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It took just a few hours for Donald Trump to upend a relationship that China had been cultivating for decades.

Only hours before he was seized in a nighttime raid, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had been praising his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping as “an older brother” with a “powerful message as a leader to the world” during a meeting with senior diplomats from Beijing.

China has invested heavily in oil-rich Venezuela, one of its closest South American partners. And its state media showed off the footage from that meeting to prove it: smiling men in suits, reviewing some of the 600 current agreements between their two countries – except the next photograph of Maduro was taken on board a US warship, blindfolded and handcuffed, in grey sweats.

China joined many countries around the world in condemning Washington’s stunning move against a sovereign state. It accused the US of acting like a “world judge” and insisted that “the sovereignty and security of all countries should be fully protected under international law”.

Those stern words aside, Beijing will be making careful calculations not just to insure its foothold in South America, but also to manage an already tricky relationship with Trump and plot its next steps as the great power competition between the US and China takes a new, wholly unexpected turn.

Many see this as an opportunity for China’s authoritarian Communist Party rulers. But there is also risk, uncertainty and frustration as Beijing tries to figure out what to do after Trump tore up the very international rulebook it has spent decades trying to play by.

Beijing, which likes to play the long game, is no fan of chaos. That is certainly what it seems to be coming up repeatedly against in Trump’s second term. It had planned ahead and weathered the on-again, off-again trade war. Xi will believe he showed the US and the world just how dependent they are on Chinese manufacturing and technology.

But now Beijing faces a new challenge.

Trump’s play for Venezuelan oil has likely strengthened China’s deepest doubts about American intentions – how far would the US go to contain Chinese influence?

Speaking to NBC on Sunday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared: “This is the western hemisphere. This is where we live – and we’re not going to allow the western hemisphere to be a base of operations for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”

The not-so-hidden message was for Beijing: get out of our backyard.

Beijing is unlikely to listen. But it will wait to see what happens next.

On Wednesday Beijing strongly condemned a US report that suggested Washington will order the acting Venezuelan president to sever economic ties with China and Russia.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters that this was a “typical act of bullying, a serious violation of international law, a severe infringement upon Venezuela’s sovereignty and will do grave damage to the rights of the Venezuelan people.”

Some wonder if China is waiting and watching to see if it could do the same in Taiwan, the self-governing island which it views as a breakaway province.

Xi has vowed that Taiwan will one day be “reunified” with the mainland and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this. And some nationalists on Chinese social media are asking: if the US can unilaterally act in Caracas, what is stopping Beijing from snatching the Taiwanese president?

For one, Beijing might not see those parallels because it considers Taiwan an internal matter, and not a concern of the international order. But more important, if Xi decides to invade the island, it will not be because the US has set a precedent, according to David Sacks from the Council on Foreign Relations. He writes that China doesn’t have the “confidence that it can succeed at an acceptable cost”.

“Until that day comes, though, China will continue with its strategy of employing coercion to wear down Taiwan’s people, with the aim of forcing Taiwan to the negotiating table. The US strikes on Venezuela do not change this dynamic.”

Rather, they are a challenge China did not need and does not want – and they risk its long-term plan to win over the Global South.

The relationship between Beijing and Caracas was fairly simple. China needed oil. Venezuela needed cash. From around 2000 to 2023 Beijing provided more than $100bn to Venezuela to finance railways, power plants and other infrastructure projects. In exchange, Caracas gave Beijing the oil it needed to fuel its booming economy.

Around 80% of Venezuelan oil was sent to China last year. That’s still only 4% of the country’s oil imports. So, when it comes to China’s financial risks in Caracas, “it’s important to keep some perspective”, says Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of The China-Global South Project.

“Chinese firms like CNPC and Sinopec are among the largest players there and there is a risk of those assets either being nationalised by the Venezuelans, under the direction of the US or otherwise marginalised amid the chaos.”

There are also around $10bn of outstanding loans that Venezuela owes Chinese creditors, but again, Olander urges caution as it’s unclear if any investments in the country are currently at risk.

But it could warn off future investors. “Chinese enterprises need to fully assess the risks and extent of potential US intervention before investing in related projects,” Cui Shoujun, from the School of International Relations at Renmin University, said on Chinese state media.

