The Evolution of the International Order Underlying the Trump Corollary

The Evolution of the International Order Underlying the "Trump Corollary": 

Why Must the Global South Form Alliances?

Matteo Capasso, Walaa Alqaisiya

(Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, Northwest University, China)

Interviewed and Translated by Rong Jianxin | Editorial Department, Beijing Cultural Review

BCR: Let us begin with recent developments. Although the Trump administration increasingly disdains disguising its actions, his supporters and proxies continue to employ weaponized humanitarian rhetoric—for instance, Machado vigorously extolled the US "kidnapping" of Maduro as a contribution to "the freedom of the Venezuelan people." Ironically, however, with Trump’s claim of seeking total control over Greenland, Western nations—particularly the United States' NATO allies—seem to have "suddenly" realized the unreliability of these rules. When interests are at stake, the so-called international order is rendered no more than scrap paper. Taking this opportunity, perhaps we could first trace the history of how the United States has utilized this [rhetoric] to legitimize its foreign interventions.

C&A: The apparent contradiction in US human rights discourse dissolves when we understand that "human rights" and "humanitarianism" function not as universal principles but as sophisticated instruments of imperial power projection. This weaponization of humanitarian language represents what can be understood as selective humanization, where certain populations are deemed worthy of protection while others are relegated to what exists outside the moral universe deserving of rights.

This selectivity operates through the structural logic of what imperial powers define as humanity itself. Western modernity has historically drawn boundaries between human and non-human that align with colonial and imperial hierarchies. The "human" in human rights discourse effectively refers to those populations whose lives serve imperial objectives, while those who resist are systematically dehumanized and thus placed outside the protective scope of humanitarian concern (as we also discussed earlier in relation to the savage, terrorist Palestinians). When the US State Department labels Israeli military actions in Gaza as "legitimate" while simultaneously condemning Chinese AI technology or Iranian drones as threats to human rights, it reveals how humanitarian discourse serves to delineate acceptable from unacceptable forms of violence based entirely on their relationship to US imperial interests.

This framework becomes coherent when we examine how it has operated consistently across decades of US interventions in West Asia, where the systematic weaponization of UN mechanisms extends beyond providing diplomatic cover to encompass direct intelligence operations and military targeting that fundamentally corrupts international institutions. The weaponization of human rights discourse follows a predictable template that extends far beyond Palestine to encompass systematic interventions where humanitarian rhetoric provides moral cover for geopolitical objectives serving American hegemony.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration justified the 2001 invasion partly through claims of liberating Afghan women from Taliban oppression, with Laura Bush delivering radio addresses about women's rights while US bombs destroyed the country's infrastructure. The systematic deployment of feminist rhetoric transformed what was fundamentally a strategic intervention into a civilizational mission, creating the ideological framework that enabled twenty years of occupation. The irony became evident as the occupation failed to meaningfully improve women's conditions while creating massive displacement and civilian casualties, revealing how humanitarian discourse obscures rather than addresses the material conditions it claims to remedy.

The 2003 Iraq invasion used different tactical requirements while revealing the operational mechanisms through which UN agencies become instrumentalized for military purposes. Humanitarian concerns about Saddam Hussein's human rights record provided partial justification for regime change, despite the US having previously supported the same government when it served American interests during the Iran-Iraq War. The New York Times reported in 1999 that US intelligence agencies had systematically infiltrated UN weapons inspection teams to conduct espionage operations against Iraq, with American officials confirming that the CIA used the cover of UN weapons inspectors to gather intelligence on Iraqi military installations and government communications. This infiltration enabled the US to gather targeting information for subsequent military strikes while maintaining the international legitimacy that UN authorization provided, transforming what were ostensibly international humanitarian and disarmament missions into covert intelligence operations serving US strategic objectives.

Libya exemplifies how this strategy operates through international institutions to provide multilateral legitimacy for imperial interventions. The 2011 NATO intervention was authorized under the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, ostensibly to prevent humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi. Hillary Clinton famously celebrated Gaddafi's death with "We came, we saw, he died," revealing the triumphalist logic underlying humanitarian interventionism. The transformation of Africa's most prosperous state into a failed state with open slave markets and ongoing civil war demonstrates how humanitarian rhetoric enables destruction while obscuring the imperial interests driving intervention.

