Epoch Times - Why Maduro’s Capture Is a Major Blow for Beijing | J. Michael Waller
Aired: 2026-01-07
Duration: 03:31


=== Super Cheap Oil Power (03:18) ===

[00:00:00]  What are the implications with respect to communist China?
[00:00:04]  I've seen quite a bit of commentary on this issue.
[00:00:07]  Notably, there was actually a delegation from China there, you know, hours before the raid that took Maduro actually took place.
[00:00:16]  What do you think?
[00:00:18]  Well, it was interesting because just a couple of days before Trump removed Maduro, the Chinese regime had said, we're not going to give up an inch of our gains in Latin America.
[00:00:32]  So Trump just went and took away a lot of those gains.
[00:00:35]  Venezuela was an important linchpin for the CCP and for its global strategy in building a blue water navy that will ultimately be able to operate in any part of the world.
[00:00:50]  It will become a trans-Pacific power on the sea.
[00:00:54]  It will become an Atlantic maritime power.
[00:00:57]  The PLA Navy would become under this plan a Caribbean power, which means control over Panama Canal, which means control over shipping from Houston, Galveston, Mississippi River Delta, anywhere, anywhere in the world.
[00:01:16]  So it would use its Belt and Road dual-use port facilities, both seaport and airport facilities, to expand its power projection and then to potentially allow, not potentially, but this is the whole theory behind it, to allow any Chinese warships existing now or those that are being built now to dock at these Belt and Road facilities anywhere in the world.
[00:01:42]  So Venezuela was a colossal asset for China as a piece of real estate from which the CCP could operate against us, but also a huge resource sitting on the world's largest reserves of oil.
[00:01:56]  Once that infrastructure was restored, Venezuela could provide the Chinese communists with any amount of oil.
[00:02:06]  And for them, it's embargoed oil, right?
[00:02:09]  It's under sanctions.
[00:02:11]  So the Venezuelans can't sell it on the open market for dollars.
[00:02:14]  They have to sell it at a steep discount.
[00:02:17]  And the Chinese communists don't even have to pay in petro dollars.
[00:02:20]  They're paying in yuan or they're paying in barter.
[00:02:23]  So this is super, super cheap oil that's keeping Xi Jinping's whole domestic and global agenda afloat.
[00:02:30]  And they've just lost it.
[00:02:32]  There's this other dimension I heard about.
[00:02:34]  There was commentary about how it was Chinese radar systems that had been basically evaded by the American force.
[00:02:43]  Have you actually followed the dynamics of the raid and what we actually know as a fact?
[00:02:48]  And how did this fit in?
[00:02:50]  Oh, this is a big defeat for the CCP's military hardware industry and for the Huawei telecommunications industry because Venezuela is wired with Huawei.
[00:03:02]  So if Beijing is so smug about controlling the world through Huawei, well, it looks like the United States was able to break in through cyber attacks into the whole Huawei system and shut it down.

=== Breaking Logic Systems (00:12) ===

[00:03:18]  And also to break into the logic systems of the computers running the Chinese-made air defense systems and to shut those down.
[00:03:25]  Fascinating.
[00:03:26]  So it wasn't that the systems weren't working.
[00:03:29]  It was that they were disabled.