama Canal occupies a pivotal role: as a critical artery of global trade and a cornerstone of U.S. supply chain security, it handles more than 70 percent of cargo flows linked to the American economy. The growing presence of Chinese entities in the Canal’s strategic environment triggered firm diplomatic pressure from Washington on Panama, culminating in the country’s announcement in February 2025 of its withdrawal from the Belt and Road Initiative [12][15].

The Panama case became an empirical test of the U.S. doctrine for protecting strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere. Washington sent an unequivocal signal that it would not accept the sustained presence of strategic rivals, nor their long-term control over infrastructure of critical geopolitical importance in its immediate neighborhood. This approach was subsequently formalized in the National Security Strategy, which identifies the preservation of freedom of action and operational control in the Western Hemisphere as a core U.S. national interest. The loss of such control would be unacceptable not only from a commercial standpoint, but also from military and intelligence perspectives, as it would entail risks of critical infrastructure disruption, constraints on the operational freedom of U.S. naval forces, and the potential use of Chinese port presence to collect sensitive data on strategic flows [1].

Global Confrontation Through a Regional Lens

China’s engagement in Latin America has given rise to an alternative model of relations with the region, operating outside the long-dominant framework of U.S. conditionality. Whereas the U.S. approach for decades linked economic cooperation to political and market reforms as well as human rights standards, Beijing has consistently promoted relations grounded in non-interference and transactional exchange. The reduction of political conditionality increased the functional appeal of China’s offer and enabled its broad uptake across the region, regardless of the ideological orientation of incumbent governments.

At the same time, the scale and durability of China’s presence have generated an indirect normative effect. Without explicitly imposing its own standards, Beijing has nonetheless weakened the United States’ ability to sustain its traditional role as the primary external reference point for regional states. As a result, competition has expanded beyond trade and investment to encompass the shaping of the rules of international cooperation, contributing to the erosion of Washington’s normative advantage in a region historically sensitive to external pressure perceived as Western paternalism.

A key factor behind the effectiveness of this strategy has been its resilience to political change across the region. Beijing’s ideological neutrality has enabled continuity of relations despite government turnover and electoral cycles, reducing political risk for long-term infrastructure and investment projects. China has maintained functional ties with authoritarian regimes such as Venezuela and Cuba, left-leaning governments in Brazil and Colombia, as well as right-wing administrations in Argentina and El Salvador. As a result, Beijing has gained an operational advantage in the form of engagement stability, allowing it to consolidate its presence systematically where Western cooperation instruments remain selective and vulnerable to shifts in domestic political conditions.

China’s multi-layered diplomacy, developed over many years, has been deliberately oriented toward the sustained projection of influence in Latin America. The region has been embedded in Beijing’s narrative of “changes unseen in a century,” which assumes the gradual erosion of U.S. relative power alongside the parallel rise of China’s international standing. Within this framework, Latin America has ceased to be a peripheral area of interest and has instead become one of the components of China’s vision of a future global order, conceptualized inter alia through the notion of a “community with a shared future” [16][17].

In this sense, Latin America functions not only as a regional theater of competition, but also as a testing ground for a broader confrontation of a global nature. The region has been explicitly incorporated into China’s pressure strategy surrounding Taiwan, which has been noticeably tightened in Beijing’s most recent policy documents. Cooperation with regional states has increasingly been conditioned on unequivocal support for the “One China” principle, opposition to Taiwanese independence, and active endorsement of the process of “national reunification” [18].

The scale of these expectations has led to the systematic contraction of Taipei’s international diplomatic space. Several U.S. partners – including Panama, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua – have severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan. From the U.S. perspective, the 2023 decision by Honduras to withdraw recognition of Taiwan was particularly consequential, given the country’s importance to the U.S. security architecture in the Americas and its hosting of a permanent U.S. military presence. Continued pressure on Guatemala and Paraguay – the last remaining diplomatic partners of Taipei in the region – confirms that Latin America has been drawn into the competition over Taiwan’s future status, one of the central fault lines in the strategic rivalry between the United States and China [16][18].

