On January 3, 2026, news that the United States had launched a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela and swiftly arrested President Nicolás Maduro and his wife sent shockwaves around the world. U.S. President Donald Trump later told reporters that the United States would “take charge” of Venezuela until a “safe, proper, and prudent transfer of power” could be achieved. Trump also claimed that Venezuela’s oil sector had long been stagnant, and that major U.S. companies would enter the country to repair infrastructure and begin generating revenue.
How exactly the U.S. plans to “take charge” of Venezuela remains unclear. What form will the country’s transfer of power take? And after Venezuela, which country might be the next target of U.S. military action? Other than these unanswered questions, it is crucial to consider a more fundamental one: why did Trump order a large-scale military operation against Venezuela in the first place? Since the U.S. invaded Panama and deposed military leader Manuel Noriega in 1989, it has not conducted such a direct military intervention in Latin America.
Before this military action, the signs of war had already become obvious. In mid-December 2025, Trump posted on social media not only designating the Venezuelan government as a “foreign terrorist organization”, but also ordering a “total and complete blockade” on all sanctioned tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, a move widely seen as a dangerous escalation in U.S.–Venezuela tensions.
In addition, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said that Trump may declare a state of war with Venezuela. Correspondingly, reports indicate that the U.S. Department of Defense has updated its military contingency plans for Venezuela, including the possible tightening of the naval blockade, an expanded military role in enforcing sanctions, and the conduct of so-called “security cooperation operations” with regional allies.
Trump’s military planning is not merely for show, as many military experts and scholars of international affairs have suggested, but rather the implementation and continuation of his broader “Americas policy”. As early as 2024, ANBOUND’s founder Kung Chan provided a series of assessments, such as the concept of Trumpism’s “Century of the Americas”. Since the beginning of the Trump 2.0 era, a range of actions, including calls for Canada to join the U.S., demands that Denmark cede Greenland, and pressure on Panama to withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative, have all indicated that the U.S. is gradually shifting its focus of investment and strategic development toward the entire Western Hemisphere. Fully integrating the Americas, including Latin America, is set to become a central pillar of Washington’s future global strategy. At the same time, Trump has also planned to maintain a larger U.S. military presence in the Western Hemisphere in the future, in order to respond to migration flows, drug trafficking, and the rise of hostile forces in the region.
In North America, the economic strength of both the U.S. and Canada has certainly been common knowledge. Although Canada has taken a clearly oppositional stance toward the U.S. on specific issues such as trade disputes, the ideological differences between the two countries are minimal. Moreover, Canada remains highly dependent on the U.S. in economic affairs. Therefore, its eventual full incorporation into the U.S.’ regional strategic planning is largely a matter of time. Consequently, Washington’s primary task lies in the integration of Latin America as a whole. From both an economic development and strategic integration perspective, Latin America holds significant importance for the U.S. First, the region is extremely rich in mineral resources. Second, it possesses abundant oil and gas reserves; securing effective control over and developing these resources would help enhance U.S. strategic resource autonomy and reduce dependence on China. Finally, Latin America also represents a vast consumer market.
When it comes to the U.S.’ integration of Latin America, the region’s major powers remain the primary targets. This means that the success or failure of Washington’s broader integration efforts will largely depend on the positions taken by Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. As for other countries, their relatively limited population and economic scale leave them with a weaker capacity to resist U.S. influence, making their full incorporation into the U.S. regional framework highly likely. As for the so-called “rebellious actors” in South America, Cuba has long been constrained by isolation and sanctions, with its internal economic and social difficulties persisting. It also has the highest degree of population aging in Latin America, and its social vitality is likely to continue declining, making it difficult for Havana to pose any effective obstacle to Washington’s future strategy in the Americas. In the case of Venezuela, Maduro’s rule has been restricted by the country’s overall scale and national strength, leaving it similarly incapable of genuinely obstructing U.S. efforts to integrate and dominate Latin America as a whole. The fact that the U.S. was able to swiftly overpower Venezuela and arrest Maduro and his wife serves as further confirmation of this reality.
