The following article from Weaponized Information, published in late December 2025, frames the current period as a pivotal moment for Latin America and the Caribbean, with competing visions of how the region fits into broader geopolitical shifts.
“Within weeks of each other, two texts appeared that quietly announced Latin America and the Caribbean as a decisive front in the struggle over the next world order. China released its third Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean, framing the present as a moment of ‘changes unseen in a century’, with the Global South rising in influence while unilateral coercion destabilises peace and development. At nearly the same time, the Trump administration issued its National Security Strategy, declaring that American power had been ‘restored’, borders militarised, tariffs weaponised, and the Western Hemisphere re-centred as a strategic priority under an unapologetic America First doctrine. These are not parallel statements. They are opposing blueprints.”
China’s policy paper presents the region as an active political subject and an essential force within the rising Global South. It emphasises integration through trade, infrastructure, industrial cooperation, technology transfer, cultural exchange, regional institution-building, local-currency settlement, and engagement via multilateral bodies such as CELAC. In China’s vision, sovereignty is strengthened through diversified partnerships that reduce exposure to US financial vetoes, sanctions and conditional lending.
The Trump administration’s NSS, by contrast, is framed in terms of the restoration and enforcement of US hegemony. It asserts that US power has been “restored” under an unapologetic America First doctrine, militarising borders, weaponising tariffs and engaging in direct military aggression. Such a strategy does not treat Latin America and the Caribbean as a collective political subject at all, but as a managed perimeter and strategic rear base, echoing the Monroe Doctrine without any liberal euphemism. Infrastructure, ports, supply chains, payment systems and information spaces are reclassified as assets to be locked down or insulated from “non-hemispheric competitors”. Security becomes the alibi for expanded coercive reach.
The article highlights that in the lived history of the Americas, “security” has often meant security for capital and compliant oligarchies, enforced through coups, lawfare and counterinsurgency against popular movements.
When China speaks of development without political conditions, it challenges the architecture that has historically converted economic dependency into political obedience. The US response to China’s role is to attempt to narrow options for countries of the region, via the threat of tariffs, sanctions, statecraft, destabilisation, lawfare and – as we are currently witnessing in Venezuela – direct military aggression and the blatant violation of the most basic principles of international law.
The author concludes that the difference between the US and Chinese approach is not about democracy versus authoritarianism, but community versus command. Multipolar integration introduces something disruptive the region has long been denied: the normalisation of choice. The intensity of the US’s reaction signals a historic shift – autonomy is no longer unthinkable. The hemisphere now faces a clear struggle over whether it remains frozen in managed dependency or expands sovereignty through cooperation and plural development paths.
The Hemisphere at the Breaking Point
There are moments when states stop improvising and start publishing doctrine. Not press statements, not campaign slogans, but documents meant to harden intentions into policy and turn instinct into structure. Late 2025 was one of those moments. Within weeks of each other, two texts appeared that quietly announced Latin America and the Caribbean as a decisive front in the struggle over the next world order. China released its third Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean, framing the present as a moment of “changes unseen in a century,” with the Global South rising in influence while unilateral coercion destabilizes peace and development. At nearly the same time, the Trump administration issued its National Security Strategy, declaring that American power had been “restored,” borders militarized, tariffs weaponized, and the Western Hemisphere re-centered as a strategic priority under an unapologetic America First doctrine. These are not parallel statements. They are opposing blueprints.
From a Weaponized Information standpoint, the significance lies not in tone but in structure. China’s document speaks in the language of historical transition. It treats Latin America and the Caribbean not as a problem to be managed but as a political subject—an “essential force” in the movement toward a multipolar world. Its emphasis on solidarity, development, finance, infrastructure, technology cooperation, cultural exchange, and multilateral coordination signals a wager: that sovereignty can be widened through integration rather than surrendered through dependency. The U.S. National Security Strategy, by contrast, speaks in the language of restoration and enforcement. It assumes that instability flows from insufficient dominance and that order must be reimposed through military readiness, economic coercion, border fortification, and the exclusion of rival powers from infrastructure, ports, technology systems, and strategic assets across the hemisphere. Where China narrates the end of an era, the United States narrates its recovery.
