In the face of a Trump administration launching extraordinary attacks (see: Venezuela), Australia needs to change

share_windows This article appeared in Crikey on January 8 2026.

Imagine this scenario: the world wakes up to learn that the United States has carried out a major military operation in a sovereign nation, launched strikes around its capital, captured its president and his wife, and flown them to New York to face US federal charges.

No, this is not another episode of Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals; nor is it an imaginary case study conjured up by a lecturer desperately trying to animate a tutorial in which students are bored with dry, abstract theories of global power and national strategy. This is something that actually happened last weekend in Venezuela, and, to use a cliché favoured by lazy journalists, the world is reeling from it.

So, when a big country claiming to uphold the international rule of law goes with guns blazing into a small, oil-rich but cash-poor country, arrests its corrupt dictator and claims control of its oil resources, who is in the wrong? Who has the moral high ground?

So far, several Western nations — including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia — have responded to these questions with platitudes about the importance of diplomacy, democracy and deescalation. Such mealy-mouthed responses aim to avoid criticising the US administration, while making sure not to apportion any sympathy to President Nicolás Maduro, who is in US custody along with his wife Cilia Flores.

For a self-proclaimed 'middle power' such as Australia, the US’ actions in Venezuela signal that Australia may be entering a new and even more challenging phase of being caught in the discomfort zone between the US, our closest security ally and protector, and China, our biggest trading partner.

In moral terms, the US’ actions in Venezuela suggest a broader shift in Washington’s approach to global competition — one in which longstanding normative positions on democracy, sanctions and international law are increasingly subordinated to strategic and economic imperatives. In the context of US–China relations, this move reinforces Beijing’s longstanding critique that the United States bends international rules and moral norms when material pressures — energy security, inflation, geopolitical bandwidth — become acute.

China is framing the US intervention in Venezuela as a textbook case of 'hegemonic acts' and 'world policeman' behaviour. Beijing’s foreign ministry has condemned the air strikes and the capture of Maduro as a serious breach of international law and the UN Charter, casting them as proof that Washington applies rules selectively and threatens the sovereignty of weaker states.

Australia sits alongside the US in a complex network of security agreements that includes AUKUS, the Five Eyes, ANZUS and the Quad. We are there at least in part because the participating countries supposedly respect international law and want to maintain the rules-based order.

But by not condemning the US’ illegal action against another sovereign nation, Australia risks undercutting its own long-standing claim to champion the UN Charter, non-aggression and a rules-based order, in forums like the Pacific Islands, ASEAN and the UN. And these are precisely the norms Australia invokes to criticise China’s behaviour in the South China Sea.

In strategic terms, a unilateral US strike tells us just how quickly strategic priorities can shift for the Trump administration. Prior to this, the White House had already signalled a pivot to the Western Hemisphere, while expecting nations in the Indo-Pacific such as Australia to defend themselves. Nevertheless, Foreign Minister Penny Wong is still saying that the US is our 'closest ally', and 'the Indo-Pacific would not have enjoyed long periods of stability and prosperity without the United States and its security guarantee to the region'.

AUKUS ties Australia’s long-term force structure to both US and UK industrial bases and export controls via nuclear-powered submarines and emerging technologies, and the pact — according to its advocates — will create both capability gains and means of deterrence. But critics inside Australia are already using the Venezuela episode to argue that allowing a large US military presence and doubling down on AUKUS exposes Australia to decisions it has no control over but which may nevertheless implicate us in US actions we strongly disagree with. Such actions may not be in our own national interest, and may even lead us to become military targets ourselves.

The Venezuela episode underscores how China–US rivalry is increasingly fought more through economic might, energy, resources, and positional advantage than through direct military confrontation. The White House’s National Security Strategy 2025 makes it clear that the US will 'deny nonhemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere'. The main 'non-hemispheric competitor' is, of course, China. Washington’s message is clear: go away and play in your own sandbox.

Over the past two decades, China has been one of Venezuela’s main economic partners, providing tens of billions of dollars in loans secured against future oil supplies. It has invested in Venezuela’s infrastructure, with Chinese state-owned companies now operating across the energy and telecommunications sectors.

From Beijing’s perspective, the US move suggests that efforts to isolate China have not worked, and that Washington must now compete in a region it had previously left to China. What will unfold is too early to tell but this dynamic pushes both the US and China further into a pattern of rivalry in third regions — Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific including Australia — and each will read the other’s moves in these regions as part of a global contest for resources and narrative dominance.

Confronted with this, Australia seems to have two main options. The first is keep calm and carry on, which means we continue to allow the presence of US troops and military bases in Australia, continue to see the US as the most reliable protector in the Asia-Pacific, and continue 'full-steam ahead' with AUKUS. And we just hope for the best. 

The other option is crawl out from under our security blanket and face what Hugh White calls the 'hard new world'. The historian and international affairs commentator James Curran describes the attitude of Australian politicians as 'the studied refusal to accept just how weary the US is from global leadership'. He believes a failure of political will on the part of Australian leaders across both major parties has led them into a state of denial.

Instead of seeing Trump as an anomaly, Curran, like many others, argues that Trump is the symptom of structural changes that Australia must face. Emma Shortis is more blunt: 'The United States we thought we knew is gone. And it isn’t coming back.'

And note that these cautions were issued even before the recent development in Venezuela. Allan Behm, former senior adviser to then shadow minister for foreign affairs Penny Wong (2017–19), believes Trump’s intervention in Caracas has normalised extra-legal and illegal action. He urges Minister Wong to work with 'like-minded' countries to bring together a 'concerted regional response to the destruction of international legal norms and codes of behaviour'. Reading between the lines, he seems to imply that it is in Australia’s national interest to stop regarding the United States as a 'like-minded' partner. 

And perhaps it is also the right time for the Australian government to adopt the same mantra for the US as it does for China: we will cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in our national interest.