As President Donald Trump warns of “zero tolerance” for narco-states in America’s backyard, China is tightening its grip on Venezuela — a high-risk economic and political bet that could soon collide with U.S. power.

U.S. defense officials confirmed to Reuters last month that a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group had entered the Southern Command region, which covers the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America, to monitor narcotrafficking routes linked to Venezuela’s military leadership.

The Pentagon said the arrival of USS Gerald R. Ford, carrying more than 4,000 sailors and dozens of tactical aircraft, would “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities.” It added that the mission aims to “degrade and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.”

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Within weeks, Venezuelan officers were reportedly training for guerrilla-style defense against a possible U.S. strike — an acknowledgment, according to Reuters, of “rising anxiety inside Caracas.”

Into this standoff, Beijing unveiled a “zero-tariff” trade agreement with Caracas at the Shanghai Expo 2025, announced by Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade Coromoto Godoy. Venezuelan officials said the accord covers roughly 400 tariff categories, removing duties on Chinese and Venezuelan goods.

While final implementation details remain pending verification, the goal is clear: Beijing is moving fast into a sanctioned economy that Washington has sought to isolate.

“This really looks like China is going to completely take over the Venezuelan economy,” said Gordon Chang, an expert on China’s global trade strategy. “It’s going to decimate Venezuela’s local industry.”

“Venezuela basically sells petroleum to China and very little else,” he said. “China, of course, is a manufacturer of many, many items. Venezuelan manufacturing is not going to experience a renaissance anytime soon — it’s going the opposite direction.”

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Chang added that Maduro’s sudden embrace of Beijing stems from fear of Trump’s next move.

“Maduro probably doesn’t have a choice,” he said. “He realizes he’s got a problem in the form of Donald J. Trump. There’s a U.S. aircraft carrier not far from his shores, and a lot of military assets bearing down on him. He needs a friend, and he’s desperate.”

“For Maduro, the zero-tariff pact may offer temporary relief — but it only deepens dependence,” Chang added. “I don’t see this trade deal as strengthening Venezuela. I see it strengthening China’s stranglehold over Venezuela.”

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From Beijing’s perspective, the tariff-free pact opens a commercial and strategic doorway into the Western Hemisphere just as Washington doubles down on sanctions.

The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that China has extended around $60 billion in loans to Venezuela over the past two decades, much of it repaid through oil shipments — a figure still cited by both Chinese and Venezuelan officials in 2025.

“China has leveraged multibillion-dollar loans and the establishment of satellite positioning and surveillance facilities to secure strategic control over Venezuela’s natural resources and critical infrastructure,” said Isaias Medina III, an Edward Mason Fellow at Harvard University and a former Venezuelan diplomat to the U.N. Security Council.

Medina was referring to the El Sombrero satellite ground station in Venezuela’s Guárico province — a joint China-Venezuela project that Western analysts, including a recent Associated Press report, describe as part of a wider space cooperation network giving Beijing an intelligence foothold in Latin America.

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Medina said the new pact must be understood as one layer in a wider anti-Western alignment.

“Under the banner of so-called ‘21st Century Socialism,’ initiated by Hugo Chávez and expanded by Nicolás Maduro, the nation has evolved into a forward operating base for regimes openly hostile to the United States and its allies,” he said.

“Iran, Russia, China, and Cuba have entrenched themselves across Venezuelan territory, using the country as a platform for asymmetric warfare, intelligence operations, and ideological expansion throughout Latin America.”

He noted that “Russia’s military footprint includes more than $12 billion in arms sales and ongoing defense cooperation and Wagner Group presence in military exercises,” while Cuban military advisers remain embedded inside Venezuelan security institutions.

“Iran has exploited this environment to embed terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, using Venezuela as both a financial hub and a logistical corridor. These activities extend to former training camps in Syria, where Venezuelan operatives and mercenaries have been indoctrinated in hybrid warfare tactics,” he added. “Iranian interest includes potential drone manufacturing and uranium mining.”

“The Maduro government, shielded by the absence of the rule of law or legitimate governance, has replaced statecraft with criminal enterprise,” Medina said. “Grand corruption is not the exception; it is the system.”

“The humanitarian toll is catastrophic,” he added. “Over 30% of Venezuela’s population has been forcibly displaced. Starvation has been weaponized as a tool of social control, amounting to a war crime under international law. Despite the enormity of these crimes, many United Nations member states continue to recognize and engage with this illegitimate regime, thereby perpetuating its impunity. The failure to confront this crisis decisively enables a coalition of adversaries, state and non-state actors alike, to project power dangerously close to U.S. territory.”

For now, Washington’s sanctions campaign still constrains Venezuela’s oil lifelines. In March 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. threats to impose tariffs on nations buying Venezuelan crude caused a temporary disruption in shipments to China. Beijing dismissed the measures as “illegal extraterritorial actions” and vowed to continue cooperation — but has not disclosed how it will enforce the new tariff-free pact.

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Chang said the underlying reality hasn’t changed: China can’t protect Caracas from U.S. hard power.

