Subject: Re: As Albaby says...
I think you're consistently missing the larger picture.

One can recognize that something is a relative insignificant part of a larger picture without missing the larger picture. China is of enormous geopolitical importance. And raising the price of a tiny fraction of their oil by a few dollars per barrel doesn't change the larger picture by any material amount.

Getting rid of the ghost ships isn't nothing.
Adding 15-20% cost to 4.5% of China's oil imports isn't nothing.
Getting rid of a base of operations for terrorists and bad actors in the Southern Hemisphere isn't nothing.
Putting China's oil square in the normal sea lanes (i.e. also under our control) isn't nothing.

Things can be not "nothing" and still be relatively immaterial. And even this "not nothing" is wildly overstated.

We didn't get rid of ghost ships, we have captured a small fraction of them - and that capture will have zero impact on China's ability to obtain oil, because we're going to continue to sell it to them, just on different ships. We didn't add 15-20% cost to 4.5% of China's oil imports - the 4.5% figure is seaborne imports, not total imports, and China will replace some (if not all) of that oil with similarly sanctioned (and therefore discounted) product from Russia and Iran.

We didn't get rid of a base of operations for terrorists and bad actors. As I've repeatedly noted, nothing has changed in the governance structure of Venezuela. It's still a socialist military dictatorship with the same geopolitical factors that drive their interests and constrain their action. They're going to be pretty much the same base of operations for pretty much the same folks going forward as they have in the past. Perhaps even moreso, since Trump has a higher tolerance for authoritarian regimes than prior Administrations and may cut them some slack as long as they give him the puffery he likes.

And China's oil square isn't materially any more in the normal sea lanes (which doesn't mean under our control) than it was before. Most of their seaborne oil imports are still going to come from Iran and Russia, in exactly the same way. A huge part of the rest was already in normal sea lanes - with the opening of the TMX pipeline, China has recently been importing as much or more oil from Canada as they were from Venezuela. Again, Venezuela was a small fraction even of China's seaborne oil imports, and some of that will simply be replaced by different 'not normal' sea lanes when the slack gets picked up by Russia and Iran.

We seem to fundamentally disagree on China and the steps we need to take to get ready for what's coming.

We don't. Or at least, nothing in this thread is about that. This isn't about whether China is an important threat, or whether we need to do something to respond to that threat, or even what steps we need to take to respond to that threat. This is a disagreement on what impact the specific action we have taken in Venezuela will have on China. It's not about objectives - it's about what stems from the removal of Maduro. From your posts, I garner that you think it will result in something material. I think it will have no material effect on our geopolitical position vis-a-vis China. That's where we disagree in this thread. Not on China in general or the need to take steps to respond to them.

Sure, it will give them at least two hangnail's and a paper cut's worth of discomfort. But I can't see any reason to think that a year from now, a Venezuela run by the military dictatorship with Delcy Rodriguez in the big chair will be any different from China's perspective than if it had remained Maduro in the big chair. And after the USS Ford carrier group goes back to the Middle East (where it needs to be), and after the rest of the naval build up gets dispersed back to where it was, Venezuela will still be where it is, ruled by the same people it was before.