A Credibility Test of Two Orders

U.S. actions in Venezuela directly erode the foundations of China’s strategic narrative, exposing Beijing’s structural limitations in providing meaningful protection to its partners against pressure from Washington. The Caracas case undermines the credibility of China’s “all-weather partnerships” as instruments of political leverage, revealing their essentially transactional and economic nature, devoid of effective deterrence mechanisms. As a result, some authoritarian governments in the region may be compelled to reassess their strategic calculations, concluding that Chinese financing and normative rhetoric opposing U.S. hegemony do not translate into an ability to prevent escalation in situations of direct confrontation. For Latin America, this dynamic intensifies pressure to choose between U.S. security guarantees and Chinese development capital – an outcome that, amid deepening polarization, entrenches the region as a locus of sustained systemic competition [3].

From a broader perspective, Latin America is emerging as a microcosm of the global power shift. Two distinct models of international order collide in the region: a Chinese model grounded in state capitalism and infrastructure-led power projection, and an American model rooted in security logic, control over strategic assets, and the capacity to apply coercion. The region has thus become an arena for testing the credibility of both powers – for Beijing, a trial of its ability to safeguard interests and partners under military pressure; for Washington, confirmation of its willingness to enforce its sphere of influence despite the growing economic weight of its systemic rival.

Sources:

[1] National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, November 2025

[2] Statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on U.S. Security in the Western Hemisphere, The White House, January 2026. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/01/rubio-this-is-our-hemisphere-and-president-trump-will-not-allow-our-security-to-be-threatened/.

[3] Chatham House, Attack in Venezuela Highlights Growing US-China Rivalry in Latin America, 2026, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/01/attack-venezuela-highlights-growing-us-china-rivalry-latin-america.

[4] China’s Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean, Government of the People’s Republic of China, December 2025.

[5] America’s Raid on Venezuela Reveals the Limits of China’s Reach, The Economist, January 5 2026, https://www.economist.com/china/2026/01/05/americas-raid-on-venezuela-reveals-the-limits-of-chinas-reach.

[6] CSIS, The Geopolitics of Maduro’s Capture: China’s Future in Latin America Following Operation Absolute, https://www.csis.org/analysis/geopolitics-maduros-capture-chinas-future-latin-america-following-operation-absolute.

[7] U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, China-Venezuela Fact Sheet: A Short Primer on the Relationship, https://www.uscc.gov/research/china-venezuela-fact-sheet-short-primer-relationship.

[8] U.S. Rare Earth Imports by Country, Statista, 2024, https://www.statista.com/chart/34301/us-rare-earth-imports/.

[9] Council on Foreign Relations, China’s Influence in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela – Security, Energy, BRI, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/china-influence-latin-america-argentina-brazil-venezuela-security-energy-bri.

[10] Nedopil, Christoph (2025): Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai: Green Finance & Development Center, FISF Fudan University.

[11] China’s New Playbook for Latin America. A Special Report, Americas Quarterly, V ol. 19, No. 4, 2025

[12] European Parliament Research Service, China’s Role in Latin America, Briefing, 2025, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/769504/EPRS_BRI(2025)769504_EN.pdf.

[13] Americas Quarterly, China and Latin America, Issue 4/2025, https://www.americasquarterly.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Americas-Quarterly_China-and-Latin-America_Issue-4-2025.pdf.

[14] Inside Climate News, China Port in Peru and Its Impact on the Amazon Rainforest, December 1 2025, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01122025/china-port-in-peru-impact-on-amazon-rainforest/.

[15] Al Jazeera, China Blasts US as Panama Quits Belt and Road Initiative, February 7 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/7/china-blasts-us-as-panama-quits-belt-and-road-initiative.

[16] The Jamestown Foundation, China Spares No Expense for Latin America and Caribbean Ties, https://jamestown.org/china-spares-no-expense-for-latin-america-and-caribbean-ties/.

[17] China’s Increased Presence in Latin America: Win-win Relations or a New Dependency? A State of the Art, ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361017843_China’s_increased_presence_in_Latin_America_Win-win_relations_or_a_new_dependency_A_state_of_the_art.

[18] CSIS, China’s Third Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean: Expanding Influence and Ambitions, https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-third-policy-paper-latin-america-and-caribbean-expanding-influence-and-ambitions.