“It can certainly launch a propaganda blitz,” he said, “but it can’t project military force in the region. It’s really up to what President Trump does. China does not have the military strength to oppose American intervention if that’s what Trump decides.”

Medina agreed that the stakes reach beyond economics. “Just three hours from U.S. shores, this narco-terrorist regime has become the operational convergence of organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering, and human rights atrocities,” he said, urging a Western response combining “diplomatic isolation, targeted sanctions, and, when necessary, defensive deployments.”

The European Commission unveiled its new Democracy Shield on Wednesday, a roadmap to better protect democracies and electoral processes from foreign interference and information manipulation — including those originating within the bloc itself.

At the heart of this strategy lies Russia and its “state or non-state proxies”, which for over a decade have conducted online destabilisation campaigns across the EU.

These efforts have been amplified by the rapid development of new technologies that make false information more convincing and its dissemination more viral.

Recent elections demonstrated how damaging online campaigns can be to democratic processes.

Last December in Romania, presidential elections were cancelled by the Constitutional Court after reports from intelligence services revealed Russian involvement in influencing voters through a propaganda campaign in favour of ultranationalist candidate Calin Georgescu.

Meanwhile, in Moldova, an EU candidate country, social media platforms were rife with disinformation in the run-up to the September parliamentary elections. Driven by artificial intelligence, bots were deployed to flood comment sections with posts deriding the EU and the pro-European party ahead of the vote.

What is Brussels’ Democracy Shield about?

“Our Europe may die,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned during his Sorbonne speech in April 2024, a concern the European Union wants to address.

The Commission writes that the Democracy Shield “is not only necessary to preserve the EU’s values, but also to ensure Europe’s security and to safeguard its independence, freedom and prosperity.”

In the 30-page document, the Commission lays out its plan to “enhance democratic resilience across the Union”. Despite the strong rhetoric, the initiative comes with few concrete measures.

The centrepiece of the Democracy Shield is the creation of a European Centre for Democratic Resilience. Its purpose will be to identify destabilisation operations, pool expertise from member states, and coordinate the work of fact-checking networks already established by the Commission.

However, participation in this centre is purely voluntary for members. French MEP Nathalie Loiseau (Renew Europe), who heads the Democracy Shield committee, believes that the Commission should have gone further.

“There is a certain timidity about this Democracy Shield. It is true that some powers remain national and that the European Union cannot impose itself,” Louiseau told Euronews.

“But let us remember that, just as with online platforms — where the Commission long relied on their goodwill only to realise it did not exist — it is time to build something that truly protects individuals, European citizens, including against states that would seek to undermine democracy.”

The EU executive put a strong emphasis on including EU candidates in this defensive plan, but also potentially “cooperation with like-minded partners could also be foreseen, and that is something that we will develop over the period ahead,” European Commissioner for democracy and rule of law Michael McGrath told journalists.

McGrath, who is in charge of the file, also explained that the nature of the centre would evolve in the future, “as the nature of the threat that it will be dealing with is constantly evolving.”

The Commission also proposed “setting up a voluntary network of influencers to raise awareness about relevant EU rules and promote the exchange of best practice,” to hold influencers participating in political campaigns accountable.

Big promises, small purse

However, both the specific measures and their funding remain unclear. “There has to be funding to actually do this, otherwise it just ends up being hot air,” Omri Preiss, managing director of Alliance4Democracy nonprofit, told Euronews.

Although he recognised that it was an important step, Preiss highlighted that the Russian government spends an estimated two to three billion euros a year on such influence operations, while “the EU is not really doing anything equivalent.”

The allocation of funds will also depend on the outcome of the Commission budget discussion – currently under negotiation.

For Loiseau, protecting democracy means that the Commission must first apply the rules it adopted to regulate its online sphere.

“I’m a little afraid Ursula von der Leyen’s hand may have trembled, because what we are seeing today is, of course, massive Russian interference,” she said.

“But it’s also the behaviour of platforms like TikTok, which raises many questions -and, even more so, the collusion between the US administration and American platforms,” Loiseau added.

“On that front, it seems Ursula von der Leyen struggles to take the next step. She tells us that she will implement the legislation we have adopted and I should hope so. But we must go further.”

Several rules aimed at protecting electoral processes have already been adopted. Since 2023, the Digital Services Act has required greater transparency in recommendation algorithms and includes provisions to reduce the risks of political manipulation.

Meanwhile, the AI Act, adopted last year, mandates the labelling of AI-generated deep fakes. The European Media Freedom Act, which came into force this summer, is designed to ensure both transparency and media freedom across the bloc.

Yet, under pressure from US tech giants backed by the Trump administration, Commission sanctions have to materialise — despite serious suspicions of information manipulation and algorithmic interference.

“These rules reflect the will of those who elected us. Enforcing them is the first step in building a shield for democracy,” the centrist group Renew in the European Parliament said.

“It is imperative to ensure that the European Media Freedom Act is fully implemented across the European Union,” the group wrote in a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“The actions will be gradually rolled out by 2027,” Commissioner McGrath said. This year will be a decisive test of the Shield’s resilience in the information war, as citizens in key EU member states — notably France, Italy and Spain — head to the polls.