Let’s begin 2026 with a bit of geopolitics, and a note from Dan Wang’s annual year-end letter, musing about the preponderance of Sputnik moments that lead nowhere:
One of the startling geopolitical moves of the year was how quickly Donald Trump withdrew his ~150 percent tariffs on China. Trump folded not out of beneficence, but because Xi Jinping denied rare earth magnets to most of the world, threatening many types of manufacturing operations. And yet I’m struck by Beijing’s relative restraint. Chinese producers are close to being monopolists not only in rare earths, but also electronics products, batteries, and many types of active pharmaceutical ingredients. In case China denies, say, cardiovascular drugs to the elderly, how long could a state hold out?
One might have expected the US to have roused itself after this bout of the trade war. But there have been too many declarations of Sputnik Moments without commensurate action. Barack Obama declared a Sputnik with China’s high-speed rail; Mark Warner repeated with Huawei’s 5G; Marc Andreessen called it with DeepSeek. The more that people use the term, the less likely that society spurs itself into taking it seriously.
That passage resonated for a few reasons. First, it’s just a good observation: there have been lots of purported Sputnik moments in recent years! Second, the collective meltdown in the wake of DeepSeek’s R1 release last year is still amazing to look back on (approaching the one year anniversary!), and as someone who follows China news every week, I can attest that that sort of fevered, existential dread is not rare (Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro and its 7 nm chip inspired a similar wave of alarm across Washington). And finally, paranoid AI and chip hyperbole nowithstanding, Wang asks a serious question that I come back to frequently: if these two countries are trending toward a full decoupling and a prolonged conflict, then why isn’t the US acting like it?
Aside from rhetorical commitments to restoring domestic industrial capacity and a variety of China Select Committee investigations that tend to go ignored, there’s near-weekly evidence that Congress and the current administration are not entirely serious about leading a whole of nation effort to eliminate regulatory bottlenecks to power abundance, bring pharmaceutical production onshore, mine and refine rare earths, and reduce the leverage that China has over the U.S. economy in about a dozen different areas. Absent solutions on any of those fronts, some of which will take years, Trump couldn’t even ban TikTok. Then, just before Christmas, the U.S. greenlit the sale of high-end Nvidia chips that could help Chinese companies narrow the gap with U.S. competitors in AI. If successfully navigating a prolonged competition with China requires not only acknowledging said competition but actually making the sacrifices necessary to win it, one could be forgiven for reading the news over the past 10 years and concluding that America simply doesn’t have the mettle to prioritize long term national interests over short term private interests (or political incentives).
Wang, who earlier in 2025 penned the New York Times bestseller Breakneck, about China’s quest to engineer the technological future, published his year-end letter on New Year’s Day. Then, 36 hours after reading his warnings about American complacency, I opened WhatsApp to find a flurry of messages and tweets about a Delta Force operation to capture and exfiltrate Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, fly him to Manhattan to face prosecution on drug charges, and replace him with a government that’s beholden to the United States.
Now when I re-read Wang asking whether America can rouse itself to respond to competitive threats from its greatest adversaries, I can’t help but wonder whether the world just watched the U.S. provide an answer.
What the U.S. Wants in Venezuela
Attempting to parse the logic and implications of this operation is not easy, and possibly ill-advised. The facts on the ground will continue to evolve, as will our understanding of last week’s operation. With that caveat noted, and having just recorded a Sharp China episode that was largely focused on China’s reaction to these developments, I’ll work from what’s known today and share why I’m encouraged by what the U.S. is attempting here.
First, there’s the threshold matter of who’s driving these policies and what that means for how they’re perceived. Let’s stipulate the Trump administration says and does a number of things that are unbecoming of the Presidency. I won’t list my personal grievances and specific examples of the lack of humanity, judgment and/or tact of the current administration, but suffice to say I understand why anyone would be exhausted and deeply uncomfortable with this presidency. On the other hand, where Trump critics tend to err is in the assumption that because he is often careless and objectionable, everything he does is careless and objectionable. If you start from the premise that Trump is simply a boorish moron who’s unfit to hold power in any context, there’s a risk that confirmation bias will distort the analysis of whether any of his policies are reasonable or effective. This leads to buying into resistance fan fiction like “Trump didn’t support an incredibly risky, full scale regime change because of bitterness over the Nobel Peace Prize,” and, a more relevant risk for his political opponents, it leads to opposing a good number of broadly popular policies and initiatives.
