Understanding America is difficult, even anachronistic, if one sticks to traditional geopolitical frameworks. In recent times, the continent has undergone a veritable structural overhaul, giving rise to a new type of strategic matrix and conflictuality. Its interpretation, generally absent from analysis and training forums, is all the more essential and requires an intellectual upgrade.

Early geopolitical materialism

Kautilya, followed by Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and Schmitt, provided rational tools for describing the essence of politics and the power relations that have shaped history. For these thinkers, as well as others, the global arena is broadly governed by materialism. The quest for power, conflict, and the designation of what is enemy and outside the community are consubstantial with the formation of politics. While power relations are a privileged means for a political community to develop, they are at the same time an end in themselves, that is, a raison d'être in the name of which to build its essence and causality.

The approach to war, whether economic, military, psychological, cultural, or a combination of these various modalities, has traditionally been based on this conceptual premise. Even if numerous biases have limited the continuum between these forms of confrontation practiced by the powers, the fact remains that they have been implemented in an integrated manner and at different intensities through friction and power relations. The exercise of war also implies two assumptions: clearly identifying the political entities to be confronted, as well as the enemies or hostilities involved; characterizing the opposing wills and the offensive means mobilized.

The strategic turning point of the 20th century

This environment was disrupted at the beginning of the 20th century. On the one hand, the methods of warfare followed the evolution of cultural and technological environments, particularly those driven by the Second Industrial Revolution and nationalism. Conflict widened, reaching an “unlimited” dimension at the end of the century, echoing the perspective of Unrestricted Warfare formulated by China in the late 1990s.

But it was in fact much earlier, at the very beginning of the 20th century, that a double political and strategic break occurred. The Victorian British Empire, challenged and pushed back at the end of the 19th century by the rise of the United States, embarked on a project to create an Anglo-American imperium. This initiative, which was ethno-political and supremacist in nature, brought together new cultures of combat and overturned the usual benchmarks of war, the designation of the enemy, influence, and the segmentation of combat zones. It created a qualitative break by sealing the foundations of dialectical materialism, namely a mode of warfare based on the triangulation of conflict and the strategic exploitation of the resulting shock.

In doing so, the blows dealt to its targets had the particularity of being carried out on a different terrain and escaping the friend-enemy framework that had been the foundation of previous geopolitical materialism. The societies affected were then plunged into a state of disorientation that prevented them from undertaking any strategic response calibrated to the true nature of the adversary.

Latin America

Latin America, and indeed America as a whole, is precisely the offspring of this new strategic age.

Five sequences illustrate the reshaping of the continent by the approach we have just mentioned.

  • 1898: The United States' victory in the Spanish-American War projects its power on a global scale. The conflict was triggered by the sabotage of the USS Maine in Cuba, against a backdrop of major economic entrepreneurs entering the US political arena, notably JP Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller. The North American republic was then infiltrated by the Round Tables and the Council on Foreign Relations, giving rise to the formation of an Anglo-American establishment that exploited its “manifest destiny”. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to be controlled, directly or indirectly, by this establishment. A vast operational conglomerate, revolving around the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States and Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) in the United Kingdom, was established.

  • 1948: The Bogotazo riots in Colombia are secretly provoked by the CIA and Fidel Castro in order to reify the communist enemy and push the nations of the continent into Washington's orbit. George Marshall chairs the Pan-American Conference, which gives birth to the Organization of American States and identifies the communist threat. The antagonism of the Cold War is exacerbated and exploited in order to activate a triangulation favorable to Washington.

  • 1952: Fulgencio Batista is installed in power in Cuba by the United States. He is deliberately removed in 1959 to allow the revolutionary figure of Fidel Castro, recruited by the CIA, to triumph. The Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and the missile crisis (1962) were dramatized to seal the Soviet Union's support and galvanize Castroism as the regional bridgehead of the communist threat. Cuba became a proxy for Washington and destabilized the entire continent through revolutionary action. At the same time, the Alliance for Progress and other initiatives mimicked continental cooperation in the service of development and the fight against communism.

  • 1969-1990: Castro's revolutionary struggle, military and economic interventionism, and drug trafficking networks spread throughout the region. These three components destabilized the Latin American republics and gave rise to military reactions, supported by Washington in the name of the anti-Soviet struggle and the restoration of security. Each cycle of crisis triggered a ratchet effect in terms of the economic dependence of South American nations. The flight of capital and human resources to the north (exile and emigration) goes hand in hand with the conquest of markets by North American entities. A structural framework of covert systemic warfare and dependence is built around international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, IDB), the Trilateral Commission, and MERCOSUR.

  • 1990-present: The former communist threat is recycled into the Castro-Chavism pole formed by Cuba and Venezuela. The arrival of Hugo Chávez in 1998, in reaction to the neoliberal agenda, is secretly favored by Washington to establish a pole antagonistic to Anglo-Saxon imperialism. The Anglo-American establishment then completes its cognitive and media encirclement. It supervises the party and ideological system and models regimes of “administered democracy” in which opposition is more or less controlled.

Strategic assessment

It is important to summarize the strategic architecture of this reshaping. It has led South American nations to very different levels of destruction, vassalization, or dependence. While some countries were among the leading developed nations in the 1900s (Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela), the continent is now increasingly marginalized on the world stage. China's entry continues this dependence and does not challenge the strategic perspective.

At no point were the South American elites able to grasp the true strategic plan that surrounded and targeted them. They failed to understand that the strategic pincer movement, acting on one side through revolutionary destabilization and on the other through military interventionism, ultimately aimed to usurp their constitutional framework and weaken them. This confusion of interpretation was made possible by the erasure of the Schmittian enemy and by the warfare waged by a conflictual system, rather than by a binary and clearly distinguishable kinetic force. No military war was waged in the name of this reshaping, but rather a combination of indirect, stealthy, and triangular approaches, whose strategic gains were systematically sought and exploited.

The delay in perceiving the strategic arena and the hostilities undertaken by the Anglo-American establishment is a sine qua non condition of this systemic war. A vast system of influence, relying on the media, think tanks, NGOs, universities, intelligence, the private sector, and government agents, maintains a solid cognitive encirclement to cover this architecture. In addition, the long execution time, spanning several generations, creates a “geostatic” effect that makes it difficult to perceive the offensive pattern.

Our reflection here focuses on Latin America, but it is largely valid for other continents as well, given that the Anglo-American initiative has spread globally. As a manifestation of this profound perceptual veil, most observers of the American continent, notably Marie-Danielle Demélas, Gérard Chaliand, and Alain Rouquié, to name but a few French-speaking authors, have failed to discern this architecture and have applied a conventional realist interpretative framework.

The current strategic era, which has become post-Clausewitzian and post-Schmittian, calls for a profound strategic upgrade.