<\/strong>In a world where the Pax Americana can no longer sustain itself on its own terms, we search for explanations for this new reality. Political scientist Graham Allison revived the concept of the “Thucydides Trap,” the structural tension that arises when a rising power threatens to displace a hegemon\u2014drawing a parallel between Athens vs. Sparta and China vs. the U.S. Fareed Zakaria suggests we are entering a “post-American world,” where the U.S. no longer dictates the rules alone, and the relative rise of other powers disperses global influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn this emergent order, the U.S.\u2019s partial retreat from the global stage\u2014more symbolic than real\u2014has opened space for a proliferation of strategic actors. Europe faces an unstable neighborhood (Russia, the Middle East, North Africa) while trying to redefine its role in defense, immigration, and energy. Asia, meanwhile, is asserting itself decisively, extending its technological and logistical reach worldwide\u2014even into Latin America, traditionally the U.S.\u2019s \u201cbackyard.\u201d Examples include the Chancay Port in Peru, electric vehicles and batteries in Brazil, solar parks, and Huawei\u2019s data center projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
China is not only vying for economic power\u2014it\u2019s also challenging prevailing narratives. As Kishore Mahbubani points out, while the U.S. has been in Asia for a century, China has been there for a thousand years\u2014and likely will remain. This historical perspective not only relativizes Western influence but also calls into question how we interpret global change: not everything can be understood from Washington\u2019s vantage point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vietnam exemplifies how industrialization processes\u2014shaped by globalization and technology\u2014are reshaping class structures and economic models. Societies absorbing rural populations into expanding industrial sectors contrast with many Western ones, where a shrinking, aging, and precarious middle class perceives decline as relative loss. These are structurally and temporally distinct dynamics in asymmetric competition. Overlaying them are public development policies with very different timeframes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and Russia, long-term development strategies are bearing fruit. In the U.S., short-term thinking has created internal sectors moving at different speeds. A kind of \u201cpolitical dumping\u201d occurs between systems capable of sustaining a long-term economic and political strategy\u2014often at the cost of political alternation and opposition suppression\u2014and democracies where term limits frequently hinder medium- or long-term goals. Latin America suffers the worst of both worlds. For 500 years, it has endured an asymmetric integration into the global economy, fostering internal social inequality and severe environmental degradation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump, more than Trump: The product of structural erosion<\/strong>
<\/strong>Returning to Trump, we propose a perspective that goes beyond his personality or morality. Trump is not merely an anomaly. He is, in many ways, a consequence of the internal imbalances of a worn-out political and economic system. The U.S. is experiencing an internal fracture marked by the weakening of its middle class, the concentration of power in financial sectors, and the long-term impoverishment of vast swathes of its population.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGlobalization has been the true tsunami of the past three decades. It reshaped value chains, displaced production centers, and fragmented societies, unevenly. While some globalized elites gained access to new markets and resources, others, more national, less mobile (though not necessarily poor)\u2014began to lose ground. Trump, as Bolsonaro, Le Pen, or Milei, expresses this tension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus, the point is not whether Trump is right, but what his political success reveals. Perhaps his most significant contribution (intentional or not) is to point out that the global system is cracking. The U.S.’s declining competitiveness and influence drive Trump to take unilateral actions that strain the global order\u2014preemptive attacks on strategic enemies, trade pressure on historical allies like Canada. But these moves also force intermediate players\u2014Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia\u2014to rethink their own margins of maneuver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Latin America amid the shifting board<\/strong>
<\/strong>The key issue is not whether countries or regions should support or reject the U.S. or China, nor which short-term strategy to adopt in the tariff wars or in the communications spectacle. The challenge is how to position ourselves in this reconfigured world. With vast territory, strategic natural resources, and a still-active demographic window, countries like Brazil and Argentina have opportunities that should not be squandered on reactive or emotional responses. Geopolitics can<\/em> and should<\/em> help us think strategically\u2014from our own location, interests, and capacities.<\/p>\n\n\n\nResponding to Trump\u2019s unilateralism with purely emotional or mechanical retaliations\u2014like raising tariffs, can be as ineffective as it is na\u00efve. What we need is a complex, multidisciplinary understanding, one that weaves together economics, sociology, history, and foreign policy. A view that recognizes the world is not univocal, and that charismatic leaders, left or right, cannot substitute for structural analysis. The long-term health of our economies and societies depends on building cross-partisan consensus that outlasts electoral cycles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Less short-term thinking, more realism<\/strong>
<\/strong>Today\u2019s geopolitical uncertainty isn\u2019t going away anytime soon. The global order is in flux, narratives are multiplying, actors are being reshaped. Trump\u2014whether loved or loathed\u2014is neither the beginning nor the end of this process. He is a shattered mirror reflecting multiple crises: of the neoliberal model, of multilateralism, of trust in elites. Understanding this requires more than moral condemnation or ideological allegiance.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf geopolitics is once again central to analysis, it\u2019s because we need complex tools to understand a world that is both interconnected and competitive. As history reminds us, there is no greater mistake than facing a crisis with outdated frameworks. Trump is not the earthquake\u2014he is the fault line. And if we don\u2019t change our lens, we will see only the rubble, not the structures still groaning beneath our feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*Machine translation proofread by Jana\u00edna da Silva<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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