Going the the other direction here, and treating Trump like a historical figure worth thinking about with a bit more intellectual rigor, one of the most perceptive (and concise!) reads on Trump-era policy came early last year from a Bank of Japan Deputy Governor named Himino Ryozo. Remarking on tariffs and how Japan should view the U.S. under Trump, Himino began his comments by saying:
If I could offer some personal and tentative reflections, I would argue that there are three characteristics that define the current administration’s way of thinking.
First, the administration adopts a holistic approach and treats political, economic, and cultural matters, as well as domestic and international affairs, as integral parts of a single, inseparable policy agenda.
Second, while it is highly flexible in its tactical decisions, switching its approaches as situations evolve and choosing when to press ahead, pause, or make temporary retreats, the administration remains persistent in its strategic choices about what it ultimately aims to attain.
Third, it is unfettered from conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, focuses on facts that define the locus and sources of power, and explores opportunities that have thus far not been exploited.
The analysis above applies pretty cleanly to the news of this week. I don’t have a security clearance, but it seems likely that U.S. national interests driving engagement in Venezuela are related to countering transnational narcotics gangs, controlling the flow of oil, securing access to critical minerals, power projection, and national security. The U.S. was negotiating a peaceful Maduro exit to Turkey in late December; when that offer was rejected, there was a pivot.
Maduro was a repressive, corrupt dictator who oversaw human rights violations and suffering on a mass scale. My own lesson in that respect came when I saw the Venezuela’s basketball team at the Rio Olympics in 2016 and met a Venezuelan fan who told me through a translator that he was filling his suitcase with medicine to bring back to his his mother and grandmother, all while the team played in Rio amid a widespread hunger crisis back home (and spoke very carefully about it). There have been two rigged elections since then, and removing Maduro now is hopefully a step in the right direction for the Venezuelan people.
Still, there are corrupt, inhumane leaders all over the world. As to the American interests that justified capturing this one, with one of the most audacious U.S. military operations of my lifetime, Marco Rubio appeared on “Meet The Press” this week and said the following:
“What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States. You have to understand, why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Why does Iran need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live, and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”
It would be easy to focus on the first half of the answer—oil! Iraq part two!—and miss the far more important note on Venezuela as a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States. By many accounts, that’s precisely what Venezuela had become.
For example, this article from Renegade Resources was compelling, outlining the extensive ties between Venezuela and Russia, which sells arms to Venezuelans and trains them (“Over 120 Russian troops operate in Venezuela under Lieutenant General Oleg Makarevich, leading what Ukrainian intelligence identifies as the “Equator Task Force.’”); Iran, which sold even more arms to Venezuela and has an operational presence in the country (“Documented Iranian weapons transfers to Venezuela since 2020 include Mohajer-6 unmanned aerial vehicles with 2,000 kilometer operational range, sufficient to reach any target in Florida. Venezuela has publicly displayed these systems in military parades from 2021 through 2023.”); and then China, which has flooded the country with investment and cornered the market on critical minerals extraction (“Western nations seeking to diversify away from Chinese processing looked to Venezuela, only to discover Chinese buyers already controlled extraction operations. This is strategic encirclement where China dominates both global processing infrastructure and alternative source extraction”). There was also a note this week from former Biden NSC official Rush Doshi, who wrote that “The PRC has long pursued military sites in Latin America,” and that “prominent PRC figures confirmed to me directly [one desired site] was Venezuela.”
This overview of Unmanned and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles highlights another potentially urgent security risk, noting that Venezuela’s coastline “sits close enough to the Panama Canal, Gulf shipping lanes, and cable approaches that UUVs can operate without long transits draining their batteries.” Undersea drones were recently deployed to great effect in the Ukraine war and are incredibly difficult to defend against. The hypothetical risk of deploying them from Venezuela to disrupt U.S. internet cables and shipping lanes illustrates the more concrete problem with allowing hostile foreign adversaries to deeply embed military assets in a country within the Western Hemisphere. If the U.S. intends to defend Taiwan, or Ukraine, or fight battles anywhere else in the world, it’s a potentially history-altering liability if China, Russia and/or Iran have the capability to paralyze the U.S. economy from South America (and exhaust U.S. resources addressing the problem).
