The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty

We’re living through an unprecedented moment of dependency—one where, with each day, we become more reliant on everyone else but ourselves.

Over the last 500 years, capitalism hasn’t just reorganized economies. It has hollowed out sovereignty. It has steadily pulled knowledge out of people’s hands; and at best placed it into systems - markets, supply chains, professional guilds, credential regimes, corporate infrastructures, and state bureaucracies - and at worst simply lost it. The result is a strange historical inversion: this generation has the most access to information ever—and yet we are among the least capable of caring for ourselves without the market. (This is the “loss of competence” problem that Ivan Illich named—how institutions can produce dependence by deskilling ordinary life.)

Look at how fragile ordinary life has become. In war zones and crisis zones, entire cities can lose heat, electricity, and water in a matter of hours. And I understand the obvious reply: that’s war. But the deeper question is: how quickly can “normal life” become war? How quickly can geopolitics or climate shocks or economic collapse turn your everyday dependencies into your emergency? (This is also the “risk society” insight—modernity doesn’t just face risks; it manufactures new, cascading, system-wide vulnerabilities; see also Giddens on “manufactured risk”.)

What’s terrifying isn’t simply violence—it’s the architecture of vulnerability we’ve built around ourselves. We’ve moved into apartment buildings stacked like rabbit cages. We’ve created lifestyles with no land, no buffer, no redundancy: no space to grow food, no capacity to forage, no ability to repair, no knowledge of basic materials, no community infrastructure for survival outside consumption. We’re reliant on supermarkets that can be disrupted in a moment. We’re reliant on systems that concentrate wealth into small pockets while pushing the rest of society closer to the edge—one job loss, one illness, one supply disruption away from panic. (This is the “just-in-time” fragility problem: efficiency for profit replaces redundancy for survival; see also recent supply-chain scholarship on adapting JIT under turbulence.)

Manufactured Consent and the Slow Surrender of Sovereignty

And the irony is brutal: we've gone down this road voluntarily. But “voluntary” isn’t the as simple as it sounds. It’s voluntary inside a system that manufactures consent. Capitalism doesn’t usually seize sovereignty in one dramatic moment—it dangles shiny lives in front of you: jobs, wages, stability, upgrades, phones, vacations, comfort, status. It makes refusal feel irrational, even irresponsible. So yes, we chose it—but we chose it inside a slow, structural seduction that trained us to confuse convenience with security, and consumption with freedom.

We chose convenience, variety, comfort, and speed—more clothes, more options, more devices, more “security”—and traded away the skills and capacities that once made ordinary people resilient. We can’t build our own homes anymore. Many of us don’t know the materials, the processes, the maintenance. We’ve outsourced care, outsourced food, outsourced repair, outsourced medicine, outsourced community, outsourced governance. We’re not sovereign. We’re not autonomous. We’re functionally dependent on a system designed to create billionaires—people with more money than they could ever meaningfully use—while hundreds of millions live in desperation, paycheck to paycheck, without the ability to feed themselves if the markets or global systems stutter. (Polanyi’s old point still lands: when “life” gets disembedded and reorganized around markets, society pays the price.)

Some would call this resource slavery. The label doesn’t even matter. What matters is the lived condition: dependency without control.

And then, when people try to live differently—when they try to go off-grid or re-skill or step outside the sanctioned script—they’re often treated as a threat, or as deviant, or as unfit. The state will say it’s protecting health and safety. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. But the deeper contradiction remains: if a state can intervene in people’s lives in the name of safety, doesn’t it also carry responsibility for the systemic conditions that make people unsafe in the first place? (This is the “legibility” problem James C. Scott describes: systems that govern by simplification often fail to recognize practical, local know-how—metis—and then punish what they can’t easily administer.)

Rebuilding Capability: Food Sovereignty, Redundancy, and Resilience

Because what happens if supply systems collapse? What happens if energy grids falter? What happens if a larger conflict spreads? What happens if climate disruption accelerates? What happens when the “normal” dependencies snap?

A hundred years ago, many communities could have absorbed shocks differently—not because life was romantic or easy, but because more people had retained everyday knowledge: how to grow, how to preserve, how to repair, how to heat, how to forage, how to survive with less. And they had the capacity, the space, the land, the community even the commons. Now, most of us don’t. We have information, but not capability, not capacity. We have “access” (at a price), but not sovereignty.

So the core realization isn’t that we need to scare people into some apocalyptic fantasy. It’s simpler, and more unsettling:

We no longer know how to take care of ourselves.

