John Authers: US power projection returns as Venezuela raid redefines global influence

Key topics:US military raid in Venezuela signals revived power projectionSpheres of influence challenge the postwar rules-based orderMessage to China and Russia on Taiwan, Ukraine and global power.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By John Authers.There’s an enticing way to rationalise last weekend’s extraordinary events in Caracas. It means the return to Spheres of Influence, rather than a rules-based international order. The US enjoys its own sphere in the Americas (under what we must now call the Donroe Doctrine). The extraordinary step of abducting the president of a nation of more than 30 million souls can be taken as a signal that Washington will focus on its own sphere while leaving Russia and China, the other powers of the moment, to their own preoccupations, notably in Ukraine and Taiwan.This would be a return to the blocs and diplomacy of the 19th century, much as renewed protectionism is ushering back a Victorian version of trade and capitalism. It’s also perfectly congruent with the nightmare vision for a postwar order that George Orwell advanced in 1984, in which he saw a world divided between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, huge blocs centred on the US, Russia and China. There is comforting logic to it, and a deep literature explaining how we can all survive in a world of spheres.For those who dislike the Trump administration, there can even be some solace in a comparison with gangsterism. This may not be the UN Charter or the Magna Carta, but there’s honour among thieves, and a world divided among Mafia families would at least be stable and mostly peaceful. Think only of the order that prevails in the opening scene of The Godfather, when Vito Corleone is operating as a benevolent dictator sharing spoils with other families, and with the police.Risk can never be excised altogether. When they go wrong, such models can lead to disasters like the final scenes of The Godfather, or the breakdown between blocs that caused the First World War. And there are drawbacks that fall short of military conflict. Anne Applebaum lays out this vision of a carved-up tripartite world in which “America is just a regional bully” to whom European and Asian markets are eventually closed while “sooner or later, ‘our’ Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back.”However, snatching Nicolas Maduro in the largest military operation in the Americas in decades doesn’t fit perfectly with any such stable if partitioned system. Far from telling Russia and China that they’re free to operate in their own zones of interest, it can be viewed as a Trumpian challenge to them. And in an important sense, spheres of influence never went away..Spheres of Influence.The phrase took hold during the European powers’ rush to capture and build colonies in the late 19th century. Predating attempts to build a global order, the idea was to find a way to coexist, with colonies providing economic sustenance for their imperial masters. The original Monroe Doctrine, promulgated as colonialism gained force early in the 1800s, was an attempt to defend a similar zone of influence. But even after decolonisation and the postwar rules-based order, it’s questionable whether the concept ever went away..Writing in 2020, Harvard University’s Graham Allison described the decisions that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as follows:US policymakers had ceased to recognize spheres of influence — the ability of other powers to demand deference from other states in their own regions or exert predominant control there — not because the concept had become obsolete. Rather, the entire world had become a de facto American sphere. Spheres of influence had given way to a sphere of influence. The strong still imposed their will on the weak. Spheres of influence hadn’t gone away; they had been collapsed into one, by the overwhelming fact of US hegemony.Viewed this way, the last 36 years have seen the continuous shrinking of that once vast US zone of influence. That’s in part because of the economy. Other countries, starting from a lower base, have grown much faster. American dominance of the global economy is over.Military incidents also shrunk the US sphere. The disastrous American occupation of Iraq cut it down to size, and reduced the nation’s appetite for running the world, while the Obama administration’s failure to follow up when Syria crossed its “red line” by gassing its citizens showed weakness. Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014 went unchallenged (save for its exclusion from the G-8 group of countries).On a broad interpretation, the United Nations and the rest of the rules-based apparatus at one point helped enforce a global US sphere. That it doesn’t any more is due to the decline of both that order and the nation at its centre.Further, it’s not at all clear that the Maduro abduction, for all its obvious transactionalism, is about solidifying a smaller but still large area of influence. Both China and Russia have interests in the country. And the White House isn’t behaving as though it has shed global ambitions. Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group geopolitical risk consultancy, points to deepening US involvement in the Middle East over the last year, and said:The “spheres of influence” frame doesn’t fit. Trump isn’t carving up the world with rival powers, each staying in their lane. Washington just sent Taiwan its largest-ever arms package, and the administration’s Indo-Pacific posture does not evince a desire to cede Asia to China..Trump Intentions.This grows clearest when reading the 30-page National Security Strategy that the administration published last month. It garnered most attention for its startlingly negative, even contemptuous, attitude to western Europe, and its use of culture war language. Restoring Europe’s “civilisational self-confidence and Western identity” after mass immigration is identified as a core US foreign policy interest. Its first priority, to ensure the Western Hemisphere is stable enough “to prevent and discourage mass migration to the US,” seems parochial.But while this shows a big shift in cultural priorities, there isn’t a whiff of willingness to leave Russia or particularly China alone in their own spheres of influence. On the contrary, the US “must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others.” While it argues for a “readjustment” of global military forces to address “urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” it also says that the Indo-Pacific “will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds” and “we must successfully compete there.” It commits to a “robust and ongoing focus on deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific” and to ensuring that “allied economies do not become subordinate to any competing power.”The document devotes two pages to the necessity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan, and to preventing “the potential for any competitor to control the South China Sea.”Overcoming Caracas’ air defences and seizing Maduro in a special forces raid after a complex military buildup is a signal to China and Russia, and not one in which they have carte blanche in their corners of the world. “Geopolitics is about power projections,” says Tina Fordham of Fordham Global Foresight, who says Trump’s message is: “We have military supremacy and we could carry off this operation. You try it.”The spectacularly successful Venezuela operation makes a stark contrast with Russia’s continued failure after four years to remove Volodymyr Zelenskiy from Ukraine. Now, says Fordham, “Trump has put a big fork in Putin’s eye, and in China’s. The Kremlin has lost big time.”.The View From Beijing and Moscow .Because Russia has given Venezuela military support, the success of the US operation is deeply embarrassing. “As in Iran, Russian military equipment did nothing to impede the U.S. assault,” says Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution. “These failures hardly serve as an advertisement for future Russian arms sales.” For China, there is no way to view the Maduro abduction as a quid pro quo on Taiwan. “China does not need Trump’s takeover of Venezuela to justify a military campaign against Taiwan,” says Richard C. Bush of Brookings. Indeed, the Chinese leadership regards the island as a domestic issue.Further, the incident might act as a deterrent in some ways, but it’s not going to stop China’s commercial relationship with Latin America. “Half a trillion dollars of trade with China is not going to go away,” says Eric Olander of the China-Global South project, who notes that the US has only isolated opportunities for extreme leverage in the region. “Nobody thinks they will launch a military invasion into Brazil to stop a BYD factory there.”The move does change the international status quo because of its success and sheer audacity. American military might looks stronger once more, while Russia has been humbled. It also, plainly, shows the continued retreat from an international rules-based order. As late-night humorists have pointed out, Trump’s eagerness to take control of Venezuelan oil appears almost absurdly transactional.The key takeaway is that everyone needs to defend themselves. Just look at the markets. Currencies and even the oil price have barely moved since the action in Caracas — but global weapons stocks are up 7%. In Europe, now looking friendless, defence manufacturers rose 13%. It’s reassuring in some ways if a cynical global carve-up is not really underway. But what’s happening clearly makes the world a more dangerous and less predictable place..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

John Authers: US power projection returns as Venezuela raid redefines global influence

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