In early December, as U.S. forces prepared for a possible attack on Venezuela, a Chinese navy ship sailed near the American armada gathered in the Caribbean. The CNS Silk Road Ark, a massive vessel in China’s South Sea Fleet, didn’t pose much of a threat to the U.S. warships. But its appearance in the waters near Venezuela presented exactly the kind of split screen Beijing wanted the nations of Latin America to see.
On one side were the Americans, their ships loaded with missiles and aircraft that had already killed dozens of alleged drug smugglers in strikes on small boats. The U.S. arsenal would soon be used to storm Venezuela’s capital and capture its president, Nicolás Maduro. On the other was a floating military hospital on a mission to provide free medical care to thousands of people in the region and, along the way, to burnish China’s image as a better partner than the United States.
Cultivating that image has long been central to Xi Jinping’s strategy in Latin America, and the U.S. raid on Caracas may have made that job easier by allowing him to contrast Chinese investments with American intimidation. Since Xi took power, in 2013, China has dished out an impressive slate of business deals, aid packages, loans, and infrastructure projects across the Western Hemisphere. But the U.S. now wants to unravel that network of relationships, starting with Venezuela.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the U.S. declared in its new National Security Strategy in early December.
The problem with that plan is that China’s influence campaign across the region has been methodical, well financed, and persistent. Whereas Donald Trump wants to achieve quick victories through tariffs, missiles, and commando raids, China has positioned itself as the obstinate alternative—a predictable overlord that can enrich local elites in exchange for their fealty to Beijing.
China is already the largest trading partner of Brazil, Peru, and Chile. After China made investments in Panama, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic, all three countries agreed to cut their diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which Beijing views as a rogue province. Last spring, Xi unveiled a three-year plan to improve cooperation with 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, offering a line of credit to them worth $9 billion.
Even the National Security Strategy concedes that, in the Western Hemisphere, “some foreign influence will be hard to reverse.”
Apart from its soft-power flexes, China has become a leading arms supplier to the region while establishing footholds for its military, such as the Espacio Lejano Space Station, an advanced radar system China operates in the Patagonian desert under a 50-year lease from the government of Argentina.
In its most pointed response to the National Security Strategy, the Chinese military conducted a series of war games last month to simulate a clash in Latin America. The exercises were not unusual; military planners run all kinds of simulations all the time. What stood out about these drills was the way they were publicized on state-run media for the world to see.
Evan Ellis, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, had never known China to demonstrate its presence in the region so overtly in the 25 years he has spent studying it. The report aired on an affiliate of China Central Television and featured maps of the Western Hemisphere, with dots marking the places where the Chinese own or control “dual use” facilities, such as ports and other infrastructure projects, which could serve as bridgeheads for China’s military in the event of a war.
The maps illustrated just how difficult it would be for the U.S. to evict the Chinese from the region. “I think the message was designed to be subtle, low-key,” Ellis wrote me in an email when I asked how he interprets the Chinese war games. Despite the American push to dominate Latin America, “China diplomatically, but confidently, is continuing its engagement there. And if it has interests in challenging the US there in time of war, it will do so.”
Among the clearest statements of China’s intent in the Western Hemisphere came in the fall of 2024, when Xi traveled to Peru to inaugurate the Chancay Port, the largest deepwater facility on the western coast of South America. Controlled and operated by a state-run Chinese firm, the project promised to reinforce the region’s dependence on trade with China by halving the time it takes Chinese container ships to reach the shores of Latin America and the Caribbean.
“We are now an interdependent community with common interests and a shared future,” Xi told a summit in Lima that November, less than two weeks after Trump won the U.S. presidential race. In an apparent reference to the trade war Trump promised, Xi added that “the world is in a new period of turbulence and transformation,” one in which “unbridled unilateralism” threatens to reverse the process of integration that China and its partners had been pursuing for decades. “The grave challenge for us is like sailing up a river,” he said. “We either forge ahead or drift downstream.”