Syria reveals the most sophisticated version of this strategy, where humanitarian concerns about Assad's treatment of protesters provided justification for supporting armed opposition groups that prolonged and intensified the conflict. The focus on chemical weapons attacks and civilian casualties obscured how US intervention served the broader objective of weakening Iranian influence while fragmenting Syrian state capacity. The systematic amplification of women's rights concerns and minority protection issues created moral pressure for intervention while hiding how prolonged conflict devastated the very populations supposedly being protected.

The pattern continues into the contemporary period, as evidenced by recent AnsarAllah raids on UN agency offices in Sanaa, Yemen. In August 2025, AnsarAllah forces raided offices of the World Food Programme and UNICEF in Sanaa, alleging that these humanitarian organizations were being used for intelligence gathering and coordination with the Saudi-led coalition that has devastated Yemen with US military support. This broader pattern of UN agency infiltration established in Iraq creates legitimate concerns about how humanitarian organizations become instrumentalized for military purposes, operating through mechanisms that corrupt the fundamental principles underlying international humanitarian law (as we have already discussed in relation to GHF in Gaza).

Finally, the Iran case shows how this framework adapts when direct military intervention becomes unfeasible. Comprehensive sanctions and support for opposition movements operate alongside systematic amplification of women's rights issues during protests. The weaponization of Iranian women's struggles serves the dual purpose of destabilizing the government while positioning the US as the defender of universal human rights, despite the demonstrable harm sanctions inflict on Iranian women and families. This reveals how humanitarian discourse functions independently of actual concern for the populations it claims to protect.

This historical pattern reveals human rights imperialism as a systematic feature of US global strategy rather than a consistent application of universal principles. Each intervention follows identical mechanisms. First, amplifying genuine grievances while obscuring how US intervention worsens conditions for the populations supposedly being protected. Second, manufacturing humanitarian crises to justify interventions serving broader geopolitical objectives. Third, utilizing international institutions to provide multilateral legitimacy for unilateral imperial interests—while systematically corrupting their neutrality through intelligence infiltration and military coordination.

The contemporary deployment of this framework against China represents its most sophisticated iteration yet. The systematic promotion of Uyghur genocide allegations through Adrian Zenz's methodologically fraudulent research demonstrates how humanitarian discourse gets weaponized against emerging challengers to US hegemony. The contrast becomes stark when examining institutional responses: while documented genocide unfolds in Gaza with overwhelming evidence and International Court of Justice findings of "plausible genocide," Western institutions hesitate to apply genocide terminology and limit criticism to calls for proportionality. Meanwhile, these same institutions immediately embraced genocide accusations against China despite relying on research containing mathematical impossibilities and obvious methodological flaws.

BCR: On this note, we are compelled to mention the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Just days ago, Machado passed her medal and diploma on to Trump, making this award—which was already suffering from a precipitous loss of credibility—seem even more like a farce. In fact, critics have long argued that this prize serves as a weapon of “human rights imperialism.” What is your take on this?

This same institutional apparatus that manufactures atrocity narratives against imperial adversaries while obscuring actual atrocities committed by imperial allies found its most recent—and perhaps most brazen—expression in the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee celebrated Machado for her "tireless work promoting democratic rights," yet this same laureate maintains a formal cooperation agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party signed in 2020, has telephoned Netanyahu following her Nobel announcement to express appreciation for "Israel's efforts against Iran" and support for Israeli military operations during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity stated in an open letter to the Nobel Committee, this prize is "already stained with blood."

The juxtaposition between Machado and the Bolivarian project she seeks to destroy could not be starker. When Nicolás Maduro cast his vote in the July 2024 presidential election, he declared "Viva Palestina Libre!" His opponent, María Corina Machado, had already proclaimed that "Israel's struggle is our struggle." This contrast encapsulates two fundamentally opposed orientations toward empire, toward genocide, and toward the very meaning of human rights. The Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 during Operation Cast Lead, with Chávez explicitly condemning Israeli genocide in Gaza—making Venezuela the first Latin American nation to break ties with the settler-colonial state and the first to recognize Palestine on 1967 borders. Maduro has consistently described the Palestinian cause as "the most sacred cause of humanity," hosted the International Conference of Solidarity with Palestine in Caracas in November 2024 where historic Palestinian leader Leila Khaled addressed delegates from 53 countries, and backed South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice. He has condemned the United Nations for its "cowardly silence" regarding Israeli atrocities and warned that any ceasefire agreement without justice would amount to "a peace of rubble."

