CIA Weighs Shuttering China Center as Trump Shifts Focus to Venezuela
The U.S. is temporarily stepping back from its Cold War with China and channeling its aggression toward Venezuela, reflecting the limits of American power.
For years, the United States built its foreign policy consensus around confronting China. Washington’s overriding goal, across administrations, has been to preserve a global order it no longer commands – launching a trade war against China, rallying the public with anti-China propaganda, and pitting Chinese and American workers against each other.
President Donald Trump has carried that project forward. His China policy looks just as aggressive on paper, as he continues to threaten trade war against the world’s second-largest economy. But behind closed doors, reality is setting in. Having hit the ceiling of confrontation with China, the Trump administration is quietly redirecting energy from that front, at least temporarily, and pivoting toward war with Venezuela – framing a renewed push for regime change and anti-cartel operations as the next front in “national security.”
Reflecting the administration’s pivot, the Central Intelligence Agency is now considering dissolving its China Mission Center, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as part of a broader realignment that de-emphasizes confrontation with China.
The CIA has about a dozen mission centers that cover functional focuses, including counterintelligence, counterterrorism, technology, and weapons and counterproliferation, as well as regional centers specializing in geographic areas such as Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. In 2021, the Biden administration launched a China-focused mission center – the only one devoted to a single country. The creation of this independent China mission center, which had previously fallen under the agency’s Mission Center for East Asia and Pacific, emphasized how fully the U.S. national security establishment had reoriented itself around the so-called China threat.
“If there is any country that deserves its own mission center, it is China, which has global ambitions and presents the greatest challenge to U.S. interests and to international order,” former CIA Director John Brennan said at the time.
Sources say that the CIA is thinking about shutting down the China center, in part, for its ineffectiveness, having consumed vast resources with little to show for it. This comes in the wake of one of the CIA’s worst intelligence failures in its history. Between 2010 and 2012, Chinese counterintelligence wiped out the CIA’s network of informants, killing or imprisoning nearly twenty people and destroying years of espionage work, the New York Times reported in 2017. More than a decade later, the agency has yet to fully recover.
Washington would keep losing ground in other ways, too.
Despite years of trade war, export bans, and posturing, the U.S. remains structurally dependent on China. Beijing has the ability to collapse the American military and economy through its near-total control of rare earth minerals, the critical components that power U.S. weapons systems and industrial technology alike. The state that proclaims itself locked in existential competition has no way to arm itself without its supposed enemy – a contradiction that’s finally starting to register among U.S. officials. It’s why the Trump administration was forced to retreat from its sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, and why its strategy is shifting again, at least for now.
In late March, the CIA, and broader intelligence community (IC), began ramping up its “counter narcotics” efforts and focus on the Western Hemisphere, just as Trump was escalating his tariff threats against China. In the months since, the U.S. military has followed suit. A draft of the Trump administration’s 2025 National Defense Strategy downgrades China on the list of threats, renewing focus on “defending the homeland” and “hemispheric security.” That change marks a departure from earlier doctrines that explicitly targeted China, including the first Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which identified China as the top priority.
Trump’s pivot away from confrontation with China and toward the Western Hemisphere is less a bold reordering than a recognition of material limits, and a temporary one, at best. China processes around 90 percent of global rare earths necessary for the production of the U.S. military and economy, and dominates the processing and magnet manufacturing that turn ores into usable defense components. When China tightened export controls on rare earths in retaliation to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods in April, the effects on Western defense manufacturers were immediate. One drone-parts supplier reported delays of up to two months, and the price of some inputs spiked fivefold or more. One company said samarium, the element used in magnets that withstand jet-engine heat, was suddenly offered at sixty times the usual rate, defense executives said in August.
U.S. munitions stockpiles were already drained due to the proxy war in Ukraine and ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Pentagon’s factories can’t replace weapons as fast as Washington sends them abroad, and global supply chains for critical materials still run through China.
“The U.S. has very little leverage in this story at all,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). “He seems to think he’s doing something horrible to China – 100 percent tariffs, doubling the price of everything we get from them. But that’s a huge tax on Americans. China could live with it. They’d lose some business. We’d raise prices here.”
“Trump is utterly clueless,” Baker added. “His understanding of the world is virtually zero, and he just wants to be the tough guy. He thinks he’s pushing people around…he has no idea how powerful China is.”
The dream of a new Cold War with China is largely confined to Washington. Outside of the foreign policy establishment and defense lobby, few Americans have any appetite for conflict with China, especially over Taiwan, the Philippines, or some maritime dispute. The American working class is tired, poorer, and less convinced that distant imperialist ambitions serve them in any way. Progressive and pro-restraint advocacy groups recently wrote to Trump, urging him to make diplomatic agreements to tone down tensions over Taiwan as part of a bargain to deliver a more favorable economic deal for American workers.
As Washington quietly pulls attention and resources away from countering China, it is actively escalating in Venezuela – expanding its military footprint across the Caribbean, carrying out unconstitutional strikes on boats near Venezuelan waters, and reviving anti-drug rhetoric as the pretext for regime change. Recent polls show that both Americans strongly oppose U.S. military action against Venezuela as well.
Since early September, the U.S. military has conducted at least five lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean, which the Trump administration claims were operated by members of Venezuelan drug cartels it has labeled terrorist organizations. Trump has also acknowledged that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, intensifying his efforts to push Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. This new authority would allow the CIA to carry out lethal operations in the country.
The CIA’s record in the hemisphere is long and bloody, from the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende to the coups it abetted in Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras. Each intervention was justified as a defense of “democracy” against governments that threatened U.S. corporate or strategic interests.
Now, constrained by limits of its own making, the U.S. is falling further behind China and turning instead to displays of power closer to home. Trump is determined to prove the U.S. can still project strength somewhere. Even if it means punishing the Venezuelan people and, ironically, fueling migration across the region.
“He’s offered everything,” Trump said of Maduro last week. “You know why? He doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”
Update (October 24, 2025): After publication, a CIA spokesperson dismissed the claim that the agency is considering shutting down its China Mission Center as “false, absurd and totally baseless.” The agency did not address other parts of the inquiry, including context on the collapse of U.S. spying operations in China between 2010 and 2012.
A very good and informative read.