And we should let that sink in—not with panic, but with clarity. Because the point isn’t to glorify rugged individualism or lone-wolf survival. The point is to rebuild sovereignty at the level that actually matters: life. Food. Water. Heat. Shelter. Repair. Care. Community. (This is where “food sovereignty” discourse is actually useful—sovereignty as a collective right to define and build the systems that feed you, not just a private lifestyle choice.)

Sovereignty doesn’t mean “do everything alone.” It means you’re not one disruption away from collapse. It means capacities live with people, not only in systems above them. It means having redundancy—skills, networks, local knowledge, shared infrastructures—so that the future can’t be taken away at a moment’s notice.

Right now, too much of our world is someone else’s: someone else’s supply chain, someone else’s expertise, someone else’s platform, someone else’s electricity, someone else’s permissions. (And the logistics literature is blunt about this: modern life is organized around keeping goods circulating—through choke points, borders, and infrastructures—often with hidden coercion and violence.)

What kind of life is that?

If there’s an answer, it isn’t a bunker. It isn’t a fantasy. It’s a collective return to capability: re-learning what we’ve been trained to forget, rebuilding local infrastructures, reducing dependency where it’s dangerous, and creating forms of everyday life that are resilient by design. (And to be clear: “resilience” has two lives—one as liberation through capability, and one as a political demand to simply adapt to danger rather than transform its causes. That critique matters here; see Evans & Reid and Jonathan Joseph.)

Not because we want to exit the world.

Because we want a world we can actually live in.

The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine? The evolution of a politics of impunity

 

I want to map something out that I think people keep missing because they’re stuck in moral language—“norms,” “rules,” “international order”—when what’s actually happening is more basic.

It’s about impunity.

And impunity, in geopolitics, doesn’t mean “nobody complains.” It means: nobody who matters can impose costs you care about.

1) The Monroe Doctrine was always about the right to call the shots

Start with the Monroe Doctrine. In its cleanest form, it’s the U.S. telling European powers: don’t recolonize the Americas, don’t interfere, this is our sphere. It’s a line in the sand—separate spheres, non-colonization, non-intervention—presented as principle, but anchored in power. Monroe is the early branding of a deeper claim: we get to define what happens in this hemisphere

Authority links: National Archives (Monroe Doctrine) | U.S. State Dept. Historian (Monroe)

1.5) The Roosevelt Corollary: Monroe becomes “police power”

But Monroe didn’t stay as “Europe, stay out.” In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt adds what becomes known as the Roosevelt Corollary—and this is where the logic shifts from soft-powered sphere-claim to righteous claims, backed by ostentatious enforcement.

The Corollary basically says: if countries in the Western Hemisphere are unstable, mismanaged, or can’t meet obligations, the U.S. reserves the right to intervene as a kind of hemispheric “police power”—in part to prevent European intervention and debt-collection gunboat politics. But let’s be clear: it was a justification to intervene as the U.S. saw fit, within the Americas.

Authority links: National Archives (Roosevelt Corollary) | U.S. State Dept. Historian (Roosevelt Corollary)

So if Monroe is “this is our sphere,” Roosevelt is the upgrade that says “and we’ll step in whenever we decide (our) order needs to be preserved.”

Keep that move in mind, because it’s the bridge between doctrine as boundary and doctrine as intervention method.

2) The Donroe Doctrine is the Monroe Doctrine with the mask off

Now fast forward and you get what people have started calling the “Donroe Doctrine”—Trump’s corollary to Monroe framed within his 'America First' logics. The reporting is pretty explicit that Trump is reworking the Monroe logic into a posture of raw dominance and coercion in the Western Hemisphere (and beyond), and even linking it to concrete moves—Venezuela intervention, Greenland, Iran, and threats elsewhere, tariffs-as-leverage.

Key reporting: Reuters (Donroe coverage hub) | EL PAÍS English (U.S. / Donroe analysis) | Defense News (U.S. national security strategy framing)

But the Donroe Doctrine isn’t the real innovation. It’s the marketing wrapper. And if you want to be precise about the genealogy: Donroe reads like Monroe + the Roosevelt Corollary’s “police power” instinct—but updated into a more openly transactional, coercive style that’s less about “stability” rhetoric and more about leverage, extraction, and claims.

3) What this really is: the BIBI Doctrine — impunity as method

But what the Donroe doctrine really is, and what Trump is really admiring, and trying to emulate, is what I’ll call the Bibi Doctrine—Benjamin Netanyahu’s nickname and his way of engaging geopolitically...

