The "decapitation-style" raid carried out by U.S. forces on Venezuela on January 3 was not merely an "anti-drug" operation or an attempt at regime change. Instead, it was the decisive implementation of the "Western Hemisphere First" top-level design in the field of critical minerals as outlined in the Trump administration's 2025 updated *National Security Strategy Report*, marking that the U.S. critical minerals strategy has completed three major systemic shifts.
Thus, the Trump administration in the United States has completely torn off the fig leaf of "values" and started a jungle "naked run" of "America First". Trump also reaffirmed his ambition to buy Greenland and proposed to take action against Colombia and Mexico for the same reason. The core of its strategy is guided by the "new Monroe Doctrine", shifting the security of key minerals and energy from "offshore balancing" to direct control of the Western Hemisphere, so as to achieve the goals of supply chain autonomy and geographical exclusivity. The reckless move of the United States has set a very dangerous precedent, pushing the global supply of key minerals into an uncertain future.
On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration officially released the National Security Strategy (NSS) for its second term, explicitly designating the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) as the highest priority in the United States' global strategy and proposing the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine" (Tangluo Doctrine). This corollary has overturned the global critical minerals strategic framework centered on "values" of the previous Democratic Biden administration. It designates the Western Hemisphere as the primary geopolitical focus and emphasizes the use of military and strategic power to ensure the United States' absolute influence in the Western Hemisphere. The new report clearly takes "safeguarding U.S. core interests" as the sole main line, puts forward the principle of "flexible realism", shifts strategic resources from regions such as Europe and the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere, reshapes the modern version of the "Monroe Doctrine", and emphasizes that "U.S. dominates Western Hemisphere affairs and absolutely excludes external forces". This shift provides a top-level strategic basis for the United States to take tough military actions in Latin America.
Trump's strategy is to position Latin America as the "resource backyard" of the United States, with Greenland as a "resource outpost fortress," and build a "Western Hemisphere safe, resilient, and autonomous critical resource supply chain" with the United States at its core. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Latin America holds approximately 60% of the world's proven lithium reserves and accounts for about 46% of global copper production, while Brazil has the world's second-largest rare earth reserves. The Trump administration is fully promoting nearshore production, conducting smelting and processing within the framework of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to meet the subsidy requirement in the Inflation Reduction Act that "critical minerals originate from North America" — which needs to reach 80% by 2027. At the same time, it aims to form a closed loop of "extraction in the Western Hemisphere - nearshore processing - consumption in the United States" to reduce reliance on extra-regional areas such as Australia, Guinea, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and explicitly exclude the participation of major extra-regional powers such as China and Russia. Data from a 2025 report by the Americas Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that Latin American countries generally have a high degree of dependence on exports to the United States, and U.S. tariff increases have led to a 53% year-on-year decline in foreign investment projects in the region.This military intervention will strengthen U.S. pricing power and control over Latin American resources and fill the gap in the critical mineral supply chain of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.
In terms of strategic implementation methods, the Democratic administration represented by Biden has focused more on weaving a global multilateral critical minerals alliance network based on the so-called "shared values" in its policies. It influences the global critical minerals supply chain through market and rule-based means such as trade agreements, investment rules, technical standards, domestic subsidies, and foreign sanctions. However, Trump, who comes from a real estate background, believes that this strategy is very ineffective in responding to the wave of global resource nationalism, the economic rise of Southern countries, and major power competition. He prefers to simplify the complex global critical minerals supply chain into a simple business logic centered on transactions and control. Domestically, he directly converts government subsidies into equity investments to strengthen control; externally, for "unfriendly" resource-rich countries, he directly adopts the approach of "military intervention + resource trusteeship" to build a nearshore critical minerals supply circle. This time, using "cracking down on drug terrorism" as a public excuse, it has listed "cracking down on transnational drug trafficking groups" as a core security issue in the Western Hemisphere, advocating the use of U.S. military forces to "neutralize" the so-called "drug terrorists." This provides policy and public opinion support for launching a military raid on Venezuela, and its essence is to use force to break through resource development barriers.
Venezuela was chosen by Trump as a core breakthrough, first of all because it has the world's largest proven oil reserves. According to data from the London-based Energy Institute, Venezuela holds about 17% of the world's oil reserves, which is 303 billion barrels, ahead of Saudi Arabia, the leader of OPEC. Trump publicly announced that companies such as ExxonMobil would participate in Venezuela's oil development, which is essentially a reward for their huge financial support for the election.Second, Venezuela, as a vanguard against the United States, has in-depth cooperation with China in the fields of oil and minerals (more than 80% of its oil is exported to China), and has close relations with Russia in political and military fields, making it the first choice to exclude external forces.Third, by promoting regime change to break through Venezuela's resource nationalization barriers and create a "chilling effect", it can deter other left-wing Latin American countries such as Cuba, Colombia and Brazil.Fourth, in domestic politics, it can shape a tough image, accumulate political capital for subsequent elections, and shift the focus of domestic contradictions.
