China Power | Security | East Asia
The U.S. capture of Maduro is likely to bolster, rather than undermine, deterrence across the Taiwan Strait.
The recent capture of Nicolas Maduro serves as a stark warning to Chinese leaders about U.S. capabilities and resolve – a warning that is likely to bolster, rather than undermine, deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. While it’s not possible to know what’s in the mind of Xi Jinping, the United States’ capture of Maduro should give Xi Jinping pause as he sets his sights on Taiwan.
Fears that the capture of Maduro will encourage China to do something similar in Taiwan are overblown. First, and most importantly, China doesn’t need to use U.S. action as a pretext to act aggressively toward Taiwan. China has worked hard to build a rationale for action against Taiwan by portraying it as a Chinese “internal affair.” To that end, it has conditioned its diplomatic relationships on acceptance of its “One China Principle.” As a result, due to China’s distortion of the reality in the Strait, China claims not to need to justify its intervention in Taiwan.
As far as Beijing is concerned, international law does not apply; cross-strait relations and U.S.-Venezuela ties are in no way analogous. For Beijing to say otherwise would be to undermine its own arguments regarding Taiwan. At most, the U.S. action against Maduro provides Beijing with fodder for propaganda and an imperfect view of how the international community reacts to leadership decapitation operations. Taiwan is far more central to global supply chains and strategic stability than Venezuela, and the international response would reflect that.
Second, joint operations capabilities, critical to carrying out leadership decapitation operations, have been a longstanding hurdle for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Despite the huge upsurge in PLA activity around Taiwan in the last few years, China’s military has struggled to effectively demonstrate an ability to carry out joint operations between its service branches. Drills, even if they are “rehearsals,” can only go so far to develop joint operational capabilities.
The PLA lacks the United States’ remarkable history of successful covert operations targeting hostile foreign governments (even if Washington has not always been successful in predicting or managing their aftermath). Operation Absolute Resolve should remind Beijing’s leaders just how complex these operations are. And Taiwan, which for decades has been preparing for a fight with China, is a much harder target than Venezuela.
Beijing would have to consider the costs and benefits of such an operation. Simply removing one or two Taiwanese leaders would be unlikely to advance China’s designs on Taiwan. Instead, it would stiffen resistance, since Taiwanese leadership is popularly elected, in contrast to the Maduro regime. Simply exchanging the Taiwanese president for a pro-China figure would not bring about unification. In order to fully subsume Taiwan as a Chinese province, China would need to neutralize the political, military, and civilian resistance to its rule.
Despite the insinuations of some commentators, the U.S. operation against Maduro is also likely to reinforce U.S. deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Through this operation, the U.S. has shown its capability, and more importantly its resolve, to take on high-risk, decisive decapitation operations when its interests are threatened. Although the “Donroe Doctrine” implies an embrace of exclusive spheres of influence, the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy outlined very clearly that “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority” for the United States.
Moreover, Beijing has a longstanding fear of U.S.-sponsored regime change in China. The CCP’s leadership has repeatedly emphasized the importance it places on U.S. administrations taking a policy of regime change off the table. Proven U.S. capabilities to take out hostile foreign leadership in a precise manner is likely to terrify leaders in Beijing. Such fears may even be part of the impetus for the construction of the “Beijing Military City,” a massive military command center and nuclear bunker noticed under construction in 2025. These fears will almost certainly shape Xi Jinping’s calculations about entering into a conflict against Taiwan.
How can the U.S. take advantage of its fearsome reputation to deepen deterrence? To be clear, it is not in the U.S. interest to pursue forcible leadership decapitation or regime change in China, or to make that explicit U.S. policy. However, the U.S. should not unilaterally surrender the psychological leverage that it has in its relationship with China by ruling this policy out. Maintaining the capability to precisely target Chinese leadership will serve U.S. foreign policy goals without binding the hands of U.S. policymakers. If Xi Jinping fears that long the long arm of American law – in the shape of Delta Force operators – could come for him, he may be more cautious in moving against Taiwan.