Beijing will not want to jeopardise the fragile trade truce it just signed with the US, but it won’t want to lose its foothold in Latin America either. Striking that balance is going to be hard, especially with someone as unpredictable as Trump.

The concern for China is that other countries across South America start to worry about significant Chinese investments “out of concern of attracting unwanted US attention”, Olander says. “This region is a critical source of food, energy and natural resources to China with two-way trade now topping half a trillion dollars.”

The US has also made it clear it wants the Panamanian government to cancel all Chinese port holdings and investments related to the Panama Canal, which, he adds, is “undeniably concerning for China”.

So Beijing may have to win the battle in Washington’s backyard in other ways.

China has shown patience and persistence in wooing South America. The Global South is a group of countries that have signed up to “a community with a shared future” and urge opposition to “unilateral bullying”.

This message resonates with governments that have grown wary of the West and, in particular, Washington under Trump. China is usually explicit from the start about what it wants from its partners – they recognise the “One China” principle and Taiwan is treated as an “integral part” of China.

Beijing has had considerable success in persuading Latin American states to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, with Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras all siding with the $19tn economy’s talk of strategic partnership over the last 20 years.

In contrast, Trump has shown that a relationship with Washington can be volatile. And that could play into China’s hands, as it seeks to project Xi as a stable leader, now more than ever before.

“This is important because the situation in Venezuela could easily descend into chaos,” Olander says. “Also, don’t forget the lesson from Iraq, where the US also said the country’s oil reserves would pay for the reconstruction of the economy. That did not happen and China is now the largest buyer of Iraqi crude. Something similar could easily happen in Venezuela.”

For years, the US was urged by China hawks in Congress to counter Beijing’s influence across South America. It has made its move but what no-one seems sure of is what comes next.

Everything about this is a gamble – and Beijing, by all accounts, hates to gamble.

Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who became one of America’s most damaging double agents, has died aged 84.

The former counterintelligence officer, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, died on Monday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, CBS News, the BBC’s media partner in the US, reported.

Ames was jailed on 28 April 1994 after he admitted to selling secret information to the Soviet Union and later Russia.

He compromised more than 100 clandestine operations and divulged the identities of more than 30 agents spying for the West – leading to the deaths of at least 10 CIA intelligence assets.

Seeking money to pay debts, Ames said he began providing the KGB with the names of CIA spies in April 1985, receiving an initial payment of $50,000.

Known to the KGB by his code name, Kolokol (The Bell), Ames went on to identify virtually all of the CIA’s spies in the Soviet Union, for which he was well rewarded.

“To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me $2 million in gratitude for the information,” he said in an eight-page statement he read to the court.

Over the course of nine years, Ames admitted receiving a total of about $2.5 million from the Soviet Union for his betrayal of the US.

The cash fuelled a lavish lifestyle, with Ames splashing out on a new Jaguar car, foreign holidays and a $540,000 house – despite never having a salary of more than $70,000 a year.

Ames’s 31-year career at the CIA began when his father, an analyst at the CIA, helped him land a job there after dropping out of college in 1962.

He married his first wife, fellow CIA agent Nancy Segebarth, in 1969, before being sent to Turkey as a counterintelligence officer to recruit foreign agents.

Three years later, he was brought back to the US, where his problems with alcohol began to emerge and his marriage began to collapse.

Despite several security violations over the years, including leaving a briefcase full of classified information on a subway, Ames was then sent to Mexico City in 1981.

There he met his second wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, a cultural attaché at the Colombian embassy and a CIA asset who would later be charged as his accomplice.

Returning to the US in 1983, Ames became head of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence department – despite continuing concerns over his drinking.

While his career was soaring, his personal life was spiralling. As well as paying monthly support to his first wife, he was also funding Rosario’s lifestyle, including her love of shopping.

It was his escalating debts that led him to selling the wealth of secrets that he had access to.

“It was about the money, and I don’t think he ever really tried to lead anybody to believe it was anything more than that,” FBI agent Leslie G Wiser, who was involved in the investigation that led to Ames’s arrest, told the BBC’s Witness History in 2015.

His treachery began in 1985 when he gave the Soviets the names of a few KGB officers secretly working for the FBI in exchange for $50,000.

His espionage continued for the following nine years, until his arrest on 21 February 1994, after a mole hunt that had started closing in the year before.

Ames cooperated with the authorities in exchange for a plea deal that secured a lenient sentence for Rosario, who admitted she had known about the money and his meetings with the Soviets. She was released after five years.

