Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Beijing cannot accept any country acting as the “world’s judge” after the United States captured Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.
The world’s second-largest economy has provided Venezuela with an economic lifeline since the U.S. and its allies ramped up sanctions in 2017, purchasing roughly $1.6 billion worth of goods in 2024, the most recent full-year data available.
Almost half of China’s purchases were crude oil, customs data shows, while its state-owned oil giants had invested around $4.6 billion in Venezuela by 2018, according to data from the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which tracks Chinese overseas corporate investment.
They tried that towards the end, sending B-52s to carpet bomb Hanoi. Dozens of planes were shot down, hundreds survived, thousands of civilians were killed. If the US continued, they would have managed to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, but eventually they’d run out of planes before the Vietnamese ran out of people or willingness to defend themselves.
You all act like we didnt already have dozens of nukes at that ppint and couldnt straight up glass the entire country. It wasnt capability that stopped the US is was political willpower or lack there of.
They escalated, yes - absolutely not denying that. But the point was that they didn’t just nuke the city. Winning was important, but there was a point that the consequences of winning were deemed to outweigh the victory itself.