This is not a dispute over manners or morality. It is a clash between two architectures of world order. One treats Latin America and the Caribbean as co-authors of global governance, embedded in the Global South and entitled to diversify their economic, financial, and diplomatic relations without permission from a hegemon. The other treats the hemisphere as a strategic rear base whose primary function is to remain aligned, disciplined, and closed to alternatives. When China speaks of development assistance without political conditions, it is not simply offering money or projects; it is directly challenging a century-old system of conditionality, sanctions, financial choke points, and elite mediation that has allowed external powers to veto popular development from afar. When the U.S. speaks of security, it invokes a word that in the lived history of the Americas has too often meant security for capital, for compliant oligarchies, and for the machinery that intervenes whenever popular forces threaten to convert land, labor, and resources into public dignity.
Workers learn quickly how to read power. You do not judge the boss by the speech; you judge him by the rules written for the shop floor. These documents are rules. China lays out its preferred instruments: trade expansion, industrial cooperation, infrastructure connectivity, alternative financing channels, local-currency settlement discussions, technology partnerships, and collective engagement through regional bodies such as CELAC. The U.S. lays out its own: tariffs as discipline, militarized borders, alliance pressure, financial leverage, and the recasting of migration, drugs, and instability as security threats requiring expanded coercive authority. The implications are material. If Latin America and the Caribbean can widen their development options—financially, technologically, and diplomatically—the American Pole loses its most reliable weapon: the ability to enforce submission without firing a shot. This is why the U.S. doctrine increasingly reads like counterrevolutionary consolidation stripped of liberal euphemism, and why China’s doctrine, whatever its contradictions, reads like an opening that reduces dependence on imperial veto power.
Here we have established the terrain. Two doctrines are not merely competing; they are incompatible. One gestures toward a future in which sovereignty is multiplied through cooperation. The other seeks to secure a past in which sovereignty in the Americas was tolerated only when it remained harmless. The tension between these visions does not remain on paper. It expresses itself in tariffs, sanctions, militarization, lawfare, oligarchic restoration, and the creeping normalization of repression. To understand what follows in the hemisphere—politically, economically, and socially—we must begin here, at the moment when the plans were written down and the masks were finally removed.
Two Worldviews Enter the Hemisphere
Every doctrine begins with a story about what time it is. China’s policy paper opens by insisting that history itself has shifted—that the world is moving through “changes unseen in a century,” that the balance of power is no longer fixed, and that the Global South has emerged as an active force shaping human progress rather than a passive recipient of instruction. In this story, Latin America and the Caribbean appear not as latecomers to modernity but as participants in a long struggle for sovereignty whose moment has finally arrived. The document reads like a map drawn after a storm, oriented toward a future where power is dispersed, development paths are plural, and no single state claims the right to supervise the destiny of others.
The U.S. National Security Strategy tells a very different story about time. It speaks as if history briefly went wrong and has now been corrected. Decline is blamed not on imperial overreach, financialization, or endless war, but on weakness, restraint, and deviation from an imagined national essence. The solution, therefore, is restoration—of borders, of military authority, of economic discipline, of unquestioned leadership. Where China’s document assumes transition, the U.S. document assumes relapse followed by recovery. It does not ask how the world has changed; it asks how American primacy can be made permanent in a world that is clearly refusing to stand still.
These competing diagnoses shape everything that follows. If one believes the world is becoming multipolar, then cooperation, diversification, and institution-building make sense. If one believes the world is dangerous because rivals are gaining space, then exclusion, enforcement, and coercion become virtues. China’s policy paper frames instability as the product of unilateral pressure and zero-sum thinking, arguing—implicitly but clearly—that peace and development require widening participation in global governance. The U.S. strategy frames instability as the result of insufficient dominance, arguing—explicitly—that order depends on America’s ability to deter, discipline, and, when necessary, crush challenges before they mature.
This difference is not semantic; it is structural. China presents the Global South as a historical subject whose accumulated experience of colonialism, underdevelopment, and resistance has produced legitimate claims on the future. The United States presents itself as history’s indispensable manager, uniquely qualified to decide which changes are acceptable and which must be reversed. In the Chinese worldview, sovereignty is something to be multiplied through networks of cooperation. In the American worldview, sovereignty in the hemisphere is something to be tolerated only insofar as it does not obstruct U.S. strategic freedom of action.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, these narratives are not abstract philosophies. They are competing explanations for lived reality. One recognizes the region’s long memory of intervention, debt traps, coups, and developmental sabotage, and offers an exit from permanent tutelage through diversification of partners and pathways. The other denies that memory by reframing the past as benevolent leadership and the present as disorder caused by deviation. In doing so, it recycles an old imperial habit: when people move without permission, call it chaos; when they demand autonomy, call it a threat.
