There will be a tendency in Australia to write off the American night raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro as an isolated incident in South America with little local relevance. A combination of geographic distance, a focus on our immediate region, domestic concerns and a deep complacency about national security conspire together to lead Australians to this conclusion.
China will be studying the military execution of the raid to ensure it can match America’s capabilities.
That would be a mistake.
As the new year breaks, the team assembling the 2026 edition of Australia’s National Defence Strategy will be closing in on their final drafts and circulating them for comment among senior military, public service and political leaders. A key area of deliberation will be the future of the US alliance and what the the Trump administration means for force structure, AUKUS, infrastructure to support American forces, and the overall budget.
While discussions with our American partners will provide vital input into Australia’s National Defence Strategy, so too will the recently released US National Security Strategy. The Venezuela raid provides an insight into the Trump administration’s implementation of the Strategy because this operation hews to the priorities listed in it.
The Trump strategy places America’s western hemisphere first among its priorities. While heavily biased towards economic initiatives, the document also focuses on pushing back foreign influence. It notes that “non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future.”
Viewed through this lens, the Venezuela raid assumes a different meaning from the law enforcement operation that the US president described in his 3 January press conference. The Americans were asserting their primacy in the region, in the capital of a nation that had supported Russia’s operations in Ukraine and which had just completed meetings with senior Chinese diplomats hours before the raid commenced.
Unfortunately, the American demonstration of abiding by the priorities of the National Security Strategy could also be interpreted as the Trump administration being open to a “spheres of influence” approach to foreign policy. This has been the subject of much speculation in the past year. As a series of articles in Foreign Policy magazine argued:
the spheres-of-influence approach to grand strategy largely fell out of public discourse at the end of the Cold War, a time of great hope for globalization and multilateralism. But now, many analysts argue that under the second Trump administration—not to mention the regimes of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—it is back with a vengeance.
Australia is in tough position in such a world. Into whose sphere of influence does it fall, and does it get a choice? The NSS lists Asia listed as a priority for American security, and the US is reinvesting in its Asian alliances with Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia. But will America compete for, or cede to China, a sphere of influence in Asia? Sorting through the ramifications, and Australia’s security relationship with its key military ally, will be challenging for the authors of the National Defence Strategy.
Two other aspects of the raid will interest Australian strategists.
President Trump’s declaration that America will “run Venezuela in the transition” contradicts the “America First” inclinations of many in the new Republican party, and is an unclear objective with no strategy attached. There is no clear end-state other than the implication that the government of Venezuela should be anti-drug, pro-America, pro-business and keep the oil flowing. As a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have seen this slovenly strategic thinking about regime change and reconstruction before. It did not end well, and may result in a distracted America while China further builds its military, economic and diplomatic power. An obsession with tiny nations in South America could have a significant impact on the American competition with China.
As a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have seen this slovenly strategic thinking about regime change and reconstruction before.
Second, authoritarian leaders such as Xi, Putin and Kim will be newly energised. This raid provides them with the justification to target their own political enemies abroad. We might now assume they will keep this American raid in their arsenal of rhetorical weapons should they wish to do something similar. But they will also use it for short term cognitive warfare. China has already issued a statement about the Venezuela operation, noting it is “deeply shocked by and strongly condemns the U.S.’s blatant use of force against a sovereign state”.
China will be studying the military execution of the raid to ensure it can match America’s capabilities. The PLA may employ such tactics not only against Taiwan but in other regional countries where it is not satisfied that the political leadership is sufficiently inclined towards the PRC.
There will be many analyses of this raid in the coming weeks. For Australia, the geography is irrelevant. The improved comprehension of American strategic thinking is the vital issue. The insights are there if we care to look.
