To the Trump administration’s critics, this month’s U.S. special operations raid that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is the epitome of everything that is wrong with President Donald Trump’s worldview. The operation, which included a wave of airstrikes on select Venezuelan military sites across the country, occurred without the slightest consultation with Congress, let alone a vote that authorized the mission. Here was the United States, supposedly the guardian of the so-called rules-based international order, effectively violating another nation’s sovereignty by arresting its head of state and sending him to New York City to answer U.S. criminal charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. 

Some have made an even more dramatic claim: Trump’s decision to use force against Venezuela to remove its top leader will have grave geopolitical consequences for the world’s primary hot spots. As Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a statement after the raid, “If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?” M. Gessen, a columnist for the New York Times, expressed a similar sentiment in an op-ed published one day following the raid. Trump’s propensity to throw America’s weight around in the Western Hemisphere, Gessen said, will motivate Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to carve out his own sphere of influence in what used to be the Soviet Union.

Taken at face value, these assertions depict an era in which territorial conquest and modern-day empire building are just around the corner. But this scenario, while popular in the current discourse, shouldn’t be treated as gospel. The impressive spectacle that was the U.S. snatch-and-grab mission is likely a less transformative geopolitical event than conventional wisdom suggests. 

Take Taiwan as a prime example. Much like his predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping has had his eyes on the self-governing island ever since he ascended to the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy. His goal, expressed in numerous CCP documents and speeches, is to reunify Taiwan with mainland China, by force if necessary. As the 2025 “China’s National Security in a New Era” white paper declares, “China has always strived [sic] for peaceful reunification with the utmost sincerity and effort, but it will never promise to renounce the use of force and reserve [sic] the option of taking all necessary measures.” The U.S. national security establishment is taking these words deadly seriously; the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s power, published last month, reiterates that Beijing seeks to acquire the hard power needed to fight and win a war in Taiwan by 2027. Presumably, the argument goes, the U.S. military operation in Venezuela will embolden Xi to perform a similar action against Taiwan’s democratically elected government—if not accelerate whatever invasion plans he currently has. 

Yet, just because one country engages in military action halfway around the world doesn’t mean a totally different country with distinctive military constraints, geopolitical circumstances, and geography will adopt an identical playbook. Indeed, as desirable as Taiwan’s unification with mainland China is for the CCP, Beijing to date has shied away from an outright invasion or blockade—both of which are high-risk options for a country that hasn’t fought a war in nearly five decades. Instead, China is choosing to wear down Taiwan’s defenses with gray-zone tactics such as cyberattacks, armed flyovers over the Taiwan Strait median line, and periodic large-scale military exercises like the multi-day drills that occurred last month. The reason for this is fairly obvious: Despite the surge in Chinese defense spending over the last 30 years and an extensive military modernization campaign, Xi still doesn’t believe the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) possesses the requisite capability to invade Taiwan successfully.

And let there be no mistake: A hypothetical Chinese invasion of the island is not a simple proposition. The PLA would have to conduct amphibious warfare, the most complicated operation a military can undertake, across 100 miles of water, where it would be forced to contend with Taiwanese air and coastal defenses trying to avert that very outcome. One recent war game assessed that up to 100,000 Chinese troops could perish in a major war against Taiwan, although given the resistance the PLA would likely face from Taiwanese forces and the population at large, the numbers could very well be higher. The international blowback against Beijing could be massive as well; China, which still relies on international trade for much of its economy, could face more export bans, trade restrictions, and financial sanctions from the United States and the European Union, all of which would compromise the CCP’s broader economic agenda. China’s neighbors, including Japan and the Philippines, would likely further bolster their own militarization campaigns in response. And others like South Korea and even countries in Southeast Asia could reassess their own hedging strategies toward Beijing. None of these complications have disappeared since Maduro was put in a prison uniform. 

What about Russia? Could Trump’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine” spark an even more adventurist Putin to double down on his dreams of reasserting Moscow’s former Cold War-era empire? While it’s possible, this scenario also runs into complications.

First, Putin carrying grand ambitions on his shoulders wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. Over the course of his quarter century in power, Putin’s approach to world affairs has increasingly been premised on the notion that Russia was wronged by the West after the Cold War and that the only way Moscow will receive the respect it deserves is if Russia transforms into a great power on par with the United States. In other words, Putin’s ambitions are the same today as they were before Maduro was captured.  

Even so, those ambitions don’t mean much if Russia doesn’t possess the capability to translate them into reality. Putin already has his hands full in Ukraine, a war the Kremlin originally thought would be over in weeks with the decapitation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. Instead, the conflict will reach its fifth year in February with no end in sight. 

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Sure, the Russian army is slowly gaining more ground on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, but those gains have come at an immense cost to military equipment, manpower, and the Russian economy. As many as 350,000 Russian troops have died in the fighting to date, with hundreds of thousands more injured. Russia’s economy, which grew beyond initial expectations in the war’s earlier years, is now facing a possible recession. These are not the metrics normally associated with a country on the cusp of territorial conquest, particularly if the opponent you have to go through is NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance.  

To be sure, Trump’s foray into Venezuela isn’t without consequences. States in Latin America, even traditional U.S. security partners, have already registered their objections—not because they supported Maduro, but rather because Trump’s quest for dominance is a return to the times when Washington deposed the region’s governments at will. 

But the grand geopolitical danger some observers anticipate is far closer to Hollywood fiction than reality.