Such is the conclusion of National Review’s Noah Rothman, whose article is prefaced by one of its sentences: “Maduro’s fall presents the communist Chinese with a comprehensive embarrassment” (January 5, 2025).
Rothman lauds in detail the preparation for and execution of the U.S. raid to grab Maduro. But he notes that it has been followed by official U.S. statements on what U.S. policy will be now vis-à-vis Venezuela that are “sometimes in conflict.” Also that “the trajectory of Venezuela’s political evolution is by no means assured.”
Nevertheless:
Operation Absolute Resolve was [not only a tactical success but] also a strategic success. The signal America sent to anti-American great powers and rogue states alike with the raid is a sobering one.
Maduro’s fall presents the communist Chinese with a comprehensive embarrassment. As Nikkei’s Ken Moriyasu reported, America now threatens China’s access to a source of foreign oil that might offset Beijing’s reliance on Iran. The raid took place while a Chinese delegation was on the ground in Caracas—indeed, within hours of the Chinese mission’s meeting with the Venezuelan strongman. Beijing is fit to be tied over the insult to their diplomatic personnel—a rare [not really…] emotive display that betrays the People’s Republic’s outrage over the setback to its efforts to establish reliable outposts in the Western Hemisphere. “Over the past 24 hours, China’s regional calculations have gone out the window,” the Hudson Institute’s Michael Sobolik told Moriyasu.
Beijing has been further humiliated as a result of the failure of its “anti-stealth” radar systems, which Taiwanese media dismissed as “expensive ornaments.” Those systems proved no obstacle to U.S. forces, nor did Russia’s anti-air defense network. “Experts had warned that Venezuela’s layered air-defense network could complicate U.S. air operations,” the Financial Times reported. “But it apparently presented little or no resistance to the US strike that captured President Nicolás Maduro.”
The suggestion has been made somewhere that it was not so much the defense technology as the personnel that were so unreliable in Caracas and so helpless against the U.S. raiders. Of course, perhaps both were at fault.
Rothman’s article is a pretty good overview. But he apparently accepts the fallacy that CCP explosions of anti-diplomatic fury, whether expressed verbally or by storming out of conferences and the like, are some kind of rarity.
They may be spontaneous, they may be calculated. Rare they are not. Wasn’t it just seven or eight weeks ago that a Japan-placed CCP “diplomat” threatened to lop off the head of the Japanese prime minister? A New York Times headline informed us at the time that “China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomacy Returns With Threat Against Japan’s Leader.” The recurrence is eternal.
To be sure, the CCP’s wolf-warrior frothing does alternate with disingenuous measured counsels and saccharine exercises in phony-baloney affectations of benevolence. But all these are modes of one thing and come out of the same kit bag.