Here we clarify the ideological terrain. Before a port is built or a tariff imposed, before a loan is signed or a base expanded, there is a story told about how the world works and who belongs where. China’s story assumes a crowded future where power must be shared or managed collectively. The U.S. story assumes a shrinking future where power must be hoarded and defended. Everything that unfolds in the hemisphere—from development choices to security crises—flows from which of these stories is enforced, and which is allowed to breathe.
Latin America as Subject or Property
The deepest divide between the two doctrines appears when each is forced to answer a simple question that empire has spent centuries avoiding: what is Latin America and the Caribbean, and who gets to decide? China’s policy paper answers this without hesitation. It treats the region as a political subject with agency, history, and collective weight—a component of the Global South whose trajectory matters not because of proximity to great power interests, but because of its role in shaping a multipolar future. The language is deliberate. Latin America and the Caribbean are described as vibrant, rising, and essential, a region that seeks strength through unity and participates in global governance on its own terms. This is not charity language. It is recognition language, and recognition is dangerous to empires because it undermines the habit of command.
The U.S. National Security Strategy answers the same question differently, though it avoids saying so directly. It does not speak of the hemisphere as a collective political subject at all. It speaks of it as a space—one that must be secured, managed, stabilized, and insulated from external influence. The Western Hemisphere appears not as a partner but as a strategic environment, a rear base whose primary value lies in denying access to rivals and ensuring freedom of maneuver for U.S. power. This is the Monroe Doctrine stripped of its liberal mask and written in the blunt language of enforcement. The region is not imagined as a co-author of world order, but as a perimeter to be guarded.
This distinction matters because subjecthood changes everything. A subject can negotiate, diversify, and refuse. Property cannot. When China emphasizes collective engagement through regional bodies such as CELAC, it is affirming that Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to speak together, to define priorities together, and to bargain together. When the United States insists on bilateral pressure, conditional alignment, and the exclusion of “non-hemispheric competitors,” it is reviving an older logic: fragment the region, discipline governments one by one, and ensure that no unified political will can emerge strong enough to resist external veto.
The history of the Americas makes this contrast impossible to ignore. Whenever the region has attempted to act as a subject—through non-alignment, developmentalism, socialism, regional integration, or independent foreign policy—it has been met with destabilization, sanctions, coups, and counterinsurgency. Whenever it has accepted the role of managed space, investment has flowed selectively, elites have prospered, and order has been declared restored. China’s document quietly acknowledges this history by avoiding the language of supervision altogether. The U.S. document reenacts it by assuming supervision as a natural right.
To call this a disagreement would be to understate it. It is a struggle over political existence. China’s approach implies that Latin America and the Caribbean can be something other than a training ground for neoliberal experiments or a buffer zone for imperial security. The U.S. approach implies that any such transformation is inherently destabilizing and must be contained before it becomes contagious. One side speaks of partnership; the other speaks of control, even when it dresses that control in the vocabulary of freedom and security.
This sharpens the central contradiction. A region treated as a subject begins to imagine futures beyond obedience. A region treated as property is denied that imagination from the start. What follows in policy—development models, security doctrines, economic tools—is merely the technical expression of this deeper divide. Before the ports, before the bases, before the tariffs and loans, the decisive battle is over whether Latin America and the Caribbean are allowed to exist as historical actors at all.
Development or Discipline
Once Latin America and the Caribbean are defined either as a political subject or as managed space, the question of development follows almost mechanically. China’s policy paper treats development as a material process rooted in production, infrastructure, technology, and social reproduction. It speaks of roads, ports, energy systems, manufacturing capacity, agriculture, scientific cooperation, and finance not as isolated projects but as interlocking components of sovereignty. Development here is not a slogan; it is the slow accumulation of capabilities that allow societies to plan, to absorb shocks, and to reduce their exposure to external veto power. This is why the document emphasizes industrial cooperation, long-term supply arrangements, local currency settlement discussions, and the transfer of productive capacity. It assumes that poverty is not a moral failure but a structural condition produced by historical extraction and enforced dependency.