The Bibi Doctrine is not a formal policy paper. It’s an operating method. And the core of it is simple:

Take whatever you want. Do whatever you want. Because nobody’s going to stop you.

Why?

Because Israel has learned something structural: when your biggest backers are the U.S. and key Western allies—and those allies treat your security as non-negotiable—then you can push far past what “international law” is supposed to allow, and you can absorb condemnation without absorbing real consequences.

Context link: The Guardian (Western leaders’ “steadfast support” framing)

And what does that look like in practice?

It looks like cross-border reach and escalation that would be suicidal for most states:

• Regular incursions and attacks in Lebanon (airstrikes, cross-border fire, escalation cycles).
• Assassinations / covert operations inside Iran that Iranian authorities and multiple outlets have blamed on Israel (and which Israel often neither confirms nor denies).
• Israel striking Houthi targets in Yemen—repeatedly—because it knows it can expand the battlefront without being meaningfully contained.

Reporting links: Reuters (Haniyeh killed in Tehran – what we know) | Reuters (Israeli official later claims responsibility) | Reuters (Israel–Iran escalation timeline)

You can call it “deterrence,” “preemption,” “counterterrorism,” if you'd like. But we all know the point is pretty offensive: reach, strike, escalate, normalize it, and dare the world to do more than talk.

And the reason this becomes a “doctrine” is because it’s not just violence—it’s violence plus impunity—plus it’s working (in the narrow, brutal sense of “working” as a method that keeps going unpunished).

4) Why Trump wants it: decline-management, not just personality

Now bring Trump in—as a strategist of decline.

At the core of MAGA is one clear point, that while it may have started as political rhetoric, is actually quite real at this point: Simply put, America is not what it was. “Make America Great Again” only makes sense if greatness has been lost - and not just the usual ‘racialized’ critiques of what 1960's America was like - but rather on an even more systemic level.

It is visible around Trump, where you have a whole ecosystem—Project 2025 included—that is openly oriented toward a hard right wing state reconfiguration to enforce sovereignty and executive capacity, in radically rapturous ways from the previous status quo.

Authority link: Project 2025 (full document, Heritage), DemocracyNow!, ACLU. 

Economically, the argument is also not random. The tariff obsession, the bargaining posture, the willingness to blow up old arrangements, resource grabs, all in an attempt to reposition the U.S.—to allow it to hold on to power for just a little bit longer.

Yanis Varoufakis has laid out the internal logic: use disruption, tariffs, currency pressure, and leverage to try to force production and advantage back toward the U.S., in a way that echoes earlier U.S. shocks like Nixon-era moves.

Link: Varoufakis (on Trump’s economic masterplan, UNHerd)

It looks like this:

• Trump sees decline (or believes it).
• He sees a narrowing window.
• He watches Israel operate with impunity because everyone is scared of the U.S.
• And he draws the obvious conclusion: If Israel can do that because they’re backed by us… why don’t we do it directly?

No “rules.” No altruistic “values.” No “alliances.”

Only late-empire pragmatism: take what you can while you still can.

5) The pattern: resource grabs, chokepoints, leverage

And once you see it, the map becomes legible:

• Greenland isn’t a random fantasy: it’s Arctic positioning, maritime rights, minerals, strategic depth. (Axios (Greenland context) | TIME (Greenland + tariffs))
• Venezuela isn’t “democracy promotion”: it’s oil and pesky thorn-in-our-side hemisphere enforcement—Monroe logic with a gunboat vibe. (Reuters (Venezuela + hemisphere framing))
• Iran certainly isn’t about democracy promotion and allowing protests/free speech—especially as the U.S. itself is currently brutally cracking down on protest, and recently killed one.
• Tariffs aren’t just economics: they’re coercion tools, pressure applied like a business deal at geopolitical scale, and all bringing back notions of the late 20th century and the 'asian tigers' infant industry logics. (Reuters (tariffs-as-leverage framing))

So yes—Monroe → (Roosevelt Corollary) → Donroe is the storyline. But the deeper claim reality is that Donroe is Bibi-logic scaled up, where impunity becomes a holistic governing style.

The bottom line

So this is what I want to put on the table as an alternative idea:

We’re watching an illuminating moment where global politics is openly less about “rules” and more about who can act without consequence. The Monroe Doctrine was an early assertion of sphere-power. The Roosevelt Corollary was the moment that sphere-power became explicit intervention authority—the “power” to do (i.e. take) what we want. The Donroe Doctrine is that posture rebranded and reactivated. But what’s powering it psychologically and strategically is the lesson of the Bibi Doctrine (and a level of power and impunity Trump is infatuated with):

Do whatever you want, take whatever you want—because the world will complain, perhaps even  protest or send a ‘strongly worded rebuke’; but ultimately, nobody will stop you.

