U.S. President Donald Trump is not the isolationist he was made out to be. Over the past year, he has greenlit a special forces operation to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, ordered precision strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, and aggressively pressed territorial claims closer to home, including threats to seize Greenland. Then, last week, Trump reversed course on a prospective military intervention in Iran tied to nationwide anti-regime protests—an operation many assumed was imminent.
Trump’s reversal on Iran does not signal restraint. Rather, it reflects a distinctive brand of radical realism, in which his use of force is global in reach but narrow in scope. He is willing to act decisively—often unilaterally—when outcomes look legible, exposure is limited, and the end state can be framed as a low-cost win. But when escalation risks rise or end states become uncertain, Trump is equally prepared to change tack. His approach is not a doctrine but the raw, pragmatic application of power stripped of any ideological purpose.
Beijing is no doubt watching closely. It is parsing what triggers U.S. action and—critically— what tempers it. The past year has clarified something essential: Under Trump, U.S. power projection is both supreme and situational, unsettling Chinese assumptions and exposing how little influence Beijing wields when Washington decides to act.
Taken together, the opening weeks of 2026 reinforced Trump’s unmistakable governing style: power deployed opportunistically, calibrated less by precedent than by perceived payoff. Rather than operating within a fixed sphere of influence, Trump asserts U.S. power wherever and whenever the terms favor Washington. While the Venezuela and Iran episodes each involved hostile regimes, accumulated U.S. grievances, and high-visibility opportunities for brinkmanship, their outcomes diverged sharply not because Trump’s instincts shifted but because the perceived costs of action did.
Trump’s ouster of Maduro aligns perfectly with his instincts. U.S. commandos moved quickly, achieved their objective, and exited before Congress or other countries could weigh in. The interim Venezuela government—essentially the Maduro regime sans Maduro—is complying with U.S. demands and diplomatically isolated, limiting potential blowback while preserving U.S. leverage. Trump framed the operation in explicitly transactional terms: reasserting hemispheric primacy, unlocking oil flows, and settling injustices over Venezuela’s expropriation of U.S. oil assets. Notably absent has been any emphasis on democratic transition or human rights. Instead, Trump has praised acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez for maintaining order while undercutting opposition figures perceived as weak—signaling that predictability, not political reform, is his priority.
Last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear program followed the same playbook. They were tightly scoped, showcased the United States’ unmatched military capabilities, and were timed to exploit Israeli operations that had already significantly degraded Iranian air defenses. There were no U.S. boots on the ground and hardly any regional pushback. After the operation concluded, Trump immediately declared Iran’s nuclear infrastructure to be “obliterated,” depicted the strikes as decisive punishment against a government that had repeatedly threatened U.S. interests and him personally, and then moved on. The episode underscored his preference for force that humiliates adversaries without inheriting their problems—and for military action that delivers unmistakable dominance without strategic aftercare.
If last year’s strikes fit Trump’s model neatly, last week’s crisis did not. As protests spread across Iran, U.S. attacks might have punished the regime but offered little prospect of its collapse. Arab allies signaled discomfort; Israel was reportedly unprepared for sustained escalation; and Tehran retained multiple options to widen the fight, including counterstrikes on U.S. forces stationed across the region—precisely the kind of open-ended burden Trump has sought to avoid. All told, the end state was murky, the aftermath unpredictable, and the prospect of being drawn into Iran’s internal upheaval real. Faced with these conditions—even after telling protesters on social media that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY”—Trump seized an off-ramp that he could still brand as victory, citing Tehran’s pledge to halt executions of detained protesters.
To be sure, Trump’s 180-degree turn was not a repudiation of the Iran strikes or Venezuela raid. Instead, it fit squarely within the same calculus: When costs are containable, Trump acts; when outcomes look open-ended, he exits and claims success on the way out.
If Venezuela and Iran clarify how Trump uses power, China is the country most intent on interpreting what that clarity implies. Beijing treats these episodes as data points rather than anomalies. A pattern emerges in how Trump applies force and, just as important, in the conditions under which he withholds it. For a leadership fixated on leverage, optics, and risk management, Trump’s actions carry both warning and opportunity. The question for China is not whether the United States remains dominant—it plainly does—but how that dominance can be shaped or slowed in moments that matter most to Beijing.
On the one hand, Trump’s boldness reinforces a conclusion that Chinese strategists have long held, even as they hoped it might fade: U.S. military might remains unrivaled. The United States can still operate across theaters, synchronize complex operations, and impose outcomes without seeking permission or consensus. On the other, U.S. power under Trump’s watch is acutely conditional—filtered through judgments about escalation fallout, exit clarity, and whether the target of his ire can impose meaningful costs in return. Trump readily uses force against weaker adversaries while exercising caution with more capable ones. In that sense, he is hardly risk-averse; he is cost-aware and acutely sensitive to entanglements that could harden into forever wars.
Trump’s conditionality matters greatly to Beijing because Chinese leaders know they cannot meaningfully counter U.S. military superiority. What they do believe—reinforced by last year’s trade war and Trump’s readiness to back down after China threatened rare-earth cutoffs—is that they can confidently shape the risk environment in which U.S. decisions are made. That conviction explains why Beijing increasingly favors tactics that complicate rather than confront. Pressure on critical supply chains and energy chokepoints is not a substitute for military parity; it reflects a belief that inflating Trump’s perceived costs of action can matter as much as contesting action itself. Nowhere is this logic clearer than Taiwan, where Beijing seeks to magnify uncertainty over potential casualties, economic fallout, and alliance cohesion in order to complicate U.S. intervention. In that sense, Beijing is treating ambiguity over a Taiwan contingency as a strategic asset rather than a liability.
Of course, Trump could still reverse course on Iran, particularly if Iran’s leaders provoke, embarrass, or openly defy him. Beijing likely understands as much, recognizing that if Trump acts, China would be relegated to the superpower sidelines. But whether Trump ultimately strikes Iran or continues to stand down is beside the larger point. Yes, China retains powerful tools to defend its interests where it counts. What it cannot immediately neutralize is Trump’s modus operandi, which poses a deeper challenge than U.S. neoconservatism ever did. Washington now compresses decision timelines, rewards speed and audacity, and accelerates hard-power competition before Beijing is ready to compete on equal footing. That asymmetry—more than Trump’s unpredictability—is the reality China must confront over the next three years, largely on Trump’s terms.
All told, Beijing faces a hard lesson as its partners in Caracas, Tehran, and Moscow falter: In a world reordered by raw power and rapid action, influence belongs to those who set the pace, not those waiting for the balance to tilt in their favor.