The U.S. National Security Strategy approaches development from the opposite direction. It does not ask how societies build capacity; it asks how behavior is corrected. Trade is framed less as a means of mutual growth than as leverage. Tariffs are elevated from economic instruments to disciplinary tools. Aid is discussed not as a response to social need but as a reward for compliance and a penalty for deviation. The underlying assumption is familiar to anyone who has lived under structural adjustment or post-coup “recovery” plans: development is acceptable only when it reinforces the existing hierarchy. When it threatens to produce autonomy, it is recoded as distortion, corruption, or insecurity.
This is where the dialectic sharpens. China’s offer of development without political conditions directly collides with a U.S. system that has relied for decades on conditionality as a governing principle. The contradiction is not simply between two donors; it is between two political economies. One seeks to widen the field of choice available to states in the Global South. The other seeks to narrow it until alignment appears as the only rational option. When Washington warns that rivals are creating “dependencies,” it is projecting its own historical method onto others, unable or unwilling to imagine a form of cooperation that does not culminate in control.
The material consequences of this clash are already visible. Infrastructure that enables trade outside traditional routes is labeled strategic encroachment. Manufacturing partnerships that reduce import dependence are framed as threats to supply chain security. Financial arrangements that bypass dollar clearing systems are denounced as destabilizing. In each case, what is being defended is not stability for the region, but the maintenance of asymmetry. A Latin America capable of producing, financing, and planning at scale is a Latin America less vulnerable to sanctions, less pliable under pressure, and less willing to accept austerity as fate.
This is why development becomes dangerous at the precise moment it succeeds. Roads that connect internal markets weaken the power of export monopolies. Energy sovereignty undermines price manipulation. Industrial capacity reduces the leverage of import embargoes. Financial diversification erodes the silent threat that access to credit can be withdrawn overnight. The U.S. strategy responds to this danger not by offering a better development model, but by redefining development itself as a security problem. Growth becomes suspect. Autonomy becomes risk. Planning becomes ideology.
What presents itself as an economic disagreement is, in fact, a political struggle over time. China’s framework assumes that societies must be allowed to develop unevenly, experiment, and make mistakes if they are to escape historical underdevelopment. The U.S. framework assumes that any deviation from prescribed paths must be corrected quickly, before it accumulates into irreversible independence. Discipline replaces development not because it works better, but because it preserves hierarchy. And hierarchy, in the Americas, has always been mistaken for order.
In this way, development becomes the quiet battlefield on which the larger conflict is fought. Not with tanks or troops at first, but with contracts, tariffs, financing terms, and the language of responsibility. The outcome of this struggle will determine whether Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as societies capable of shaping their futures, or remain trapped in a cycle where every attempt at transformation is met with punishment disguised as policy.
Currency, Finance, and the Right to Breathe
Every empire eventually reveals where its real power lives. For the United States, that power is not only military bases or aircraft carriers, but the quieter machinery of finance—the ability to decide which currencies circulate, which payments clear, which debts are forgiven, and which become lifelong sentences. China’s policy paper approaches this terrain carefully but unmistakably. It speaks of expanding local-currency settlement, discussing RMB clearing arrangements, promoting currency swaps, and exploring long-term pricing mechanisms for energy and resources that reduce exposure to external financial shocks. This language may appear technical, but its meaning is deeply political. It gestures toward a world in which development is no longer hostage to a single monetary gatekeeper.
The U.S. National Security Strategy treats this same terrain as a core battlefield. It openly describes American capital markets and financial dominance as instruments of national power, sources of leverage that can be activated in the name of security. Sanctions, asset freezes, access to credit, and control over clearing systems are not presented as last resorts but as routine tools of statecraft. In this framework, finance is not a public utility that facilitates exchange; it is a weapon that disciplines behavior. The lesson for the hemisphere is implicit but clear: prosperity is conditional, and access to liquidity is a privilege granted to those who remain aligned.