And if you believe your empire is declining, and you're like Trump, and want to be seen as its savior, that lesson becomes irresistible.

Related reading inside the ecosystem

• America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire (Alternative Ideas)
• Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of “NATO” (Alternative Ideas)
• Why We Need Parallel Infrastructures (AnotherDemocracy)
• Interpreting Capitalism (hub)
• AIBIA (hub)

This post is part of Alternative Ideas—and it sits inside a wider ecosystem of “parallel” projects that try to think (and build) beyond mainstream political common sense. Related hubs: AnotherDemocracy.com, InterpretingCapitalism.com, and AIBIA.

America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire

People keep saying Trump is “betraying” America First. I think he’s finally saying the quiet part out loud: America First doesn’t mean restraint — it means America's interests come first... including power and (increasingly) resource grabs.

There’s a version of America First that many people want to believe in though. The clean version. The “let’s focus on problems at home” version. The “no more wars, no more regime change” version that works with what America has and focuses on its people's lives.

But that’s not what the slogan actually promises.

America First is not a commitment to non-intervention. It’s a commitment to U.S. interests first - as the priority - and however the government defines those interests, and whatever methods it uses to secure them is up to those currently in power.

That difference matters, because it explains what we’re watching right now: not a betrayal of America First, but a harder, more explicit, and less ethical version of it.

The Key Misread: “America First” ≠ Isolationism

People talk about America First like it’s the opposite of empire: stop meddling abroad, stop forcing our worldview on other societies, stop policing the planet.

But the phrase doesn’t say any of that.

It says: America first. Not “America only.” Not “America stays home.” Not “America minds its business.”

It’s about priority — and in practice, that can easily become dominance, doing whatever is necessary to secure what U.S. leaders claim America “needs.” Security. Minerals. Oil. Strategic geography. A compliant hemisphere. A favorable global order.

If you listen to Trump’s rhetoric, this is exactly how he frames it: America has needs; America has interests; and America - like a bully taking someone's lunch money - will take whatever it requires to feel powerful.

That is not a deviation from America First. That is America First as an imperial doctrine.

The Trump Nuance: Power, Authoritarian Envy, and “The Biggest Stick”

Here’s the nuance Trump brings — not as an abstract ideology, but as temperament and instinct.

Trump has always had a soft spot for authoritarian tactics. He doesn’t seem to respect law so much as power. He watches leaders like Putin, the Saudi leadership, North Korea, China, Viktor Orbán, and a whole range of right-wing strongmen and he doesn’t recoil — he seems to admire the simplicity: the ability to just do what you want, to treat politics as force by dominance, to make the biggest stick into the ultimate moral argument.

So on the campaign trail, America First can sound like restraint — “we’re not going to waste money abroad; we’ll focus on ourselves.”

But Trump’s America First with full institutional control — a compliant Supreme Court, control over Congress, control over the executive — is something else. It’s not “we’re stepping back.” It’s “we finally have the clearance to step forward harder, bigger, bader.”

And that’s where the older American imperial scripts start to reappear without embarrassment: Manifest Destiny, Monroe Doctrine, and now what he calls the 'Donroe' doctrine the idea that borders, norms, and even law are negotiable when the U.S. decides something is in its strategic interest.

In that frame, “America First” becomes a survival-of-the-fittest worldview: I’m going to take what I think is mine, because I can.

Greenland: When “National Security” Becomes Territorial Hunger

Greenland gets talked about like it’s a joke — a weird Trump obsession, a headline generator. But it’s not funny when leaders frame land acquisition as a “security necessity” and treat sovereign territory like an asset on a balance sheet.

Call it strategic positioning. Call it Arctic defense. Call it mineral access. The logic is the same:

We want it, we need it, therefore we should have it.

That’s not a foreign policy of restraint. That’s a foreign policy of entitled domination.

For context and reporting: AP on the White House saying military action is “always an option” in Greenland, and ABC on why Greenland is strategically important.

Ukraine’s Minerals: Transactional Empire in a Suit and Tie

The U.S.–Ukraine minerals deal is often defended as “just economics,” or “reconstruction,” or “investment.” But the way it’s been publicly framed matters: as access to resources, and as a form of payback, and as a strategic guarantee for the U.S. (not just a solidarity guarantee for Ukraine).

