From Venezuela to Greenland: How Trump is playing deep state playbook to counter China – Firstpost
Venezuela, Greenland, Iran—Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama as well—aren’t there on the American geopolitical menu just to secure the Western Hemisphere through the “Donroe Doctrine”. Many would see President Donald Trump’s ongoing ‘annexation’ spree as America’s foolhardy and draconian adventures, even madness, dragging the planet into a likely Third World War.
We often tend to forget that it’s not the Republican or Democratic Parties that draft America’s broad, long-term geopolitical vision; it’s the deep state that does. The President-of-the-day is merely an instrument to execute, phase-wise, the deep state’s futuristic plans. Yes, individual proclivities, or adverse or sudden changes in foreign ecosystems, fast-forward or leisurely down the plans to achieve those aims.
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We should remember that some of Trump’s current targets have been around for decades, or even a couple of centuries. For example, Greenland has been on Washington’s agenda since 1867; Venezuela came on the US radar since the 2010 oil glut.
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Even Canada, currently on America’s back burner, has long been on the US agenda likewise. It tried to annex Canada multiple times, most notably during the American Revolution (1775) itself, when it failed to take French-speaking Quebec but bought Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte (1803) instead. Again, Washington’s three-pronged invasion of Canada (1912–15) failed, despite Thomas Jefferson calling it a “mere matter of marching”. The US tried to capture Canada in the 1860s as well…
Long-term defence policies and what the Hindus called shatrubodh (sensing your enemy) evolve over a period of time and remain largely unaltered through regime changes—they are only updated. For example, India’s no-first-use nuclear doctrines, or the two-front war theory, have remained unchanged for decades, irrespective of who or which political party/alliance ruled it.
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So, Trump is playing an old geopolitical game on a relatively latest playground: only, he is a better showman and entertainer.
Why now?
Because America now has another global enemy: China. Beijing is challenging Washington’s supremacy. Few could read between the lines when Trump told Xi Jinping that the US-China shared a “G-2” relationship! Between 1985 and 1988, even Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met four times in official summits.
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America’s global strategy evolved primarily when Europe invited—and Japan pushed it—into the Second World War (1939–45). The Britain-led European Allies surrendered the geopolitical baton to America. Nuclear heft and the Bretton Woods conference (1944) showcased America as the first superpower, giving it dollar dominance. Gradually, it weakened European currencies—pound sterling, franc, mark, etc—and introduced a fixed exchange rate system. The US dollar was pegged to gold, the IMF oversaw financial stability or otherwise, the World Bank was used for development and reconstruction where necessary, and controls were clamped on international capital flows.
America’s chief rival, the Soviet Union, tried to sabotage this global power play by backdoor support to the Non-Alignment Movement, selective developmental aid to the “Third World”, and attempts to plot missiles in America’s backyard, Cuba.
That’s what China also tried to do by investing in Latin American countries’ infrastructure development under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While exact BRI-specific figures vary and often blend with broader Chinese investment, some reports suggest that China Development Bank funded $160 billion for over 250 projects in Latin America by 2024.
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This was a direct challenge to the US’s Monroe Doctrine (1823), which has been the cornerstone of America’s geopolitical vision for the Western Hemisphere’s security for two centuries.
Trump has German ancestry. The deep state likely convinced him that he represented the volksgeist (spirit of the people) and that he should secure America’s lebensraum (living space, the Western Hemisphere), as if the deep state was waiting for Trump’s arrival in/return to the White House. Even in 2020, he dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic’s source as a “Chinese virus” and exited the WHO, which, like many UN institutions and American universities, was seen to be ‘infested’ with the Leftists. That’s also why the US has recently exited from 60-odd institutions linked to the UN.
Democrat Barack Obama (US President from 2009 to 2017) fitted well into the deep state’s overall grand strategy of outsmarting enemies—Obama eliminated Osama bin Laden (2011), but Joe Biden (the President after Trump’s first term) became ineffective. It made Trump’s return to the White House easier. By abducting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—a la Obama’s Abbottabad attack in Pakistan, which terrorised terrorists!—Trump has effectively not only kicked out China from its backyard, but also put Nato on notice. Greenland may just be a walkover.
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Is China going the USSR way?
A centralised, fragile economy cannot handle geopolitical—even national—objectives; nor can a strong economy with a decayed political system. The Soviet Union learned it the hard way, and disintegrated into some 15 states in 1991; China may learn it soon.
How did American strategy lead to Russia’s ‘liberation’ from the motheaten USSR?
Stock industry players know how to ‘peacefully’ kill competition: they encourage a potential adversary to invest in drowning companies, and push it into bankruptcy. Remember how Winston Churchill-led Allies fooled Adolf Hitler in June 1944 by using fake and inflatable tanks and other decoys during what they called D-Day, or Operation Fortitude?