If there had still been doubts about Trump’s so-called “Americas policy” at the outset of his 2.0 term, it would have been largely dissipated with the release of the latest U.S. National Security Strategy in December 2025. The strategic shift under Trump had by then become unmistakably clear. The most striking feature of the document is its unprecedented emphasis on placing the Western Hemisphere at the very center of U.S. global strategy. Through what it describes as a “Trumpian corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, the strategy seeks to comprehensively reassert U.S. dominance over the Americas, stressing that order in the Western Hemisphere must revolve around the U.S. as its sole core. The region’s political, economic, security, and supply-chain architectures, the document argues, should all be reshaped around U.S. interests. Unlike the past three decades of U.S. policy, which were characterized by dispersed interventions across Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, this strategy does not focus on further outward expansion. Instead, it represents a broad strategic pivot toward reducing external burdens, concentrating resources back in the Americas, and reshaping the global geopolitical structure from the U.S.’ immediate surroundings. At its core lies the objective of achieving comprehensive and exclusive U.S. control over regional affairs within the Western Hemisphere.
This strategic shift is not an abstract discourse, but indeed has unfolded in the recent trend of countries across the Americas rapidly aligning themselves with the U.S. In November 2025, the United States swiftly reached trade framework agreements with Argentina, Guatemala, Ecuador, and El Salvador. Spanning Central and South America, all four are Spanish-speaking nations that form a geographically connected strategic ring with the U.S. They are broadly dollarized or semi-dollarized economies and are highly dependent on the U.S. economically, while also occupying strategically important positions and possessing valuable natural resources. These agreements go well beyond conventional trade-facilitation arrangements. They encompass wide-ranging provisions on reciprocal tariff treatment, full market opening, coordination in digital and services trade, alignment of intellectual property and labor standards, cooperation on environmental and mineral governance, harmonization of economic security policies, and state-owned enterprise reform. All things considered, they represent a high degree of institutional integration and exclusivity, fully aligning with the objective outlined in the U.S. National Security Strategy to secure and expand American control over the Western Hemisphere.
These agreements, combined with the proactive realignment of countries across the Americas toward the U.S. over the past two years, have reinforced this trend. This includes the growing integration of regional energy systems with the U.S., deeper dollarization of transactions involving critical minerals, the exclusion of Chinese competitors from digital infrastructure, and an accelerating shift toward the U.S. financial system. Taken together, these developments indicate that the U.S. is using trade frameworks as an institutional starting point to push the Western Hemisphere toward a new geopolitical configuration of accelerated Americanization. Under this emerging order, the economic rules, industrial supply chains, and security cooperation of countries across the Americas are being re-anchored within a U.S.-led framework. Looking from this angle, Washington’s Western Hemisphere strategy is not only already taking shape but is becoming increasingly institutionalized and systematized, laying the groundwork for a broader and more exclusive structure in the future.
Once the background and logic of Trump’s “Americas policy” are understood, his military strike against Venezuela becomes easier to comprehend. Through this thunderous operation, Trump has once again sent a message to the world that the Western Hemisphere has always been under U.S. authority, without any exception.
As the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil, China is inevitably affected by the U.S.’ Western Hemisphere strategy, especially given the steady expansion of China’s political and economic influence in Latin America over the past decade. The implications of this strategy for China are therefore far from negligible.
Once the U.S. Western Hemisphere strategy is fully realized, it will significantly squeeze out China’s geopolitical and economic space in Latin America. China’s future involvement in key resources such as lithium, copper, oil, and gold will be subject to far more stringent political scrutiny. Investment thresholds in infrastructure, energy, power generation, telecommunications, digital sectors, and manufacturing will rise markedly, while supply-chain cooperation with Latin American countries will be forced to adjust to U.S.-dominated rules and frameworks. Moreover, as countries across the Americas align more closely with the U.S. on export controls, investment security, and data governance, China’s strategic depth in the region will be substantially reduced, turning the hemisphere into a highly sensitive zone for China and intensifying global competitive pressures.
