President Donald Trump’s operation in Venezuela rightly captured global attention and sent a clear message to America’s adversaries: Peace through strength is once again a governing principle, not just a slogan.

But Venezuela needs to be more than just a strong, salutary message to the world — we need to treat it as a lesson. Africa will be the test of whether we learned that lesson, and President Trump’s America First Global Health Strategy is a critical, proactive step toward ensuring that we don’t allow a problem to metastasize into an emergency once again.

President Trump has successfully restored a form of deterrence that too many adversaries had begun to treat as a relic. When the White House says it will enforce red lines, it now has a record of acting — that’s not an appetite for war, it’s an insistence that bad actors should expect consequences, not press releases.

Yet Venezuela is not only a warning to those working against American interests but also a cautionary tale of what happens when Washington allows a manageable challenge to harden into a full-blown crisis.

A common mistake in conservative foreign policy debates is to treat strength and “soft power” as substitutes: choose toughness or choose engagement. That’s a false choice. The smarter view, and the one the Trump administration is demonstrating through its global health strategy, is that strength is most effective when paired with forward, targeted influence that prevents crises from ripening in the first place.

Consider the broader strategic landscape. Beijing doesn’t merely export goods to other nations — it exports leverage through infrastructure, digital networks, port access, and supply chain dependency. The Chinese Communist Party has married industrial overcapacity to a global influence campaign that reaches deepest where governance is weakest and capital is scarce.

This playbook was on full display in Venezuela. The same is true in Africa, and it’s accelerating as China’s manufacturing machine continues to hum. If the U.S. retreats from that arena, we shouldn’t be surprised when tomorrow’s Venezuela emerges elsewhere — another fragile state captured by malign actors, another corridor for illicit finance and trafficking, another population surge driving instability, another strategic mineral supply chain locked up by China, another port repurposed for military access.

The answer is not a return to over-policing the world or endless nation-building. “America First” voters are right to demand that U.S. engagement deliver clear returns for the American people, advance U.S. security and deny adversaries strategic openings. That is precisely the logic behind President Trump’s America First Global Health Strategy: deploy targeted, results-driven engagement that protects Americans at home, stabilizes partners abroad and outcompetes China without subsidizing corruption or dependency.

By strengthening disease surveillance, health supply chains and workforce capacity, in partnership with private American companies and allied institutions, the strategy turns global health into a tool of national power. Done right, it reduces the likelihood that fragile states collapse into criminal hubs or adversarial spheres of influence, and it does so at a fraction of the cost of military intervention after the fact.

Programs and authorities like the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Millennium Challenge Corporation exist precisely to translate American power into durable alignment by bringing in private capital, rewarding reforms, and deepening market ties that create jobs and reduce openings for China.

This is how you avoid a future in which U.S. policymakers face only two options: tolerate a hostile regime’s criminality or launch an operation to end it.

We can and must start pre-positioning influence in places where competitors are laying track.

When the United States waits for manageable challenges to become emergencies, the costs rise and the choices narrow. The more durable path is the one President Trump has started down: pair credible strength with early, results-driven engagement. The America First Global Health Strategy is an opportunity to use trade, investment and strategic partnerships to shape outcomes before adversaries do.

Getting that balance right in Africa will determine whether future headlines resemble Caracas or never need to be written at all.

Former Rep. Ed Royce, a California Republican, served from 1993 through 2019, serving as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2013 through 2019. He is now co-chair of the Consensus for Development Reform and policy director at the Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck law firm.

Former Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican, served from 2013 through 2023 and was a member of the House Intelligence Committee, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and House China Task Force. He is now the president of Skyline Capitol, a government affairs firm in Washington, D.C.