Finally, while the ultimate value of Venezuelan oil to the United States is debatable, the value of that oil to China is more interesting. To wit, restricting oil exports to Cuba could spell disaster for the communist regime within months, which would be bad news for Russia and China, both of whom maintain extensive signals intelligence operations in the country. Additionally, this highly technical post about oil composition and global refining capacity argues that if U.S.-aligned producers in Venezulea stop shipping oil to China, over the long term, it could force China into a single point of dependence on Iran for certain critical oil imports (Canada is potentially a player here too, while reliance on the Iranian regime is increasingly looking like a pretty big wild card). On the other hand, if US-aligned producers in Venezuela do ship to China, but retain the power to pause those shipments, that creates leverage over the Chinese industrial complex that mimics rare earth export controls and creates “a very real wartime advantage against China.”
That post concludes by observing of the strategic advantage, “It’s likely the US does not recognize this fully. They just wanted China OUT.” Which brings us to a headline from Tuesday night—Trump demands Venezuela kick out China and Russia, partner only with US on oil: EXCLUSIVE.
What the US does and doesn’t recognize about the scale of its opportunity is an open question, and there’s room to debate how much strategic leverage America will actually gain. Regardless, it certainly looks like the U.S. is in a better strategic position today than it was a week ago. The same cannot be said for Russia, Iran, or the CCP, which had an “all-weather strategic partnership” with the Maduro regime, had Chinese delegates meeting with the former president hours before he was captured, and is now left hoping that the U.S. continues to sell them oil.
The Cold War That Was Never Announced
Many of my millennial peers processed the news last weekend and immediately thought about the Iraq War. I get that. Those were formative political years for an entire generation that was then conditioned to be skeptical of military engagement specifically and Republicans generally. None of us have lived in a world where there’s active tension with rival superpower. Moreover, to anyone who’s not been paying close attention to the threats facing the U.S. in any wartime scenario, and the extent to which those threats have expanded and evolved over the past 10 years, a Delta Force helicopter invasion to capture a world leader on foreign soil, in violation of International Law, sounds like something that would be too stupid even for Dick Cheney, but might be pushed by Donald Rumsfeld.
Also, let’s go back to Sputnik. The reason there’s never been a Sputnik moment that resonates with the mainstream is because most people don’t even know the U.S. is in the middle of another cold war. David Wallace-Wells had a good column about this dynamic for the New York Times last year, noting that “part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture,” while “this time, there has been essentially none of that — no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict even as a narrative crutch.” But of course Hollywood’s not doing that; Zootopia 2 just made a billion dollars thanks to the Chinese market. And in all seriousness, given the economic interdependence of the US and China, there are lots of incentives to not declare a cold war, mobilizing the entire United States public behind efforts that will take years, while tanking the retirement accounts of 100 million Americans in the meantime.
All this makes for a bewildering landscape in which the U.S. is on one hand taking certain steps that seem reckless, overtly aggressively, and unprecedented in the modern world, and on the other hand conducting business mostly as usual. The Administration itself does not make it any easier; unlike the Bush administration pushing Yellow Cake stories in 2002, none of the asymmetric threats described above have been cited publicly, while Trump talks often about his “great relationship with Xi Jinping.” After meeting Xi in November he referred to the US and China as the “G2” and wrote, “This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success. God bless both China and the USA!” He’s set to visit Beijing in March, and U.S. countermeasures on China are paused indefinitely in service of a trade war truce to keep rare earths flowing for at least the next 10 months.
It’s certainly possible that Trump’s critics are right and he is a credulous fool, easily flattered, destined to start pointless wars, destroy relationships with allies, and forge a grand bargain that hands China control of Taiwan. Chinese scholars certainly hope so. My guess, though, is that those assessments will ultimately look facile. Trump’s words have successfully mollified the Chinese and kept rare earths flowing to U.S. industry, but last weekend’s actions reflect an American security apparatus that understands the scale of its modern threats and the urgency of addressing them.
Here’s to betting that there will be more moves that bend the norms of the postwar liberal order but nevertheless advance American interests in ways that will benefit successive administrations from either party. As for Venezuela, it’s still early. It will be several years before we know whether any of this was truly successful. In the meantime what we can say for certain is that last weekend’s operation an attempt at fortifying regional security that may weaken some of America’s greatest adversaries. If not quite a race to the moon, it was the latest reminder that we’re all living in a different world these days.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.