The CIA director at the time, R. James Woolsey, described Ames as “a malignant betrayer of his country”.

Woolsey said the agents Ames betrayed died because a “murdering traitor wanted a bigger house and a Jaguar”.

US President Donald Trump has been discussing “a range of options” to acquire Greenland, including use of the military, the White House said.

The White House told the BBC that acquiring Greenland – a semi-autonomous region of fellow Nato member Denmark – was a “national security priority”.

The statement came hours after European leaders issued a joint statement rallying behind Denmark, which has been pushing back against Trump’s ambitions for the Arctic island.

Trump repeated over the weekend that the US “needed” Greenland for security reasons, prompting Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to warn that any attack by the US would spell the end of Nato.

The White House said on Tuesday: “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the US military is always an option at the Commander-in-Chief’s disposal.”

Nato is a trans-Atlantic military group where allies are expected to go to each other’s aid in case of external attacks.

On Tuesday, six European allies expressed support for Denmark.

“Greenland belongs to its people, and only Denmark and Greenland can decide on matters concerning their relations,” the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Denmark said in a joint statement.

Stressing they were as keen as the US in Arctic security, the European signatories of the joint statement said this must be achieved by Nato allies, including the US “collectively”.

They also called for “upholding the principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders”.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen welcomed the statement and called for “respectful dialogue”.

“The dialogue must take place with respect for the fact that Greenland’s status is rooted in international law and the principle of territorial integrity,” Nielsen said.

The issue of Greenland’s future resurfaced in the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela, during which elite troops seized the country’s President Nicolás Maduro and take him to face drugs and weapons charges in New York.

A day after that raid, Katie Miller – the wife of one of Trump’s senior aides – posted a map on social media of Greenland in the colours of the American flag, alongside the word “SOON”.

On Monday, her husband, Stephen Miller, said it was “the formal position of the US government that Greenland should be part of the US”.

Asked repeatedly in an interview with CNN whether America would rule out using force to annex it, Miller responded: “Nobody’s going to fight the US over the future of Greenland.”

Greenland, which has a population of 57,000 people, has had extensive self-government since 1979, though defence and foreign policy remain in Danish hands.

While most Greenlanders favour eventual independence from Denmark, opinion polls show overwhelming opposition to becoming part of the US, which already has a military base on the island.

Morgan Angaju, 27, an Inuit living in Ilulissat in the west region of the country, told the BBC it had been “terrifying to listen to the leader of the free world laughing at Denmark and Greenland and just talking about us like we’re something to claim”.

“We are already claimed by the Greenlandic people. Kalaallit Nunaat means the land of the Greenlandic people,” Morgan said.

He added that he was worried about what happens next – wondering whether Greenland’s prime minister may suffer the same fate as Maduro – or even about the US “invading our country”.

An unnamed US senior official told Reuters news agency that the American options included the outright purchase of Greenland or forming a Compact of Free Association with the territory.

In response, a state department spokesperson told the BBC on Tuesday that the US “is eager to build lasting commercial relationships that benefit Americans and the people of Greenland”.

“Our common adversaries have been increasingly active in the Arctic. That is a concern that the United States, the Kingdom of Denmark, and NATO Allies share,” the spokesperson said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also told lawmakers at a classified briefing on Capitol Hill on Monday that the Trump administration did not plan to invade Greenland, but mentioned buying it from Denmark, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Greenland and Denmark previously said they had asked to meet Rubio quickly to discuss the American claims on the island.

Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said speaking with America’s top diplomat should resolve “certain misunderstandings”.

Senator Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, emphasised the national security aspect when he spoke to the BBC on Tuesday.

“I think they’re just in talks right now,” he said. “My hope is that Europe would understand that a strong America is good – it’s good for Western civilisation.”

Trump floated his idea of acquiring Greenland as a strategic US hub in the Arctic during his first presidential term, saying in 2019: “Essentially it’s a large real estate deal.”

There is growing interest from Russia and China in the island, which has untapped rare earth deposits, as melting ice raises the possibility of new trade routes.

In March, Trump said America would “go as far as we have to go” to get control of the territory.

During a congressional hearing last summer, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked if the Pentagon had plans to take Greenland by force if necessary, and he said they “have plans for any contingency”.