Even if you think the deal is defensible, the underlying message is clear:

Support is conditional. Security has a price. Resources are the collateral.

That’s not “we’re staying out of other people’s affairs.” That’s not, this is the moral thing to do. Instead, it's “we’re involved — and we’re getting something concrete out of it.”

Background and structure: U.S. Treasury on the U.S.–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund and CSIS on what the signed minerals deal does.

Venezuela: When the Resource Grab Stops Pretending

And then there’s Venezuela — the country with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.

Whatever label people want to use — “strike,” “operation,” “intervention,” “regime change” — a U.S. military attack on Venezuela resulted in Maduro being captured and removed, and intense debate about legality, escalation, and U.S. motives.

And here’s the core point for me:

When the justification is openly tied to oil, “stability,” and U.S. control over outcomes - even the country itself - we are no longer watching soft-power influence or backroom leverage. We are watching something closer to the old force + resources + power model.

If you want to call that neocolonialism, fine. But the more direct and coercive it becomes, the more it looks like taking the material wealth of another country through direct power, and which isn’t even neocolonialism anymore. It’s OG, the original colonialism — resource extraction logic, backed by force, dressed up as national interest.

Reporting and fallout: AP live updates on the U.S. operation and casualties, Reuters on UN Human Rights Office criticism, and PBS on what we know so far.

“Do You Think Britain Colonized the World Out of Altruism?”

This is the part people don’t want to say plainly. 

Empires always have stories about themselves. They always claim moral purpose:

• We’re civilizing 'them'.
• We’re stabilizing 'them'.
• We’re bringing order.
• We’re protecting the world (and ourselves).
• We’re defending freedom...

Britain had its story. The U.S. has its story. But underneath the moral varnish, the throughline is usually the same:

resource access, strategic dominance, and the megalomania of being “the” global power.

So when people say Trump is “betraying” America First, I think they’re clinging to a comforting fantasy version of it — the fictious version that means humility, restraint, rebuilding at home.

But Trump’s version is brutally coherent:

American domination first — economically, militarily, culturally — because domination is framed as survival.

So What? Stop Laundering the Slogan

Here’s what I think needs to happen if we want to be intellectually honest (and politically serious):

1. Stop confusing “America First” with anti-war politics. They are not the same thing.
2. Name what this is: an imperial doctrine of entitled domination framed as “national interest.”
3. Reject the (fake)moral cover stories. If oil, minerals, and dominance are central motivations, say that out loud.
4. Push the debate onto law and legitimacy: sovereignty, international law, war powers, and the precedent this sets for every other major power watching.
5. Build a real alternative: a foreign policy rooted in restraint, reparative justice, and cooperation — not “dominance with better branding.”

Because if America First can mean “we take what we want because we say we need it and don't care about anyone else,” then it’s not a philosophy of national renewal.

It’s a permission slip for empire.

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).

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Former colonial powers won’t pay reparations voluntarily—nor could they fully admit what they did without opening a legal floodgate. So perhaps its time to stop asking, and realize that they’ll only arrive as an outcome of organized Global South power. For example, a small levy on extractive flows, pooled and used to build capacities that end endless extractive relationships.

Lede: why this matters now

The reparations conversation keeps getting trapped in the same dead end: will Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the U.S., etc.—and the corporations that grew rich from colonialism—ever take full responsibility? Maybe they’ll offer statements. Maybe they’ll fund memorials. But meaningful reparations—real acknowledgement, real money, real repair—runs straight into a problem (beyond the typical racism) they will never openly concede: liability.

If a former colonizing state fully admits that the colonial encounter and slavery were foundational crimes that created enduring wealth for them and enduring underdevelopment for others, it doesn’t just become “history.” It becomes a legal and political cascade. A waterfall of claims. Claims steeped in centuries of racist policies, eugenics, and every other practice used to suppress the black population. That’s why this will never be resolved by waiting for the perpetrators to “do the right thing.”

So the question isn’t: Will they pay?
The question is: How do reparations-seeking countries get what’s owed when the perpetrators refuse?

They take them—not through chaos, but through sovereignty, coordination, and steadfast solidarity. This is the logic of parallel structures: you don’t wait for permission to live the truth. You build infrastructure and enable practices that make your truth materially real.

(If you’re coming to this through recent reporting, here’s a recent Guardian article, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal U.S. framing in “The Case for Reparations”.)

They won’t admit it—so stop waiting

We can say it plainly: the Global North ascended through colonial extraction and slavery. Lives, labor, land, sugar, cotton, rubber, gold, bauxite, uranium, oil—taken, underpriced, coerced, violently secured, then laundered into “development,” “modernity,” and “the rule of law.”