That’s what President Ronald Reagan followed in 1983 when he proposed a $30 billion “Star Wars” programme, officially called “Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI)”, to develop a space-based defence system to intercept and destroy Soviet nuclear missiles. Aiming to make nuclear weapons obsolete and counter the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (Mad), it spurred significant technological advancements and influenced modern missile defence concepts as envisioned in George Lucas’ Star Wars universe.
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This strategy panicked the USSR. Its economy was crippling because of international commitments, obsolete beliefs, and internal stagnation. The SDI’s immense technological challenge and huge cost of competing, on top of existing inefficiencies, acutely burdened the Soviet economy. In the emerging Internet era, it also exposed the Soviet system’s weakness in a high-tech arms race, convincing many Soviet leaders they couldn’t win—a feeling that further weakened their resolve.
Then the US, as if, waited for the emergence of Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who represented the people’s angst and their resolve to shed the baggage. The USSR disintegrated into 15-odd countries in 1991.
The US now appears to be following a similar strategy vis-à-vis China—and waiting for Xi Jinping’s successor!
With Russia trapped in the Ukraine quagmire—whatever ‘global footprint’ it had in the Middle East and elsewhere has shrunk. Post-Greenland’s likely acquisition, Europe would remain at America’s mercy, or, in a role-reversal, even become its ‘colony’.
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For the US, the only global challenger remaining now is China. With his Latin American moves, Trump has effectively drowned China’s investments—$100 billion in Venezuela alone—and bombed the BRI in the Western Hemisphere.
Why may China follow the USSR?
By the 1980s, the USSR’s centralised economy was under extreme stress. I remember my Russian language teacher in the early 1980s buying an entire year’s shaving gear in Indore for her husband and sons who lived in Tashkent. “We don’t get positive shaving soaps and razor blades there,” she noted sheepishly. A global ‘superpower’, investing heavily in security, could not even manufacture superb shaving sets for its men! The bubble of the USSR was destined to burst.
Likewise, despite its ballooning BRI investments, threats and bluffs, China has exposed its own bubble. Its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could not success a conflict against India in East Ladakh (2020), and saw its defence equipment in Pakistan failing during Operation Sindoor (2025). It is now threatening Taiwan on a daily basis but is greatly alarmed by Japan’s fresh re-armament efforts.
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China is troubled with diminishing population, the real estate bubble, falling exports, weakening economy, diminishing living standards, and rising unemployment. In 2025, it hiked its national defence budget by 7.2 per cent in line with its push for military modernisation to almost two trillion yuan ($314 billion), next only to the USA’s $900 billion. Despite an economic growth target of approximately 5 per cent, China’s military spending continues to outpace economic expansion.
SDI v/s BRI
Rolling out his ultra-ambitious BRI in 2013, President Xi Jinping’s China enlisted over 150 countries in its $1 trillion geopolitical grandstanding. It funded massive infrastructure projects globally, but soon confronted criticism for debt traps, lack of transparency, corruption, environmental damage, financial non-viability, and unfulfilled promises. These led to cost overruns, cancellations, renegotiations, and rising debt repayment burdens for China’s ‘clients’, forcing a re-evaluation of BRI’s scope and sustainability.
Even the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Cpec), claimed to be the BRI’s flagship, has gone nowhere. If anything, it only made Pakistan more vulnerable—PoK, Baluchistan, the Taliban, etc. And Trump successfully made China suspect Pakistan!
The Final Cut!
Facing an uncertain future, Chinese youth are shunning the private sector to find security in a government job. The absence of a private sector had doomed the Soviet economy; the crippling private sector is doing the same in China. The USSR died of glasnost sans perestroika; China’s perestroika sans glasnost has brought it to the same precipice.
Recent reports suggested that China’s slowing economy is changing how young people think about their careers. With private companies hiring less, many educated graduates are choosing government roles for safety and stability.
In December 2025, for example, around 3.7 million people, most of them graduates from China’s top universities, applied for the annual civil service examination, vying for just 38,100 entry-level government positions. Urban unemployment among youths aged 16 to 24 has stayed above 17 per cent since July 2025, vis-à-vis the US’s 10 per cent.
For Chinese youth, government jobs were once known as “iron rice bowls” because of their job security, fixed working hours, and steady benefits. As the economy opened up over the past few decades, young graduates increasingly preferred higher-paying roles in private companies, especially major technology firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei.
That trend is now reversing. A long economic slowdown, plus Beijing’s regulatory clampdown on sectors such as real estate, technology, and private tutoring, has triggered large-scale layoffs. China’s top 500 private companies cut more than 314,600 jobs in 2025. Many young people are lowering their ambitions and turning towards public sector roles. Only 12.5 per cent of graduates sought jobs in private firms last year, down sharply from 25.1 per cent in 2020.
Although public sector openings jumped sharply in 2020 during the pandemic, the central government has cut planned positions for 2026 by 4 per cent to 38,119.
But that doesn’t mean America is unchallenged or undefeatable!
(The author is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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