Venezuela: if China loses, world loses

The 'Rules-based order' we know is a farce

With its response to Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel began dismantling the rules-based order under the United Nations. Bit by bit it exterminated over 70,000 and forced nearly two million Palestinians out of Gaza while reducing most of the territory to rubble.

With the January 3 abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump literally trashed the International Law and reduced the world's largest, fund-guzzling bureaucracy United Nations to zilch — making fun of it as much as Netanyahu and his ministers have been doing since October 2023.

In a brazen display of political hypocrisy, TV channels and media in Europe, Canada and the US have been instructed to avoid using word "kidnapping/abduction" and instead refer to "arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro".

For supporters, Donald Trump has acted only to create an energy leverage and deny China cheaper oil, including from Iran and Venezuela. They call it a strategy which Trump thinks would exploit China's dependence on imported energy and thus be able to shape global power. Trump believes, it seems, that power doesn't come from energy but from who controls it. The assumption of the pro-camp is that China would be the ultimate loser of billions of dollars worth of investments in Venezuela and its neighbourhood (Columbia, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil) under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Detractors of the hostile US action in violation of the International Law put the same in different words: the real objective of the military is financial and strategic by pushing China out, preserve the dollar's predominance and fracture the BRICS alliance before it solidifies. Some argue China all of a sudden has lost over 70 per cent of its non-US oil supplies from Venezuela, reeling from crippling US sanctions.

As for China, its staggering technological progress and the present economic prowess has defied the Western logic of pressures and sanctions, and disproved their assumptions. A visible hostility — expressed through the human rights' regime and protracted punishing sanctions and restrictions of various kinds — have only strengthened China.

In their selfish exuberance and quest for choking China's energy supplies, Trump and his aides overlook that Beijing does not anchor its overseas exposure to individuals but to institutions, legal contracts and infrastructure systems for a simple reason: while dealing with their American counterparts, Chinese leaders always factor in the unpredictability associated with the geopolitics.

It is not just their hunch but civilisational instinct to tread carefully without directly antagonising the interlocutors.

Strategically, China's approach is quieter and slower — embedded through trade dependency, infrastructure integration, technology transfer and operational know-how. Most Chinese oil agreements with Venezuela, for example, are binding financial contracts and globally acceptable repayment mechanisms — also connected to Western financial institutions. These contracts were devised keeping in view the possibility that struck the country on January 3.

Any unilateral breach of these contracts is likely to cascade into a tsunami of reactions (defaults, trans-border legal disputes) and confidence-shocks that could potentially rock the global financial global system.

This is why the idea of "confiscating" Chinese oil infrastructure in Venezuela and forcing it out of the key infrastructure and mining sectors is largely fictional. Seizing physical assets may be easy but substituting an integrated technological system is not.

During the past two decades, China provided the operational core of Venezuela's oil industry both as a buyer and a builder. It delivered refinery technology, heavy crude upgrading systems, transfer of technology, control software and, most critically, trained human capital.

Venezuela is the new testing ground for how far the United States is willing to go to roll back China's economic and strategic footprint in its own backyard.

But there is another tragic reality to Maduro's abduction, accompanied by self-serving American rhetoric that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier alluded to in a speech at a symposium in Berlin on January 7, 2026. The general context was his strong criticism of US foreign policy under President Donald Trump, which he described as creating a "second historic rupture" after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and warned the world against allowing the international order to collapse into a "den of robbers".

"In my opinion, we have now moved beyond the stage where we can lament the lack of respect for international law or the erosion of the international order; we are far beyond that. Today, the aim is to prevent the world from turning into a den of thieves, where the most unscrupulous take what they want... a world where regions and entire countries are treated as property rather than major powers," Steinmeier said in one of the harshest critiques of America's military action in Venezuela.

Few leaders in Europe have the courage to equate the globally condemned American action with a theft and transgression of the International Law.

The unusually bold speech reflects the deep internal conflict that most Europeans are currently going through but find hard to articulate. Maduro's abduction literally buried the noise that the entire US-led West had raised when Moscow invaded Ukraine. It also exposed the self-serving criticism that the West subjected China and Russia to for decades.

And the German president summed it all (the aim is to prevent the world from turning into a den of thieves, where the most unscrupulous take what they want). Prevention of course is possible only if the Western exceptionalism gives way to multilateralism. The consequences for the global order otherwise are certainly debilitating.