And the same basic pattern is still here, dressed up in contemporary language: “investment,” “stability,” “aid,” “trade,” “structural adjustment,” “risk management,” “good governance.” The names change; the flow often doesn’t, nevermind the exploitative power dynamics.

So the reparations conversation can’t be built on moral hope. It has to be built on material leverage.

The Global South has leverage—if it comes together

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and other ex-colonies hold an extraordinary share of what the global economy depends on: mineral reserves, strategic inputs, agricultural commodities, biodiversity, key sea routes, and (in the Caribbean especially) tourism flows tied directly to North Atlantic wealth.

The problem isn’t lack of leverage. The problem is fragmentation. Countries get played against each other. Deals get signed in isolation. Elites get rewarded for compliance. And the coalition never forms.

But if a core group of reparations-seeking countries did form—especially those with strategic leverage—then even small policy shifts could become world-shaping.

The most practical starting point is not a dramatic embargo. It’s a small, consistent, legitimate levy that is hard to resist, works, and shows other countries what is possible.

A simple proposal: a 1% Reparatory Justice Levy

Here’s the core idea:

A coalition of reparations-seeking countries—starting with a serious core bloc—implements a 1% levy on designated extractive exports to former colonizer states (and/or to corporations headquartered there). Not everything. Not forever. Start with the obvious: raw materials and extractive industries where colonial patterns are still visible in the ground (think the alliance of Sahel states and uranium to France).

And for the Caribbean, the logic expands naturally: the colonial encounter wasn’t just mines; it was plantations, forced labor, and the extraction of wealth through sugar and rum. Today, beyond sugara dn rum, the closest equivalent “flow” is tourism—especially flights and resort economies tied to North Atlantic income. So the coalition can include micro-levies like a small solidarity fee on flights arriving from Europe and North America, or on high-end tourism transactions. (This isn’t theoretical—there are real precedents for an airline solidarity levy model that funds pooled public goods.)

This is not “asking.” It’s not “begging.” It’s not “guilt.” It’s an assertive policy regime:

• You want access to our resources?
• You pay a small reparatory charge.
• The money goes into a collective fund.
• The fund builds the capacity to stop being exploited.

A 1% levy is not radical. What’s radical is pretending the current arrangement is neutral.

The fund must not become permanent dependency

Even though reparations should be about justice and accountability - with not strings attached - when have you ever met an 'ethical' slavery or colonizer? One that will just give it all back? Thus, the most important part is that the levy cannot just become another social spending stream—important as healthcare and education are. If the levy only patches wounds while the extraction machine keeps running, you institutionalize the very relationship you claim to oppose.

So the fund’s mission has to be regenerative and time-oriented:

The levy exists to build the capacity that makes the levy unnecessary.

That means investing in the exits:

• refining and processing capacity (stop exporting raw cobalt; export refined products)
• regional manufacturing and value chains
• energy sovereignty (grids, renewables, storage)
• ports, shipping, and logistics infrastructure controlled locally
• universities, R&D, and training ecosystems
• ecological remediation in extraction zones
• public institutions that can plan beyond short-term crisis
• sustainable and autonomous food systems
• etc.

This is repair that ends the need for repair.

“But Congo would pay more than Jamaica”—yes, and that’s why the fund needs solidarity rules

A real coalition has to handle internal inequality honestly.

Some countries sit on minerals the world can’t easily substitute. Others were devastated by colonialism in different ways—plantation economies, forced monocrops, debt traps, tourism dependence, climate vulnerability. Jamaica can’t “compete” with the Congo on cobalt. That doesn’t make Jamaica less harmed, less entitled, or less structurally trapped.

So the coalition fund cannot be “you get what you contribute.” That kills unity immediately.

A workable structure is a two-pot system:

Pot A: Solidarity & Repair (formula-based)

• a baseline floor for every member (small states matter)
• weighted by need/vulnerability and historical harm
• designed so plantation/enslavement economies (high value during old colonialism) aren’t punished for not having rare earths (of more value today)

Pot B: Capacity-Building Exits (project-based)

• cooperative funding for refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, regional universities
• preference for multi-country projects that build shared independence
• long-term commitments, not PR grants

This way the extraction of the materials in the Congo isn't just taxed; it gets funded to transform. And Jamaica isn’t sidelined; it gets recognized as central to the colonial story and central to repair.

