Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of 'NATO'

Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs its own version of “NATO”

Watching the latest coverage of Venezuela, one thing is impossible to ignore: the United States is no longer even pretending to operate within a rules-based international order. What we are seeing is not Cold War containment, not democracy promotion, not humanitarian concern. It is open imperial aggression—stripped of justification, framed as entitlement, and enforced through raw power.

For Latin America, this is not a rhetorical shift. It is an existential one. If the United States is willing to openly threaten, destabilize, or take control of a sovereign country in the region simply because it can, then no country stands outside that risk. And responding to this country by country—through negotiation, appeasement, or isolated resistance—is no longer viable. Latin America - or perhaps even the BRICS - needs its own defensive version of NATO.

When Legitimacy Collapses, Force Takes Over

We have seen this moment before.

After the Iraq War, governments the U.S. sought to discipline—Syria under Assad is an obvious case—responded by pointing directly back at the United States. You don’t get to lecture us about invasion, stability, or human rights anymore, they said. You invaded a country on false pretenses. You destabilized an entire region. You have riots, racial violence, internal breakdown, repeated cases of police killing innocent people in the streets, and unrest at home. You have lost the moral authority to police the world.

That response mattered because international power isn’t just military—it rests on legitimacy. Once legitimacy collapses, restraint disappears. And when restraint disappears, coercion is unmasked. That is where the United States now stands.

Venezuela as a Sovereignty Test Case

Venezuela is not just another “crisis.” It is a long-running sovereignty test case in the Americas.

Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela became a symbol—messy, contradictory, imperfect—of refusal. Refusal to accept that Latin America exists inside a permanent U.S. sphere of influence. Refusal to treat U.S. capital and U.S. geopolitical priorities as the ultimate arbiters of legitimacy.

Under Nicolás Maduro, that refusal hardened into confrontation: sanctions, economic warfare, diplomatic isolation, regime-change theater, and now the steady insistence that Washington retains the right to decide who governs.

Oil matters, of course. But oil alone doesn’t explain the intensity of the response. What Venezuela represents is more threatening than a resource dispute: a precedent of disobedience.

If a Latin American state can be punished indefinitely for asserting political and economic independence, for siding with China, Iran, Russia, and BRICS members then sovereignty in the region is conditional—not guaranteed.

Trump and the End of the Cover Story

U.S. intervention in Latin America has always relied on narratives—communism, stability, corruption, democracy, drugs, humanitarian concern. These narratives were often cynical, but they functioned as cover. They preserved the appearance of principle.

Under Donald Trump, the cover story collapses.

Trump represents a post-ethics, post-facts style of power. Anyone who watched him operate in New York in the 1980s and 90s recognizes the pattern: he wants something, and the only real question is whether he can get it. If there’s a loophole, he uses it. If there’s leverage (no matter how devious), he applies it. Whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. There is no higher code—only outcome.

In the past, that logic operated within local constraints: zoning boards, courts, regulators, press scrutiny. Now it operates at the level of the state itself, and with the unlimited backing of the world’s largest and most advanced military. This isn’t simply the familiar story of capital capturing the state—capital has always shaped power. What Trump adds is ideological and post-fact state capture: control over perception itself, achieved through media saturation, manufactured consent, and a cult of personality that becomes larger than evidence, institutions, or accountability; while fully exploiting the tools already built into a capitalocentric system.

Trump takes the approach that he doesn’t need to justify action before the fact. He acts, then manufactures consent afterward—through repetition, spectacle, and sheer narrative force (true or not). When that mentality is paired with the world’s most powerful military and information/social media infrastructure, the result is not policy. It is domination. This is not a return to Cold War discipline. It is something even more reckless.

When a Superpower Behaves Like a Rogue State

A rogue state is not defined by rhetoric or elections. It is defined by whether it recognizes restraints—whether it accepts limits on what it is entitled to do simply because it is strong. A state that asserts the right to destabilize governments, strangle economies through sanctions, manipulate internal politics, threaten takeover, or treat territory and resources as commodities when convenient is not behaving as a stabilizer. It is behaving as an aggressor. At that point, the language of “protection” no longer applies.

This is not simply about capital influencing policy—capital has always done that. What we are seeing now is ideological capture of the state; the capture of truth, legitimacy, and narrative authority. A cult-like personalization of power, amplified by media ecosystems that manufacture consent after the fact, not before. That combination is what makes the current moment so dangerous.

The Precedent Problem

Once the United States normalizes the logic that it can take, punish, or control states in its orbit because it wants to, other powers take note. If Russia can invade Ukraine and survive the consequences, why would China restrain itself over Taiwan? Why wouldn't the US go to Cuba, Colombia, and even Greenland next?

And if the U.S. starts treating sovereignty as negotiable—territory as something you can “take” if you’re strong enough—why would any rising power respect boundaries if the existing hegemon abandons restraint? This is how international order collapses—not through ideology, but through example. Venezuela matters because it signals whether sovereignty is real, or conditional on U.S. approval.

A Multipolar Opening—and a Collective Choice

This moment also arrives during a broader structural shift. We no longer live in a unipolar world where U.S. dominance is uncontested. The rise of BRICS, the diversification of trade and financial relations, and the erosion of U.S. moral authority have opened space—real space—for maneuver.

But space alone does not equal security. In a multipolar world, isolated states are easier to coerce, not harder. Independence cannot be exercised individually. It must be defended collectively. That is the central lesson Venezuela forces the region to confront.

Collective Defense Without Becoming the Empire

The conclusion is unavoidable: Latin America needs collective solidarity, collective defense, and collective red lines. Not as ideology. Not as provocation. But as survival.

This does not mean copying existing military alliances or reproducing imperial forms of power. But the logic of NATO—collective defense, where an attack on one is treated as an attack on all—does carry weight (see NATO’s Article 5, and NATO’s own note that for much of the Cold War its “mere existence” functioned as deterrence: a short history of NATO).

This is exacerbated by the complexity of modern “warfare”—ranging from military aggression to sanctions, covert destabilization, economic strangulation, narrative warfare, and the erosion of legitimacy—which makes the current shape of deterrence less obvious.

Still, what matters here is not the blueprint, but the necessity. Without collective capacity—political, economic, and defense—Latin American sovereignty remains theoretical. With it, intervention could become costly, contested, and uncertain.

Those questions—what forms deterrence can take, how sovereignty is defended without mirroring empire, how aggression is resisted beyond the battlefield—are to be worked out. They require sustained debate, regional leadership, and political courage.

But the first step is recognizing the moment for what it is. The mask is off. The threat is real. And standing alone is no longer an option…. as America is now policing the world as it polices at home—especially in racialized communities of color—where force is used first, accountability fabricated later, and facts are inconsequential. Call it a global extension of the logic that produced Derek Chauvin (and for broader documentation of policing and civil-rights concerns, see the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on police use of force).

Further reading on long-run U.S. interventionism in the region: Oxford Research Encyclopedia: U.S. interventions and occupations in Latin America; Brown University: Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs; International Court of Justice: Nicaragua v. United States (case materials).