When the United StatesSecretary of War Pete Hegsethspoke in early March about a “Greater North America” stretching from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, he was giving a name tosomethingthat had long beenimplicitin Washington’s strategic posture.
The capture ofVenezuela’sNicolás Maduro,the de facto blockade ofCuba, and the implied threats against Mexico and otherhemisphericnations reveal a clear pattern.
The United States is pursuing a unipolar sphere of influence to dominate in its own backyard through the visible fist of armed force rather than through shared economic integration and shared prosperity. From a narrow realist perspective, the desire forhemispheric primacyis entirely rational and sensible as all great powers seek to maximise their security and influence. The problem is not the goal but the chosen method, which is brittle, self-defeating, limited and ultimately unsustainable even on cold strategic grounds.
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A durable sphere of influence has never been built on coercion alone since lasting hegemony requires that smaller nations see tangible benefits in aligning with the dominant power, not merely fear the consequences of defiance. Economic integration, infrastructure investment, technology transfers, and institutional partnerships create vested interests in stability. They give regional states a reason to cooperate beyond the immediate threat of force. The current US approach offers none of these positive inducements. Instead, Washington has chosen to rely on the vulnerability of its neighbours, none of whom possess nuclear weapons or mutual defense pacts with nuclear armed powers outside the hemisphere. That vulnerability is real, but it does not produce compliance over the long term. It produces resentment, evasion, and a determined search for external alternatives. The absence ofmilitary parityaccentuates the anarchy dynamic in International Relations structure where the strongest states rule through power and fear, which is why I asked in a recent article: “Is Lula Only Now Discovering That Latin America Needs Stronger Defenses After He Abandoned Venezuela To Its Fate?”.
The fundamental weakness of the military only strategy of the United States is that it cannot outcompete its rivals on economic terms. A Marshall Plan for Latin America would require hundreds of billions in grants and low-interest loans, precisely what no current US administration, Republican or Democratic, has been willing to propose. China, by contrast, has built ports, railways, and power grids across the region, not out of charity but as long-term geoeconomic positioning. China, BRICS, and other non-hemispheric powers offer Latin American and Caribbean nations something Washington currently refuses to provide, which is genuine choice in trade, investment, and development finance. Thus, multipolarity has endowed the region with vital infrastructure, and these relationships are built on geoeconomics, not hybrid war or military capture.
The United States, by contrast, has responded to this competition by demanding that hemispheric nations sever their ties with certain states like China, Russia, Iran,and Cuba among them, using the capture orkillingof leaders, naval blockades, hybrid war and conventional war as instruments of persuasion but does not offer anything substantive in return nor does it make up for what these states are giving up. This is not market competition but the systematic elimination of alternatives through force and lawfare. When a great power must kidnap a head of state to make its point, it is confessing that it cannot win in the economic contest.
The multipolar reality of the 21st century makes this strategy even more self-defeating. Unlike the 1990s, when the Washington Consensus faced no serious ideological or financial rival, today’s Latin America has genuine room for manoeuvre. China, the global south, and other global actors provide alternative sources of capital, technology, and diplomatic support. Even Argentina, often presented as a model of US-aligned neoliberal governance underJavier Milei,continues substantial trade and financial transactions with Beijing since following the US lead had only led it to impoverishment. And this is not ideological defiance but pragmatic hedging, the natural response of any sovereign state that sees one great power resorting to coercion while another offers profitable partnership. The more the United States tightens its military grip on the hemisphere, the more it incentivises regional states to accelerate their relationships with non hemispheric powers as a counterweight. The demonstration effect of capturing Maduro and blockading Cuba may produce submission in the short term, but it may also produce a quiet and relentless diversification of economic ties away from Washington.
There is a deeper contradiction at the heart of this approach, which is the belief that the United States has no rival capable of imposing costs on it within the hemisphere. Yet a strategy that relies on permanent blockade, periodic capture, and continuous threat requires an endless commitment of naval assets, intelligence resources, diplomatic capital, and domestic political will. The American public has historically shown little appetite for open ended military adventures in the hemisphere, and the costs of maintaining a coercive order from Alaska to Guyana will mount with each new crisis, exacerbating regional poverty that will in turn increase immigration towards the US. This possible US overreach, in turn, creates its own checks in the form of domestic exhaustion, international isolation, and the emergence of balancing coalitions.
The logicalendpointof this military approach is not only arestored unipolarorder but a neo feudal andneocolonial arrangementwherehemispheric nationsbecome quasi unincorporated territories, their economic policies aligned not to their own development but to US strategic imperatives. That arrangement would cancel the sovereign freedom that makes market capitalism meaningful as true capitalism requires the ability to choose partners based on price, quality, and developmental benefit. The current US strategy offers a coercive binary choice, aligned with us or face blockade and capture, which is not market competition but the visible US fist guiding every transaction. No system based on that fist has ever proven durable. Neo-Feudal systems collapse because they offer no upward mobility and no consent and create too much instability. Empires built on pure coercion fragment because the costs of repression eventually exceed the benefits of dominance.
Source: Global Research
