It took just<\/b> <\/b>a few hours for Donald Trump to upend a relationship that China had been cultivating for decades. <\/b><\/p>\n
Only hours before he was seized in a nighttime raid, Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro had been praising his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping as “an older brother” with a “powerful message as a leader to the world” during a meeting with senior diplomats from Beijing.<\/p>\n
China has invested heavily in oil-rich Venezuela, one of its closest South American partners. And its state media showed off the footage from that meeting to prove it: smiling men in suits, reviewing some of the 600 current agreements between their two countries – except the next photograph of Maduro was taken on board a US warship, blindfolded and handcuffed, in grey sweats.<\/p>\n
China joined many countries around the world in condemning Washington’s stunning move against a sovereign state. It accused the US of acting like a “world judge” and insisted that “the sovereignty and security of all countries should be fully protected under international law”.<\/p>\n
Those stern words aside, Beijing will be making careful calculations not just to insure its foothold in South America, but also to manage an already tricky relationship with Trump and plot its next steps as the great power competition between the US and China takes a new, wholly unexpected turn.<\/p>\n
Many see this as an opportunity for China’s authoritarian Communist Party rulers. But there is also risk, uncertainty and frustration as Beijing tries to figure out what to do after Trump tore up the very international rulebook it has spent decades trying to play by.<\/p>\n
Beijing, which likes to play the long game, is no fan of chaos. That is certainly what it seems to be coming up repeatedly against in Trump’s second term. It had planned ahead and weathered the on-again, off-again trade war. Xi will believe he showed the US and the world just how dependent they are on Chinese manufacturing and technology.<\/p>\n
But now Beijing faces a new challenge.<\/p>\n
Trump’s play for Venezuelan oil has likely strengthened China’s deepest doubts about American intentions \u2013 how far would the US go to contain Chinese influence?<\/p>\n
Speaking to NBC on Sunday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared: “This is the western hemisphere. This is where we live \u2013 and we’re not going to allow the western hemisphere to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”<\/p>\n
The not-so-hidden message was for Beijing: get out of our backyard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took just a few hours for Donald Trump to upend a relationship that China had been cultivating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-679024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115851622029493093","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}