FP (Foreign Policy) Argument - The Real Reason China and Russia Won’t Try a Maduro-Style Raid

 FP (Foreign Policy) 

Argument

An expert’s point of view on a current event.

The Real Reason China and Russia Won’t Try a Maduro-Style Raid

U.S. rivals aren’t deterred by norms so much as by the limits of their own militaries.

By Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization based in Washington.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, both wearing dark suits, walk in front of a line of Chinese soldiers dressed in uniform, sporting rifles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend an official welcoming ceremony in Beijing on May 16, 2024. Sergei Bobylyov/AFP via Getty Images

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January 6, 2026, 1:35 PM

In the wake of the United States’ capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, some observers and U.S. officials have warned that this may have given Moscow and Beijing a green light to pursue similar operations in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Just as the United States does not recognize the legitimacy of Maduro’s rule in Venezuela, Russia and China do not recognize the legitimacy of Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s respective independence. If China, for instance, were to seize Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, or if Russia were to capture Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on what grounds could the United States reasonably object?

Part of why this comparison is made so frequently is because the United States makes such operations look easy. To those unfamiliar with military planning, the capture of Maduro can look almost casual—helicopters fly in, extract the target, and depart without much difficulty. The apparent smoothness of the U.S. operation has even led some observers to doubt that there was any resistance at all, speculating instead that Maduro was given up by his own government in a back-channel deal.

It is often assumed that other countries refrain from certain actions because they are more respectful of international norms than the United States, which is seen as uniquely unhindered by moral concerns under U.S. President Donald Trump and thus does whatever it wants.

Such thinking is flawed in this particular context, for two major reasons.

For one, it implies that the United States has broken a particular norm that currently constrains a wide array of Chinese and Russian actions. The problem is that no such norm exists. Russia has never respected any supposed prohibition on targeting foreign leaders, as demonstrated in the opening days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Nor does China, which incorporates leadership targeting into its military planning for a Taiwan contingency.

This argument also overlooks the reality of special operations. The one carried out over the weekend required thousands of U.S. personnel across military and intelligence services working in close coordination, using some of the most advanced technology available. It was executed by the most elite forces the United States can field, involving cyber-operations, clandestine intelligence, preparatory attacks on Venezuelan air defenses, and the use of highly specialized helicopters flown by exceptionally skilled pilots—likely equipped with classified capabilities known to very few. What the United States possesses, and others largely do not, is a rare combination of advanced technology and decades of experience conducting high-risk special operations.

Russia and China refrain from conducting similar missions not because of a supposed norm against extracting leaders they consider illegitimate. They refrain because they lack the capability to do so. In the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow attempted precisely this sort of operation and failed. Russian agents infiltrated Kyiv with orders to seize Zelensky and hold him until airborne forces landing in nearby Hostomel could reinforce them. Neither objective was achieved: Russian airborne units suffered heavy casualties both in the air and on the ground, and the network of Russian agents in Kyiv was dismantled. Having failed with the scalpel, Russia is now relying on brute force, not special operations, to break Ukraine.

China’s military, while arguably more technologically advanced than Russia’s, faces a different constraint: a near-total absence of combat experience. China’s last major military engagement, the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, was almost 50 years ago. Personnel turnover in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is high, and the PLA has struggled to retain experienced noncommissioned officers. As such, unlike the United States, China lacks a cadre of veterans with real-world combat experience to train the next generation in conducting complex special operations. To be sure, the PLA practices for such contingencies and has even built a full-scale replica of Taiwan’s Presidential Office Building at a desert training facility. But rehearsal is not experience.

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There is also a more obvious obstacle: Taiwan is not as weak as Venezuela. While Taiwan’s military likewise lacks recent major combat experience, it is highly practiced at monitoring and interdicting hostile air activity, and it possesses an advanced array of air- and ground-based early warning systems. For China to pull off an operation comparable to the U.S. mission in Venezuela, it would not need to strike a dozen targets—it would likely need to strike hundreds. Such an effort would potentially require days of preparatory strikes, during which Taiwan’s leadership could disperse or relocate. Seizing Lai from his secure residence in the middle of Taipei is not a plausible “smash and grab” job—unless, of course, it was paired with a full-scale invasion. But at that point, it’s no longer a special operation; it’s the start of a war.

The PLA appears to understand this, which is why it has devised a far simpler approach for dealing with Taiwan’s leadership: bombing them to bits. During military exercises last month, China practiced utilizing air, sea, and land forces to blockade Taiwan and conduct precision strikes on Taiwanese forces. Writing for China Military Online, a PLA-run outlet, commentator Jun Sheng described “leadership decapitation” as a central objective of the exercise, intended to signal that the PLA can “impose precise punitive measures against the principal instigators at any moment.” It’s not a particularly subtle message.

The latest discourse over the U.S. operation in Venezuela is yet another instance of the United States suffering from the taken-for-granted invisibility of its own military superiority. U.S. forces are so good at what they do that their operations can appear almost magical. In the past year or so, the United States has conducted combat operations over Yemen, Iran, and now Venezuela without losing a single confirmed manned aircraft to enemy fire. By contrast, Russian forces routinely lose combat aircraft in Ukraine, while the PLA is so aware of U.S. tactical superiority that it explicitly trains its pilots not to engage in aerial dogfights.

None of this is to dismiss the threat posed by Russia or China. Rather, it is to emphasize that both rely on brute force to compensate for their tactical inferiority, which can certainly be effective in some contexts but not in the realm of precision-based special operations. Russia and China will not be “emboldened” to conduct leadership-targeting operations in the near future, and it has nothing to do with norms. It’s entirely because China does not believe it is ready and Russia already put its hand in the fire and got burned.

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