This is why the question of currency sends such tremors through imperial planning rooms. A society that can settle trade outside the dollar, finance infrastructure without Washington’s approval, and price its resources without reference to external benchmarks acquires something dangerous: time. Time to plan, to absorb pressure, to make political decisions without the constant threat of financial asphyxiation. China’s financial proposals do not overthrow the dollar overnight, nor do they claim to. Their significance lies in accumulation. Each alternative channel weakens the automaticity of coercion, each local-currency transaction reduces vulnerability to sudden isolation.
From the perspective of the American Pole, this gradual erosion of financial control cannot be tolerated. The empire’s greatest advantage has been its ability to convert economic dependence into political obedience without the visible violence of occupation. When Washington warns of “financial instability” or “opaque lending,” it is often responding less to actual risk than to the prospect of losing this silent enforcement mechanism. A Latin America that can refinance without IMF conditions, build infrastructure without austerity packages, and weather sanctions without collapse is a Latin America that no longer responds predictably to pressure.
The lived experience of the region explains why this matters so deeply. Debt crises, balance-of-payments shocks, and sudden capital flight have not been natural disasters; they have been instruments of governance. They have disciplined governments that raised wages too quickly, nationalized resources too boldly, or prioritized social needs over creditor confidence. Financial sovereignty, even partial and uneven, threatens this cycle. It interrupts the familiar rhythm in which hope is followed by punishment, and ambition by crisis.
What is at stake, then, is not simply currency choice but the right to breathe economically without permission. China’s document frames financial cooperation as one element among many in a broader development strategy, while the U.S. strategy frames financial dominance as a pillar of global order itself. These positions cannot be reconciled. One imagines finance as a means to social reproduction and stability. The other imagines finance as a choke collar that ensures compliance.
In the Americas, this contradiction has always produced political consequences. When financial tools fail to compel obedience, pressure escalates. Sanctions harden, legal warfare intensifies, currencies are attacked, and political instability is encouraged in the name of “market confidence.” Understanding this dynamic is essential, because it reveals why even modest efforts at monetary diversification provoke outsized reactions. The struggle over finance is the struggle over autonomy’s oxygen supply, and empires have never surrendered that control willingly.
Security Without Submission
When development pathways begin to widen and financial choke points loosen, the language of empire reliably shifts. What was once discussed in terms of growth, stability, or cooperation is reclassified as a security problem. China’s policy paper anticipates this shift and counters it preemptively by framing security as something collective, cooperative, and rooted in sovereignty. Its repeated invocation of peace, non-interference, multilateralism, and the recognition of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace is not ornamental diplomacy; it is a deliberate rejection of the logic that equates security with domination. In this framing, stability flows from development, inclusion, and respect for national trajectories rather than from external supervision or permanent threat.
The U.S. National Security Strategy operates on the opposite assumption. Security is defined not as the absence of coercion but as the capacity to impose it. The hemisphere is described as a space that must be secured against disorder, criminality, migration, and external influence, with the U.S. military, law enforcement apparatus, and intelligence services positioned as indispensable arbiters of order. Borders are militarized, cartels are elevated to the status of terrorist organizations, and instability is framed as justification for expanded operational reach. In this worldview, peace is not a condition to be cultivated but a result to be enforced.
The historical memory of the Americas makes this distinction painfully clear. Security cooperation under U.S. leadership has rarely meant protection for the majority. It has meant counterinsurgency, internal surveillance, paramilitarization, and the training of forces tasked with suppressing labor movements, Indigenous resistance, and popular uprisings. The language changes—anti-communism gives way to anti-narcotics, which gives way to counter-terrorism—but the function remains constant. Security becomes the alibi through which social demands are criminalized and political alternatives are neutralized.
China’s approach does not claim to abolish conflict or erase contradictions, but it removes the presumption that one external power must serve as the region’s permanent policeman. By emphasizing UN-centered frameworks, cooperative security initiatives, and respect for regional declarations of peace, it implicitly argues that Latin America and the Caribbean are capable of managing their own affairs without tutelage. This is precisely what renders the approach threatening. A region that is not perpetually securitized is a region that can redirect resources away from repression and toward social reproduction.
