Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
The most dangerous moment in geopolitics is when the old order no longer prevails, but the new one is still unsettled.
In this circumstance, there is not so much a vacuum as a cloud of uncertainty. Everything is up in the air. Expectations, assumptions and intentions are scrambled. Fearing lost advantage in the face of these unknowns, worst-case scenarios drive the build-out of capabilities. Acting in the breach is a wild guess, the possible outcomes of which cannot be assuredly weighed.
That is the situation we are in today as we witness the nascent revival of Great Power spheres of influence being tested out in Venezuela, Ukraine and Taiwan.
Among the more shocking turns of the Trump administration is the unabashed throwback to the Monroe Doctrine, enforced by gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, replete with the remarkable claim that the national patrimony of Venezuela’s oil resources is rightly the province of U.S. oil companies.
As Trump himself put it over the weekend after Maduro’s audacious capture, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us …This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”
It remains to be seen how that rationale for intervention squares with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that, under the restored tutelage of U.S. companies, the oil industry will be “run for the benefit of the people.”
Whether the plan now is to “run the country,” as Trump put it, or Rubio’s scheme of coercing the remnants of the regime to bend to U.S. will, both run entirely counter to the MAGA base’s aversion to global meddling, regime change and “forever wars.” What appeals to that constituency is the special military operation against drug cartels, though the robust demand to get high on the home front, which so lucratively drives supply, is rarely mentioned.
To be sure, Maduro was a bad seed. No love was lost for the repressive caudillo in Caracas among most of the other countries in the region. But few, especially Mexico, will forswear the nationalist identity that legitimizes their rule by welcoming the return of imperial imposition from the North.
After the Japanese prime minister said in November that an attack on Taiwan would be a national security threat to her nation and an end-of-year $11 billion U.S. arms sale to fortify Taiwan as a defensible “porcupine,” China conducted the closest and most aggressive war games ever in the seas surrounding the island democracy. It was meant to demonstrate the locked-and-loaded capabilities for achieving its oft-pronounced intent of bringing Taiwan back into the national fold by force if necessary.
“The outcome of these struggles will determine the nature of the next world order as it reverts to Great Power spheres of influence.”
Despite urgent and ongoing peace talks over Ukraine, it is hard to imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin will ever negotiate away his vision of a reunified “spiritual Rus.” His response to U.S. and European proposals so far has been to feign interest while doubling down with vicious military attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure in the dead of winter.
Absent European resolve and ready military capacity as U.S. commitment wanes, why would Putin do anything other than dig in and wait things out while doing as much damage as possible until he gets his way?
When The Dominoes Fall
The outcome of these struggles will determine the nature of the next world order as it reverts to Great Power spheres of influence.
As it stands now, the norm of inviolable national sovereignty sanctified by the post-World War II order hangs by a tenuous thread that is further frayed daily by the unilateral transgressions of the world’s major players. When one moves, as Russia already has with the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. has now with its ousting of Maduro, the falling dominoes of the old order are set in motion elsewhere. Is Taiwan the next in line?
If each gets its own way with impunity, how will the others respond?
Russia and China will surely see America’s intervention in Venezuela as permission, and even justification, to do as they similarly wish in their own domains. While Mexico’s dependence on U.S. markets will constrain its margins of maneuver, other large powers in Latin America, such as Brazil, will inevitably seek to strengthen ties with China as a buffer against the return of the old imperialism, making the continent another proxy battleground as during the Cold War.
When push comes to shove, will the U.S. really risk going to war with a rejuvenated, high-tech and nuclear-armed Middle Kingdom over Taiwan, or simply relent in the name of a pragmatic peace?
Will the U.S. finally tire of Europe’s carping dependence on American resources to defend Ukraine and just give in to Putin’s single-minded persistence as a fait accompli?
When all that is said and done, the logic of hemispheric hegemony will deem the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal as necessary on national security grounds because of Russia’s reach into the Arctic and China’s global assertiveness.
This unraveling string of eventualities over the coming years will cement the contours of what comes next.
Of course, successful resistance by the outgunned is always a possibility. In Ukraine, a prolonged armistice, as in a divided Korea, cannot be ruled out. But the “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to say, seems aligned against the fortunes of lesser powers who, in the end, may have little choice but to accommodate the might of the most powerful.
