Why China has been restrained in its response

AMID Brazil’s bold denial of its ports to US vessels and Russia’s naval probing, China’s reaction to the US intervention in Venezuela has been rhetorically sharp but materially restrained. Beijing’s foreign ministry condemned the operation as a “serious violation” of sovereignty and international law, demanded the release of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and backed calls at the UN for an emergency Security Council session.

Chinese commentaries framed the US action as evidence of hegemonic bullying and a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, with implicit warnings that such behavior has implications for Taiwan and other flashpoints.

Yet analysts tracking Beijing’s moves agree that China has deliberately confined its response to diplomatic and normative channels, avoiding military deployments or major economic reprisals tied directly to the crisis. One study of Xi Jinping’s 2026 foreign policy posture notes that Venezuela is a partner where China has “tangible but limited” interests — energy investments, loans and political ties — but not a stake vital enough to justify risking confrontation with the United States in the Western Hemisphere.America’s empire is collapsing

Several factors explain this caution: China’s global military footprint remains modest, with only a small number of overseas bases and limited capacity to project sustained naval power into the Caribbean and North Atlantic, especially against entrenched US dominance there. Beijing prioritizes its core theaters — East Asia, especially the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea — over peripheral arenas, husbanding naval and air assets for contingencies closer to home. Chinese strategy emphasizes long term economic and institutional influence (through the Belt and Road Initiative, development finance and trade) rather than dramatic military gestures that could accelerate decoupling or galvanize anti China coalitions in the Americas.

In short, where Russia tests US resolve with submarines and reflagged tankers, China tests it through statements, voting patterns at the UN, and quiet coalition building with states upset by Washington’s behavior but not ready to join an anti American bloc.

Taken together, Brazil’s refusal to facilitate the intervention, Russia’s naval shadow play around a reflagged tanker, and China’s largely verbal resistance illustrate the incomplete, lopsided nature of today’s multipolarity. Regional powers like Brazil can deny access and legitimacy, but they lack collective mechanisms to stop a determined superpower; Russia can create friction and military risk, but mostly at the margins; China can mobilize diplomatic condemnation and economic gravity, yet still avoids direct confrontation in secondary theaters.

Alienating

For Washington, the short term lesson may be that it can still impose its will militarily in places like Venezuela, but only by spending down the remaining capital of the UN system, alienating key regional actors, and prompting counter moves that increasingly involve other nuclear powers. For the rest of the world, the lesson is darker: an order in which a hegemon can carry out regime change in defiance of the UN Charter, a rival can send submarines to escort sanctioned tankers, and an emerging superpower contents itself with words is an order in which the path from proxy confrontation to direct clash is shortening.

The most alarming feature of the current transition is the absence of robust guardrails. A major 2025 security report notes that as new poles rise and ideological divisions widen, the risk of great power war increases, because states race to arm and probe each other without the stabilizing routines once provided by arms control regimes and hotline diplomacy. Unlike during the Cold War, there is no single, well understood set of rules governing nuclear deterrence, cyber operations, autonomous weapons, or orbital systems across all major players.

Venezuela illustrates these dynamics on a regional scale. The US has demonstrated that it will use hard power in its perceived backyard even without multilateral authorization, while China and Russia have signaled that they will counter not by direct confrontation, but by deepening economic, military and diplomatic ties with states that feel threatened by Washington’s doctrine. In parallel, conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza remain unresolved, ensuring that NATO, Russia, Iran and others stay on hair trigger alert in overlapping theaters.

Miscalculation

However, such an environment magnifies the danger of miscalculation. A drone downed over the South China Sea, an exchange of fire on the Lebanon-Israel border, a cyberattack on an energy hub, or a clash between US naval forces and Venezuelan or allied units could each become the spark for wider escalation if great powers read them as tests of credibility rather than incidents to be contained. The more the UN Charter is treated as optional and the more veto wielding powers act outside its framework, the less legitimacy remains for any institution capable of mediating in a crisis like Cuba in 1962.

In economic terms, multipolar fragmentation also pushes states to weaponize interdependence. Sanctions, export controls, financial exclusion and blockades — tools already central in the Russia and Iran cases — are now embedded as standard instruments of statecraft among all major players. When every side expects economic warfare as normal, incentives grow to secure resources and chokepoints preemptively, which is exactly what underlies the strategic importance of places like the South China Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and now, Venezuela’s oil basins.

The dilemma at the end of 2025 is that the world stands between “transactional unilateralism” and “competitive multipolarity,” without the institutions and habits needed to keep competition from spilling into open conflict. The US intervention in Venezuela is a symptom of this deeper crisis: It shows a hegemon turning back to naked force just as its relative dominance is eroding, while alternative poles lack the cohesion or legitimacy to construct a credible, law bound alternative.

In theory, a genuinely multipolar order could be more balanced and plural, with regional powers sharing responsibility and no single state imposing its will. In practice, what is emerging looks less like concerted multipolarity and more like rival spheres of influence, where great powers and their clients enforce their own rules within contested zones. In such a system, Venezuela is not the last intervention but an opening act, a signal to other vulnerable states that in the absence of binding norms, security will be sought through arms, alliances and, when convenient, preemptive strikes.

Not yet

This is not yet a stable multipolar balance; it is a transitional, brittle configuration where every move in places like the Caribbean, the Amazon, or the North Atlantic risks triggering a chain of reactions across Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indo Pacific. In that sense, the Brazilian ports, the Russian flagged tanker, and China’s caution are not side stories to the Venezuelan crisis — they are early chapters in a narrative of how a fraying world system can stumble, step by step, toward a wider war.

The choice ahead is stark. Either the major powers — including the United States, China, Russia, and the leading regional blocs — accept mutual constraints and rebuild some form of enforceable international law, or the world drifts further into a phase where every crisis is a test of strength and every local war risks drawing in the giants. At that point, the question will no longer be whether the world is unipolar or multipolar, but how to rebuild any order at all from the ruins of a system that forgot how to keep the peace.

At the end of the day, China may simply be acting as a clever superpower, which is representing itself as a responsible one, sure of every step it makes. It could be merely following its revered Mao Zedong’s military dictum: “Fight no battle one is not sure of winning.” Venezuela is far from its power-projections, and the US certainly still has Latin America within its military control. No way for China, even with Russia as an ally, can militarily push back the US from Latin America.

Instead, China is exploiting Trump’s big blunder that is the removal of the legitimate head of another sovereign country, to depict Washington as a bully and serial violator of sovereignty, reinforcing Beijing’s self-presentation as a defender of the Global South and non-interference in countries’ internal affairs.

Indeed, American propagandists’ decades-old refrain that China, because of its refusal to comply with the 2016 arbitral ruling on South China disputes, doesn’t subscribe to the international rule of law rings so hollow it is almost hilarious, what with US special forces stomping on another country’s territory, and kidnapping its legitimate head of state.

Who’s the bully now, China must be rhetorically asking the Philippines’ American-brainwashed officials.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post Why China has been restrained in its response first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

Why China has been restrained in its response
Source: Breaking News PH