The American Pole cannot accept this premise, because its power has long depended on converting insecurity into leverage. Migration flows become crises to be militarized rather than symptoms of economic dislocation. Drug economies become justification for intervention rather than evidence of prohibitionist failure. Political instability becomes proof of the need for external management rather than a consequence of imposed austerity and inequality. Security, in this sense, functions as a disciplinary regime that ensures development never escapes approved boundaries.
The contradiction is stark. One vision imagines security emerging from dignity, inclusion, and the reduction of dependency. The other imagines security as a permanent posture of readiness against the very populations it claims to protect. When Latin America and the Caribbean pursue autonomy through diversified partnerships and development strategies, the response is not dialogue but alarm. Military cooperation expands, surveillance deepens, and the language of threat hardens. What is being defended is not peace but the architecture of control.
Part VI reveals why security becomes the final refuge of empire when economic and financial dominance begins to erode. Development without submission is intolerable if it produces societies capable of governing themselves. In the Americas, the move from cooperation to coercion has always followed this pattern. Understanding security as a political weapon rather than a neutral necessity allows us to see the continuity beneath the rhetoric and to recognize why the promise of a Zone of Peace provokes such unease among those who have long relied on managed instability as a source of power.
The War Over Meaning
When material control begins to slip, empire turns to ideology. The struggle is no longer only over ports, currencies, or security arrangements, but over language itself—over who gets to define civilization, democracy, freedom, and legitimacy. China’s policy paper enters this terrain cautiously yet decisively through what it calls civilizational exchange. It insists on the equality of civilizations, mutual learning, and dialogue without hierarchy. In doing so, it rejects the long-standing imperial habit of ranking societies according to proximity to Western norms and using those rankings to justify intervention. Civilization here is not a ladder to be climbed but a field of encounter, shaped by history and experience rather than permission.
The United States approaches this same terrain from the opposite direction. Its ideological vocabulary remains saturated with claims of exceptionalism, even when stripped of liberal ornamentation. Democracy, freedom, and human rights are presented not as lived social conditions to be built from below, but as attributes bestowed or withdrawn through alignment. In practice, these concepts have functioned as flexible instruments, invoked against governments that resist U.S. preferences and quietly set aside when repression serves strategic ends. The language of values becomes a weapon, sharpened or dulled according to necessity.
This is not an abstract philosophical disagreement. Ideology structures consent. When media, academic institutions, NGOs, and cultural platforms repeat the same moral narrative, coercion can operate invisibly. Interventions appear humanitarian. Sanctions appear principled. Coups appear as corrections. China’s emphasis on media cooperation, academic exchange, and cultural dialogue challenges this monopoly over meaning. It proposes a communicative space in which narratives are no longer filtered exclusively through Western institutions that have historically aligned themselves with imperial power.
For the American Pole, this is intolerable. Control over meaning has always been as important as control over markets. From Cold War propaganda campaigns to contemporary information warfare, the ability to frame reality has allowed empire to act without appearing to rule. When alternative narratives gain legitimacy, the façade cracks. Questions once dismissed as radical—about debt, extraction, sovereignty, and violence—reenter public discourse as common sense. This is why ideological contestation is treated as a security threat and why information spaces are increasingly policed under the banner of combating disinformation.
China’s civilizational language does not promise liberation, nor does it erase the contradictions within its own system. What it does promise is something more limited and therefore more dangerous to empire: the erosion of epistemic monopoly. When multiple centers of interpretation exist, imperial narratives lose their inevitability. The Americas have lived for centuries under stories that explained exploitation as progress and intervention as rescue. To loosen the grip of those stories is to open space for political imagination.
The reaction follows a familiar pattern. Cultural exchange is reframed as influence operations. Academic collaboration is recoded as infiltration. Media cooperation is labeled propaganda. The content of the exchange matters less than the fact that it bypasses established gatekeepers. What is being defended is not truth but authority over truth-production itself. Empire does not fear ideas because they are false; it fears them because they cannot be controlled.
Part VII makes visible the ideological front of the hemispheric struggle. Development, finance, and security set the material conditions, but ideology determines how those conditions are understood and contested. As long as the empire controls the story, resistance appears irrational. When the story fractures, resistance begins to look like reason. The war over meaning, then, is not ancillary to the conflict—it is its nervous system, transmitting commands and suppressing dissent long before force is required.