Previously, the core goal of the Biden administration's critical minerals strategy was to "build a diversified, resilient, and secure supply chain" to address risks such as geopolitical conflicts and natural disasters, but it did not explicitly exclude specific countries. The Trump administration's 2025 updated "National Security Strategy Report" explicitly lists "excluding the resource influence of external forces in the Western Hemisphere" as a core goal. It aims to build a geographically exclusive barrier of a "Western Hemisphere Resource Exclusion Zone" through means such as military control, capital infiltration, and technological blockade, ensuring the United States' absolute dominance in the field of critical minerals. After taking action, the United States quickly promoted the "resource management" agenda, announcing that American companies such as ExxonMobil would participate in Venezuela's oil and mineral development, achieving technological and capital control under the name of "infrastructure maintenance" while restricting resource exports to major external powers. This raid on Venezuela is the opening move of Trump's "New Monroe Doctrine" strategy, aiming to make Venezuela's resource potential serve the United States' energy transformation and military-industrial hegemony.
In terms of the new energy industry, by controlling resources such as lithium and nickel in Venezuela, the United States can provide stable raw materials for its electric vehicle and energy storage industries, support the clean energy transformation promoted by the Inflation Reduction Act, and maintain its leading position in the field of new energy technologies. In terms of the autonomy of the military industrial supply chain, Venezuela has large undeveloped rare earth deposits in the world, especially in the "Rare Earth Delta" region. Minerals such as aluminum and titanium are core materials for U.S. military equipment. In anchoring the U.S. dollar hegemony, integrating Venezuela's oil and mineral resources into the U.S. dollar settlement system and using resources as an "anchor" to consolidate the dominant position of the U.S. dollar in global commodity trade can counter the global "de-dollarization" trend. Due to the comprehensive financial sanctions imposed by the United States on Venezuela, the United States can freeze its overseas U.S. dollar accounts and cut off SWIFT channels, forcing Venezuela to seek non-U.S. dollar settlement paths. Prior to this, since 2007, China and Venezuela have formed a deeply bound "oil-for-loans" model (China has accumulated loans of about 60 billion U.S. dollars). In 2025, the proportion of RMB settlement in Venezuela's oil exports to China has reached 60%-85%, covering most "oil-for-loans" transactions and some spot trades.
This military raid on Venezuela is a landmark event in the shift of the United States' critical mineral strategy from "global competition" to "fortification of the Western Hemisphere". With "hard military intervention + strong resource control" as the core means, it aims to strengthen supply chain autonomy and geopolitical exclusivity. The divergence in global critical mineral governance has widened, and the trend of regionalization and bloc formation in supply chains has further intensified. The risk of subsequent U.S. intervention in resource-rich countries in Latin America will rise, and "Don Rohism" will become the core paradigm for U.S. control over critical minerals in the Latin American region.
China's mineral projects in Venezuela and even in Latin America will face pressure.
Although Venezuela is not a leading producer of traditional bulk metals, it has huge reserves of strategic critical minerals. Due to the severe lack of mineral exploration, data on its resource reserves are scarce. In 2021, the Venezuelan government released a mineral reserve map based on data compiled in 2009, which shows the distribution of antimony, copper, nickel, coltan, molybdenum, magnesium, silver, zinc, titanium, tungsten, and uranium, but does not list the reserves. According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey and Venezuela's Ministry of Energy and Mines, Venezuela has 1.33 billion tons of bauxite (third in the world), 792 tons of gold (fourth in the world), 39 million tons of titanium, 490,000 tons of nickel, and 14.68 billion tons of iron ore resources.
The Venezuelan government officially launched a large-scale strategic mining development plan in 2016, with the core being the development of the giant mineral resource arc in the Orinoco (AMO) region in the southeastern part of the country, aiming to break away from the single economic dependence on oil. The total area of AMO is approximately 111,000 square kilometers, accounting for about 12% of Venezuela's national territory, and it contains copper, nickel, coltan, titanium, and tungsten. The cooperation projects between China and Venezuela are the core entities, including the Iron Ore Mining Complex (FMO) project (participated by China Railway Tenth Bureau), the integrated development of the San Isidro Mine, the Port of Parúa, and the special railway line, with iron ore used to pay for the project; the Sosa Mendez Gold Mine (participated by Shandong Gold and Yankuang Group, under the concession model), the Las Cristinas Gold Mine (participated by CITIC Group, under joint venture development); the renovation of ALCASA and VENALUM electrolytic aluminum plants (participated by Chinalco International, relying on large-scale long-term funds). Due to the impact of U.S. sanctions, the progress of the projects has been relatively slow.