Xi has tried to make that choice as easy as possible for governments across Latin America and the Caribbean. Chinese firms have invested more than $200 billion there since the turn of the century, according to a study conducted in 2024. The Chinese Communist Party often demands political loyalty in return for its largesse, especially in insisting that potential partners break off relations with Taiwan.
The port in Chancay, financed with a loan from Chinese banks worth nearly $1 billion, raised particular alarm among U.S. military planners. While it was under construction, in 2024, General Laura Richardson, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the facility could provide China’s military with “multi-domain access” in the event of a war. Through such projects, Richardson added, China “is playing the ‘long game’ with its development of dual-use sites and facilities throughout the region.”
With the strike on Venezuela, Trump sought to warn the Chinese away from that strategy. He has bragged that no other military could move with such strength, speed, and precision as the U.S. demonstrated in Caracas—and that America’s display of military power would deter China and others from crossing the United States, according to people close to him. But squeezing China out of Latin America will take far more than a single show of force, no matter how impressive.
At another congressional hearing on the subject last spring, Ellis cataloged the dizzying range of projects that have cemented China’s position. These include dozens of so-called Confucius Institutes, where the recruitment of students to study in China has been flagged by the FBI as a potential tool of Chinese propaganda. It also includes “luxurious paid trips to China for thousands of journalists, academics, political party elites, and even judges, military personnel and police officers,” Ellis testified.
The list reminded me of the tools the U.S. used during the Cold War in many regions of the world. These methods were expensive, laborious, and, over the long term, incredibly effective. They used various means of American influence, including espionage, diplomacy, education and the arts, to win the grand contest for international supremacy against the Soviet Union.
Although it took a few decades, the United States eventually succeeded, not only in causing its rival to collapse but in securing the preeminence of American finance, culture, and technology around the world. The defining paradox of Trump’s confrontation with China is that, since returning to the White House a year ago, he has worked to dismantle many of the same institutions the U.S. used to advance its cause in the 20th century.
[From the February 2026 issue: The purged]
He has shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, moved to defund Voice of America, imposed new visa restrictions on foreign students and academics, and withdrawn from multilateral agreements and organizations. Last week, the White House recalled more than two dozen U.S. ambassadors in the biggest purge of the diplomatic ranks in the history of the foreign service.
China, by contrast, has spent decades replicating the Cold War strategies of American soft power and turning them against the United States. In his campaign to counter these efforts, Trump has reached for hard power, and it might work, at least in the short term. In Venezuela, the Chinese will now need Trump’s blessing to continue their purchases of oil, and they stand little chance of recovering the balance of their loans to Caracas, estimated at about $10 billion.
The countries most reliant on trade with the U.S., such as Mexico, have mostly fallen in line behind Trump’s push to dominate the region. Though she condemned the operation to seize Maduro and bring him to New York for trial, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also imposed steep tariffs on a long list of Chinese goods last year.
But the methods Trump has used to win compliance with his vision for Latin America have also created opportunities for China, whose response to the capture of Maduro betrays a confidence that should worry the White House. Beijing has pledged to continue courting allies in the region, investing in infrastructure and serving as a counterweight to U.S. influence. The National Security Strategy acknowledges: “The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.”
That may not be such an obvious choice for the countries forced to make it. Trump’s plan to dominate the Western Hemisphere has not made the countries in this region feel any freer or more sovereign. His attempt to win their loyalty against China relies on coercion and force rather than more traditional American appeals to the values of liberty and self-determination. Some governments will feel compelled to play along. Others will weigh their options and find China to be the more reliable partner.
Would China use its military to defend its investments in the Western Hemisphere? Probably not. The People’s Liberation Army does not have the means to win a major war so far from its shores. Xi will instead continue to paint himself as the more responsible force in regional affairs. In that sense, the contest Trump started with China in Latin America will pit hard power against soft power, and Beijing has wagered that, in the long run, it will wield more influence by sending hospital ships, not gunboats, to project its power around the world. The history of the Cold War suggests China might be right.
Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting for this article.