Why Multipolarity Produces Repression
The moment multipolarity ceases to be theoretical and begins to register in material practice, the response is rarely accommodation. It is repression. This is not because the emergence of alternatives is inherently violent, but because empire experiences the loss of exclusivity as an existential threat. China’s policy paper does not call for confrontation, yet its cumulative implications—development without conditions, financial diversification, technological cooperation, and ideological pluralism—strike at the mechanisms through which imperial power has historically been exercised in the Americas. When those mechanisms weaken, the system compensates by hardening.
Latin America and the Caribbean have lived this cycle before. Every expansion of autonomy has been met with a counteroffensive dressed in the language of order. When governments sought land reform, they were accused of subversion. When they nationalized resources, they were labeled irresponsible. When they pursued independent foreign policy, they were framed as threats to regional stability. Multipolarity today revives these old anxieties in new form. Diversified partnerships are recoded as infiltration. Economic planning is reframed as corruption. Popular mobilization is criminalized as extremism.
The U.S. National Security Strategy provides the doctrinal justification for this shift. By defining the hemisphere as a strategic space that must be insulated from external influence, it normalizes preemptive action. Repression becomes preventative. Lawfare replaces coups where possible, sanctions replace blockades when effective, and militarization advances under the cover of border control and counter-narcotics operations. The objective is not stability for the population, but predictability for power.
What makes this moment particularly volatile is the convergence of external and internal pressures. As imperial leverage erodes abroad, it hardens at home. Technofascist tendencies—mass surveillance, militarized policing, censorship framed as safety, and the fusion of state and corporate power—are not anomalies but adaptations. The same logic that disciplines the periphery is redeployed domestically, against surplus populations and dissenting workers. Empire does not invent new tools; it repurposes old ones.
China’s role in this process is often misrepresented as causal rather than catalytic. It does not create the repression; it exposes the fragility of an order that can no longer rely on consent. The availability of alternatives reveals how much obedience had been secured through lack of choice rather than genuine legitimacy. When countries in the Americas discover that sanctions can be mitigated, that infrastructure can be financed without austerity, and that narratives can circulate beyond Western filters, repression becomes the last remaining method of control.
This explains the resurgence of oligarchic politics, far-right movements, and militarized governance across the region. These are not spontaneous cultural regressions; they are functional responses to a system under stress. Reactionary forces are empowered because they promise restoration of discipline. They offer empire a familiar partner: elites willing to govern through exclusion, violence, and dependency in exchange for protection and privilege.
Here we must confront the uncomfortable truth that repression is not a deviation from liberal order but its enforcement mechanism when alternatives gain traction. Multipolarity does not guarantee emancipation, but it does make visible the coercive foundations of unipolar rule. In the Americas, where the memory of counterinsurgency is long and unfinished, the return of repression signals not the failure of autonomy, but its growing plausibility. Empire does not strike hardest where it is strongest. It strikes where it senses the ground beginning to move.
The American Pole Comes Into Focus
By the time repression reasserts itself, the underlying strategy is usually already in place. Here we bring that strategy into clear view. What the Trump-era National Security Strategy reveals—often more honestly than its liberal predecessors—is that the United States no longer imagines global leadership as consent-based. It imagines power as territorial, infrastructural, and logistical. The American Pole is not simply a metaphor for influence; it is a concrete project of hemispheric consolidation built around choke points, corridors, and enforcement zones designed to compensate for declining legitimacy.
This explains the obsessive attention paid to geography. Ports, canals, sea lanes, airspace, fiber-optic cables, energy routes, and border regions are no longer treated as neutral arteries of exchange but as strategic assets to be locked down. Control of movement—of goods, capital, labor, and information—becomes the organizing principle. The hemisphere is reconceived as a fortified platform from which U.S. power can project outward while insulating itself from rival systems. Migration is securitized not because it threatens society, but because it exposes the contradictions of an empire that produces displacement abroad and panic at home.
Within this framework, economic policy merges with military logic. Tariffs are deployed like sanctions, sanctions like blockades, and blockades like undeclared war. Financial pressure, supply chain restructuring, and industrial policy are fused into a single apparatus aimed at forcing alignment. What appears as “reindustrialization” in domestic rhetoric functions internationally as exclusion: nearshoring to compliant territories, reshoring behind fortified borders, and the selective abandonment of regions deemed politically unreliable. The American Pole does not seek integration; it seeks control through dependency management.
