Venezuela, Taiwan, and the Dangerous Logic of Regime Change
State Power in international politics has always been double‑edged. It delivers results for those who wield it, but it also teaches others what is permissible. What great powers do does not remain exceptional for long; it becomes precedent. In a system where international law is weakly enforced and diplomacy is increasingly instrumentalized, the most consequential effect of state power is not the immediate outcome it achieves, but the logic it normalizes for others with the capacity to imitate it.
This is the context in which current U.S. policy toward Venezuela should be understood—not only as a regional pressure campaign, but as a live demonstration of how regime change can be pursued without formal declarations of war, without explicit violations that trigger collective defense mechanisms, and without meaningful recourse for the targeted state. The danger is not limited to Venezuela. The danger is that the same methods, justifications, and sequencing are being carefully observed by other capable powers, most notably China, as they consider their own unresolved strategic objectives—above all, Taiwan.
For decades after the Cold War, U.S. actions occupied a unique space. Washington could impose sanctions, naval interdictions, financial isolation, and coercive diplomacy with little fear that its methods would be mirrored against its own allies or interests. This was not because the logic was uncontested, but because no other state possessed the combined capacity, global reach, economic weight, and political willingness to replicate these strategies while absorbing or deterring U.S. retaliation. That asymmetry has eroded rapidly. In the last decade—and especially in the last three to five years—China and Russia have demonstrated not only the ability, but the readiness, to apply similar tools under similar rationales.
The U.S. pressure campaign against Venezuela illustrates this shift with unusual clarity. Officially framed around counter‑narcotics operations, sanctions enforcement, and the defense of democratic norms, the operational reality is broader and more coercive. Naval deployments, interdictions of sanctioned vessels, financial strangulation, and explicit political signaling—such as statements that Venezuela’s leadership is living on borrowed time—leave little ambiguity about strategic intent. Whatever one’s view of the Maduro government, the precedent being set is unmistakable: regime change pursued through sustained economic and logistical isolation, enforced by maritime power, justified through a combination of domestic law, sanctions regimes, and moral claims, while remaining below the formal threshold of war.
This matters because China has an unresolved sovereignty dispute where the costs of open war are extraordinarily high. An amphibious invasion of Taiwan would be the most complex military operation in modern history and would almost certainly trigger U.S. and allied intervention. Beijing knows this. That is why Chinese strategic thinking has increasingly focused on alternatives that apply decisive pressure without crossing bright legal or kinetic lines. The emerging concept of a maritime “quarantine” of Taiwan fits squarely within this logic.
Unlike a declared blockade, a quarantine could be framed as law enforcement. Chinese coast guard vessels—not naval combatants—could board, inspect, delay, and divert shipping under the authority of domestic Chinese law asserting jurisdiction over surrounding waters. Combined with cyber operations, infrastructure sabotage, financial pressure on shipping insurers, and coercion of foreign suppliers, the cumulative effect could closely resemble a blockade while remaining legally ambiguous and politically divisive for external actors.
Taiwan’s structural vulnerabilities make such a strategy particularly dangerous. The island is heavily dependent on imported energy, especially liquefied natural gas, and relies almost entirely on foreign‑flagged shipping. Even limited disruption would ripple far beyond Taiwan itself, affecting some of the world’s busiest sea lanes and a significant share of global maritime trade. Shipping companies, driven by risk calculations rather than geopolitics, would reroute. Insurance premiums would spike. Delays would cascade across East Asian supply chains. The pressure would mount not through explosions, but through spreadsheets.
This is where the Venezuela precedent becomes strategically instructive. The U.S. campaign demonstrates how sustained coercion can be normalized when it is packaged as sanctions enforcement, law enforcement, or counter‑criminal activity. It shows how ambiguity can be weaponized—how intent can be denied even as outcomes are pursued. It tests how allies respond when commercial interests are threatened but treaty obligations are not clearly triggered. From Beijing’s perspective, Venezuela is a live experiment conducted by Washington itself.
China’s relative silence as U.S. pressure on Venezuela intensifies is therefore striking, but not mysterious. Venezuela is a long‑standing Chinese partner, yet Beijing has offered little more than rhetorical support. This restraint should not be misread as indifference. It reflects calculation. China has little incentive to confront the United States over a regime whose internal legitimacy is weak and whose economic value has diminished. Far more valuable is the opportunity to observe how far Washington is willing to go, what legal arguments it relies upon, how international reactions evolve, and whether sustained isolation can achieve regime change without provoking escalation.
Russia, for its part, is also watching, though from a different position. Its war in Ukraine already reflects a willingness to challenge post‑Cold War norms through force, but it has also revealed the costs of overt aggression. Moscow’s reduced capacity to materially support Venezuela underscores another lesson: great powers must prioritize theaters. That reality further encourages indirect, deniable, and legally gray strategies—precisely the kind Venezuela illustrates and Taiwan could soon face.
The deeper problem is not hypocrisy, but pedagogy. International politics is a classroom without a referee. When powerful states act, they teach. When they justify coercion as law enforcement, others learn to do the same. When they pursue regime change through economic suffocation rather than invasion, they demonstrate a method that can be adapted, localized, and improved upon. The double‑edged nature of state power is that it authorizes imitation.
For the United States and its allies, this should provoke uncomfortable reflection. Policies designed to avoid war today may be laying the conceptual groundwork for wars—or coercive capitulations—tomorrow. If choking a government into submission through maritime pressure and sanctions is acceptable in the Caribbean, it becomes harder to argue that similar tactics in the Taiwan Strait are illegitimate. Legal distinctions matter less when practical effects look the same.
None of this suggests moral equivalence between cases, nor does it deny the agency of local actors. It does suggest that strategy does not exist in isolation. Every coercive success carries within it the seeds of future replication. In a world where multiple powers now possess the capacity, capability, and confidence to act, the precedents being set today will shape the crises of tomorrow.
If Venezuela becomes the proof that regime change can be achieved through pressure without war, Taiwan may become the place where that lesson is applied. The most dangerous consequence of great‑power action is not the immediate target—it is the example it leaves behind.