Governance: if it looks like elite rent, it dies

A reparatory levy fund has one existential risk: it becomes another pot of money for elites and intermediaries. Then it loses moral legitimacy inside the coalition and becomes an easy target for Northern propaganda.

So governance has to be designed as if legitimacy is the whole project—because it is:

• equal regional representation, rotating seats, small-state protection
• public dashboards of inflows/outflows (every euro tracked)
• independent audits
• hard conflict-of-interest rules
• citizen-facing reporting: “this levy built this refinery / this clinic / this training program”
• a legal defense pool (because retaliation and arbitration will come)

This isn’t “good governance” as the typical neoliberal slogan. It’s coalition survival, and to survive the aggrieved countries have to maintain the moral high ground. And it will work because they are right, and people will know it is right. To atone for past expropriations carrying deep repercussions today.  

So what / what now: reparations as collective power, not moral request

Reparations won’t come from conscience. They’ll come from leverage.

Former colonial powers won’t give you the confession you want, because it’s too expensive - both politically (racist constituents) and economically (liability). So stop structuring your politics around their refusal. Build a parallel mechanism that turns Global South material power into a pooled reparatory capacity fund, with a small levy that is easy to explain and hard to dismiss.

Start with a core bloc. Start with 1%. Start with extractive raw material exports and North Atlantic tourism flows. Start with transparency. And use the money to build exits: refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, universities, sustainable food systems—real capacities that end the colonial logic rather than managing it.

The message isn’t “please acknowledge us.”
The message is: We acknowledge ourselves. We organize. We set the terms. We aren't your lap dogs anymore. 

And if the Global North wants to live in the world it claims to believe in—rules, law, ethics, responsibility—it can start by respecting a modest reparatory levy designed to repair the damage that built its wealth in the first place.

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe loves a story about “catching up.”

Southern Italy must catch up to the North.
East Germany must catch up to the West.
Post-socialist Central Europe must catch up to the “advanced” core of Europe.

This story is presented as neutral description, as if history simply flowed downhill toward modernity and some places got stuck in the mud. But the “catching up” story is not neutral. It is a technology of power: it explains away structural inequity as cultural deficiency, and it justifies a long chain of decisions that relocate sovereignty—over land, over firms, over futures—somewhere else.

If you’ve lived inside these divides, the insult is not only economic. It’s existential. You learn that your region’s ways of living are “not serious,” your social habits are “backward,” your tempo is “lazy,” your reluctance to play the careerist game is “a problem,” and your memories are “false.” The center doesn’t simply take resources; it takes interpretive authority—the right to define what counts as progress.

But here’s the twist that the “catching up” story cannot grasp:

What if these regions aren’t merely lagging?
What if they are holding capacities that the center has actively eroded—capacities for human life that cannot be replaced by GDP?

That’s not a romantic slogan. It’s an empirical claim about what marginal places preserve, practice, and reproduce—often precisely because they were never fully absorbed into the center’s tempo, ideology, and social design.

The politics of “backwardness” is a politics of dispossession

In all three cases—Southern Italy, East Germany, and post-socialist Central Europe—the familiar material pattern is not just “inequality.” It’s something more specific:

• Decisions move outward.
• Ownership moves outward.
• The region becomes a labor reservoir and a managed territory.
• And then a stigma narrative (“backward”) arrives to make this feel natural.

That stigma does real work. It trains people to doubt their own ways of living. It turns structural limits into personal shame. It makes people internalize that they deserve less.

But stigma has another function: it prevents revalorization. If you can convince a place that its strengths are defects, you can strip it of confidence, autonomy, and imagination—then sell it “development” that looks suspiciously like dependence.

So let’s do the opposite for once. Let’s name what these places hold, and why it matters.

Southern Italy: temporal sovereignty and relational wealth

Southern Italy has been framed for generations through deficit talk: laziness, corruption, clientelism, inefficiency—an entire moral vocabulary used to explain economic hierarchy as cultural failure.

Yet anyone who spends real time in the South sees something else: a different theory of life.

Not as an ideology, but as practice:

• Life is organized around relationships, not merely schedules.
• Value is produced through mutual presence, not only through productivity.
• Social time is not a leftover; it’s an infrastructure.
• The household and the neighborhood remain meaningful economic units: food cycles, care cycles, repair cycles.

The South is often described as “slow.” But slowness can also be read as temporal sovereignty: the ability to refuse a world where the clock is the ultimate authority and the self must always perform.

This is not a fantasy; it is a measurable lived difference. The center often has more money, more options, more institutional thickness. But it also produces chronic stress, thin sociality, and a permanent sense of being behind in one’s own life.