The Dilemma Faced by the U.S. "New Monroe Doctrine" Critical Minerals Strategy
The essence of the predicament in the United States' "New Monroe Doctrine" critical minerals strategy lies in the conflict between hegemonic logic, market laws, and the interests of sovereign states. The United States attempts to forcibly reshape supply chains that align with its own interests through military means, while ignoring the long-cycle nature of the critical minerals industry, the sovereign demands of Latin American countries, and the diversified needs of the global market.This strategy faces systemic dilemmas in four major dimensions: geopolitically, the alienation of Latin America as its "backyard" and checks and balances from external forces; in terms of investment and industrial chains, long industrial cycles, high risks, and insufficient processing capacity; in policies and compliance, strict domestic supervision and conflicts in international rules; and in capital and markets, heavy fiscal pressure and a mismatch between demand and supply. U.S. national debt has exceeded 36 trillion U.S. dollars, making it difficult for the government to invest large-scale funds in supporting critical minerals projects. Trump's "governance by executive orders" and reckless actions of launching attacks bypassing Congress have been accused by the Democratic Party of shaking the cornerstone of America's separation of powers politics.The raid failed to quickly gain control of Venezuela's oil and mineral resources, and remarks about forcibly acquiring Greenland have instead triggered widespread concerns and open opposition from Latin American countries and even European allies regarding U.S. military intervention.
The smoke of Venezuela's military operations had just cleared when Trump's new policies encountered an awkward situation. On January 9, 2026, Trump presided over a special meeting on oil investment at the White House. At the meeting, the CEO of ExxonMobil bluntly stated that when examining the current legal and commercial structures and frameworks, Venezuela does not have investment value at present. A new report released by BMI, a subsidiary of Fitch Solutions, on January 7 said that the Trump administration's military intervention in Venezuela has stimulated the demand for gold as a safe-haven asset, but it has done little to improve the long-term prospects of Venezuela's mining industry. Even under the leadership of a post-Maduro government, there is little reason to expect a meaningful improvement in Venezuela's metal mining industry. BMI predicts that between 2026 and 2035, due to widespread nationalization and long-term underinvestment, this industry will remain one of the least attractive industries in Latin America. BloombergNEF also confirms that the country's metal production has dropped by more than 90% in the past two decades, dragged down by poor geological data, low-skilled labor, organized crime, lack of investment and an unstable policy environment. Revitalizing this sector requires a new transparent mining regulation, improved security and the rule of law, significant investment in infrastructure, and at least a decade of continuous reform.
The core of the U.S. "New Monroe Doctrine" critical minerals strategy is "de-Chinaization," which poses a systemic challenge to China's metal mining industry in terms of overseas layout, supply chain security, and industrial chain dominance. China's metal mining industry should seize the window period characterized by the slow construction of its supply chain, insufficient funds, and the division of allies. Through the systematic strategy of "strengthening domestic foundations + global layout + leading enterprise integration + rule countermeasures," it should consolidate and expand its global competitive advantages to provide solid resource guarantees for China's new energy and high-end manufacturing industries.
1. Domestic supply side:Â Consolidate the security foundation of "resources-technology-recycling", and promote strategic reserve increase and efficient development. Focus on promoting the large-scale recycling of key metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths in power batteries and electronic waste. By 2030, the recycling volume will account for more than 20% of domestic demand, reducing reliance on primary minerals.
2. Global layout aspect:Â Build an overseas network characterized by "diversity-resilience-interest bundling" to enhance supply chain diversification and risk hedging. In resource-rich countries, implement the model of "resource development + community development + local employment". Establish a "public opinion firewall" to resist the impact of geopolitical fluctuations through means such as indigenous people holding shares, subcontracting operational links to community enterprises, and aiding in the construction of infrastructure.
3. Industrial chain side:Â Strengthen the vertical integration of "processing-manufacturing-standards", achieve full-chain control, and form dual barriers in terms of cost and technology. Break through through technological innovation, take the lead in formulating international environmental protection standards for the mining and processing of critical minerals, and promote digital traceability across the entire chain.
4. Rules and financial aspects:Â Create strategic tools for "countermeasures, pricing, and empowerment", continuously improve the effectiveness of legal and export control countermeasures, establish compliance and early warning systems, and enhance financial and pricing power.
Data sources: U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Venezuelan Ministry of Energy and Mines, CSIS Americas Program Report, Trump Administration's new National Security Strategy Report, November 2025