Technofascism emerges here not as ideology but as method. Digital surveillance, data extraction, predictive policing, and algorithmic governance extend the reach of the state without expanding democratic accountability. These tools are deployed abroad through security cooperation and at home through border regimes and policing, creating a feedback loop between imperial management and domestic repression. The techniques honed in counterinsurgency theaters return to the metropole, while technologies developed in the metropole are exported back to the periphery. The line between foreign and domestic governance dissolves.
China’s presence accelerates this convergence by denying the empire its preferred terrain of ambiguity. When alternatives exist, the fiction of voluntary alignment collapses. The American Pole must then rely on overt pressure rather than silent structuring. This is why the language of the National Security Strategy is so revealing. It does not promise partnership. It promises enforcement. It does not speak of shared futures. It speaks of dominance restored.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, the American Pole represents a narrowing of possibility. Alignment is rewarded, deviation punished, and neutrality treated as hostility. The hemisphere is not offered a role in shaping the future, only instructions on how to remain acceptable within it. The return of militarized borders, expanded bases, lawfare, and economic coercion is not accidental. It is the architecture of a power that can no longer rely on attraction alone.
All of this clarifies the stakes. The American Pole is a defensive formation masquerading as leadership, a system built to slow history rather than shape it. Its growing visibility signals not renewed confidence, but anxiety. Empires that believe in their future do not need to fortify their perimeters so obsessively. Those that sense the ground shifting beneath them do. In the Americas, the consolidation of the American Pole marks the moment when management gives way to command, and command begins to replace consent as the primary language of rule.
Community or Command
By the end of this confrontation, the choice facing Latin America and the Caribbean is no longer obscured by diplomatic language or technocratic detail. It is stark, structural, and historical. On one side stands a project that treats sovereignty as something that can be widened through cooperation, diversification, and collective self-determination, even if unevenly and imperfectly. On the other stands a project that treats sovereignty as a conditional privilege, tolerated only when it remains harmless to imperial prerogative. China does not need to conquer the hemisphere to alter its trajectory. It only needs to make American dominance unnecessary. That, more than any port or loan or satellite, is what triggers panic.
The violence that follows is not an accident. It is the predictable response of a system that has exhausted its ability to rule by consent. When alternatives become visible, repression fills the gap. Sanctions replace persuasion. Lawfare replaces diplomacy. Militarization replaces development. The return of oligarchic politics, far-right movements, and authoritarian governance across the Americas is not a cultural aberration; it is the political form taken by a declining order determined to preserve hierarchy at any cost. Empire does not retreat quietly. It hardens.
China’s policy paper never promises liberation, and it should not be read as a manifesto of emancipation. What it offers instead is something more modest and more disruptive: the normalization of choice. Multiple development paths. Multiple financial channels. Multiple narratives of legitimacy. In a region long disciplined by the absence of alternatives, even limited choice represents a rupture. It exposes the truth that obedience was never freely given, only enforced by constraint. The United States understands this intuitively, which is why its National Security Strategy reads less like a vision for the future than a manual for slowing history down.
Weaponized Information insists on naming this moment honestly. The struggle unfolding in the Americas is not between democracy and authoritarianism, nor between good and evil powers. It is between community and command. Between a world in which societies can negotiate their place collectively, and a world in which they are ordered to remain in line. The American Pole seeks to freeze the hemisphere in a posture of managed dependency. Multipolar integration, however contradictory, threatens to melt that freeze.
The outcome is not predetermined. Multipolarity does not guarantee justice, and cooperation does not erase class struggle. But the ferocity of the reaction tells us something essential: autonomy is no longer unthinkable. That alone marks a historical shift. Empires strike hardest not when they are strongest, but when they sense that obedience is slipping, narratives are fracturing, and the future is no longer theirs to dictate.
To recognize repression as imperial panic is to reclaim political clarity. The task ahead is not to choose illusions, but to understand structures, identify openings, and refuse the lie that domination is synonymous with stability. In the Americas, the ground is moving again. The plans have been written. The masks have fallen. What remains is the struggle over whether the hemisphere will be bound by command, or whether it will finally be allowed to build community on its own terms.