Southern Italy shows that another arrangement is possible: where “success” is not only individual mobility upward and outward, but the capacity to remain rooted, embedded, and human.

The center calls this backward because it cannot price it.

Czechia: everyday ecological citizenship (not the performative kind)

Czechia is frequently described as “post-socialist,” as if its defining feature is what it lacks compared to the West. But Czechia also holds a deep cultural competency that many western societies have partly lost: nature as everyday life, not as a weekend brand.

This isn’t just about hiking. It’s about a dense ecology of practices:

• tramping cultures that produce community through shared movement and simple living;
• mushroom hunting and foraging literacies that make the forest legible;
• lesní školka / forest kindergarten logics that treat weather as normal and children as belonging outdoors;
• informal and semi-formal communities of practice that transmit land-knowledge across generations.

None of this needs to be framed as nationalist pride. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a social design: a culture where ecological competence is not reserved for specialists, where “nature” is not consumed as an exotic escape from urban life, but integrated into the baseline of what a life is.

In the West, “sustainability” often becomes a moral performance—an identity, a purchasing strategy, a policy slogan. In Czechia, there’s often something quieter and more durable: habit. Culture doing the work that campaigns cannot.

That’s a serious asset. It’s a living curriculum for a future that will require land-literacy and non-commodified resilience.

East Germany: longing for socialism is not ignorance—it’s comparative memory

Here we have to be honest: people in the former GDR do romanticize aspects of state socialism. Not because they forgot repression or shortage or surveillance, but because systems are not one-dimensional.

And because what followed “unification” was not simply freedom. It was also:

• rapid asset restructuring,
• humiliating cultural pedagogy (“learn how to be modern”),
• externalized ownership,
• and a durable hierarchy of legitimacy.

When East Germans express longing, they often aren’t longing for authoritarianism. They’re longing for social guarantees, collective infrastructures, and forms of solidarity that made life intelligible and secure, even if the political form was deeply compromised.

There is also a deeper point that western moral language tries to avoid: modern liberal-capitalist states maintain strong security and policing apparatuses too—often using techniques that are remarkably continuous across regime change. The West’s story that authoritarianism is uniquely “over there” is convenient; it hides the coercions that make market society run.

So when someone says, “life felt more secure,” or “people were less alone,” or “the West is cold,” they are not necessarily confessing authoritarian desire. They may be making a precise comparative claim:

• that market society produces isolation as a baseline;
• that the West’s friendliness is often performative and transactional;
• that the constant competition for status corrodes community.

East Germany retains—sometimes stubbornly—residual collectivities: habits of association, directness, pragmatic mutuality, and an intuition that the social world can be organized differently than the market’s default settings.

Even if these habits are mixed, contested, and uneven, they exist. And they matter.

What these “margins” actually share

Southern Italy, Czechia, and East Germany are not the same. Their histories differ; their political trajectories differ; their injustices differ.

But they share a structural position: they have been treated as spaces to be managed by external standards, and they have been pressured to exchange their own capacities for acceptance.

And yet they persist as repositories of counter-capacities that the center struggles to reproduce:

1. Relational density
   Social ties as infrastructure, not decoration.
2. Temporal sovereignty
   The refusal of speed as the measure of worth.
3. Land-literacy
   Everyday ecological competence, intergenerationally transmitted.
4. Collective memory of alternative organization
   Not nostalgia as weakness, but memory as evidence that social systems can be different.
5. Low-capital abundance
   The ability to produce meaning and stability without constantly converting life into money.

The center calls these things “backward” because it cannot govern them easily. They reduce dependence on market-mediated solutions. They make people harder to discipline through scarcity narratives. They generate quiet autonomy.

Revalorization: not tourism, not nostalgia—political re-seeing

Revalorizing marginal capacities does not mean turning them into lifestyle content. It does not mean romanticizing poverty. It does not mean claiming these regions are utopias.

It means something more rigorous:

• seeing retained capacities as assets rather than defects;
• building languages that defend them against stigma;
• and treating them as design resources for futures that will demand more than growth.

It also means refusing the center’s epistemic authority. The “modern” world has produced astonishing wealth and also an astonishing thinning of life. The metrics of the center are not neutral. They are the outcome of power.

So the question is not “How can the margins become more like the center?”
The more radical question is: What can the center learn from what it tried to erase?

Because in a century of ecological constraint, social fragmentation, and political exhaustion, the so-called margins may not be behind.

They may be holding what comes next.