To begin with, the China–Venezuela relationship has already started to sour due to bad debt, though China likely wants to preserve the existing arrangement of receiving oil as repayment, and the U.S. is unlikely to interfere with that. As a result, the most likely outcome is two major powers effectively exploiting Venezuela through its oil reserves. Russia, on the other hand, is tied down by its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. Another way to look at this is that while the U.S. quickly “won” the war in Iraq, it then spent twenty years and two trillion dollars on so-called nation-building. If a similar scenario plays out in Venezuela, China could seize the opportunity to further pressure Taiwan.