While the deployment of US warships near the coast of Venezuela is intended to heap pressure on the government and limit its already strained capacity for oil shipments, the action would probably serve to bolster China’s extensive economic ties with the South American country, analysts said.
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Three destroyers and an amphibious squadron with about 4,000 US Marines were dispatched to the Caribbean Sea close to Venezuelan waters, the White House said this week, in an act they said was intended to stop drug cartel activity.
But Venezuelan officials decried the action as a threat to their country’s sovereignty, and a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman condemned the “interference of external forces” in a comment on the heightened tensions between Washington and Caracas.
“I believe that Trump’s main purpose in doing this is to politically suppress the left-wing [President Nicolas] Maduro in Venezuela and force him to step down,” said Xu Shicheng, a Latin America expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
At the heart of the issue lies Venezuelan oil, in which China has an abiding interest, others said.
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US military presence shows the US “has the capability of cutting off Venezuela’s oil supplies to China”, said Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Centre think tank in Hawaii.