The Nobel Prize thus functions as an instrument of what can be understood as inverted humanization: rewarding those who support documented genocide while delegitimizing those who stand against it, celebrating alignment with war criminals while condemning solidarity with the oppressed. Machado has pledged to restore diplomatic relations with Israel and relocate Venezuela's embassy to Jerusalem in "full recognition of Israel's sovereignty over the city"—a stance that would reverse decades of principled solidarity and align Venezuela with the colonial project devastating Palestine. Her political program explicitly advocates privatizing Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, eliminating public oversight of financial regulations, and implementing IMF-World Bank structural adjustment—the same neoliberal prescriptions that have devastated populations throughout the Global South while enriching transnational capital.

The selection reveals how the Nobel Peace Prize functions as imperialist-capitalist soft power: a mechanism to co-opt leaders aligned with imperial consensus, neutralize anti-imperialist projects by portraying them as uncivilized threats, reinforce Western cultural hegemony, and deploy humanitarian morality as ideological weaponry to justify disproportionate violence. This pattern is historically consistent. The 1994 prize awarded jointly to Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat legitimized the Oslo Accords that subordinated Palestinian national liberation to an administration dependent on international aid, obscuring the anti-imperialist nature of the Palestinian cause and paving the institutional path toward the current genocide. Barack Obama received the prize in 2009 months after assuming office, only to consolidate hybrid warfare through drone assassinations across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, oversee the destruction of Libya, and expand military bases across Africa and the Middle East. The award to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in 2016 conferred international legitimacy on a peace process preceded by systematic assassination operations against FARC leadership, ensuring implementation of agreements that preserved oligarchic control while opening the country to transnational capital.

The timing of Machado's prize proves equally revealing. As Norwegian peace organizations protested outside the December 2025 ceremony, over eighty Latin Americans had already been killed in what four United Nations bodies characterized as "extrajudicial executions and violations of international law" conducted by US military forces in the Caribbean under the pretext of counter-narcotics operations. Machado endorsed this framework, reinforcing Trump administration accusations that Venezuela constitutes a "narco-terrorist" state requiring military intervention. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom condemned the award, stating that "when the prize is given to a politician who supports military interference and actions contrary to international law, it breaks with the very purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize." Yet this apparent contradiction dissolves when we recognize that the Prize's actual purpose has never been advancing peace but rather legitimizing the violence necessary to maintain imperial hegemony.

If the international community fails to recognize and resist these patterns, the same humanitarian rhetoric that justified destroying Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—while systematically infiltrating UN agencies for intelligence and targeting purposes—will continue to be deployed against any nation that dares to chart an independent course. The military abduction of Venezuela's president, celebrated by Netanyahu and laundered through a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to his ideological ally, demonstrates that this is not hypothetical future danger but present reality. What unfolds today in Caracas prepares the ground for what imperial strategists envision for Beijing. The systematic corruption of human rights discourse serves as preparation for what could become the most dangerous imperial confrontations in human history, making the restoration of genuine humanitarian principles and institutional independence an urgent necessity for a shared future of humankind, coupled with global peace and justice. 

BCR: However, observing the successive conflicts in recent years, it is evident that the international community's receptivity to this rhetoric is steadily waning. From the "War on Terror" to the "War on Drugs," American narratives are becoming increasingly ineffective. How do you interpret this shift in perception?

To understand the declining effectiveness of the "War on Drugs" narrative, we must first historicize it within the broader arc of imperial propaganda that has justified US interventionism across the Global South since the Cold War. The "War on Terror" and the "War on Drugs" are not separate campaigns but sequential iterations of the same imperial strategy: the manufacture of abstract enemies—terror, drugs, immigration, corruption—to legitimize military, economic, and political intrusion into sovereign nations that resist US hegemony.

The "War on Terror" that emerged after September 11, 2001 did not create something new; it globalized and intensified patterns already established through the "War on Drugs" since the Reagan administration. Both operate through identical mechanisms: the racialization of populations as inherently threatening; the militarization of what were previously understood as social or public health issues; the deployment of international institutions to provide multilateral legitimacy for fundamentally unilateral imperial objectives; and the generation of profit through destruction, incarceration, and the elimination of surplus populations rendered disposable by neoliberal capitalism. The criminalization of drug use that Nixon initiated in 1971 functioned as a domestic mechanism of racial control; its internationalization through agencies like the DEA extended this logic globally, transforming sovereign states into targets of imperial policing. When the "War on Terror" arrived, the infrastructure—ideological, institutional, military—was already in place.

The world can now see through these narratives because the historical praxis of empire reveals itself with unmistakable clarity. The pattern is too consistent to ignore. We have witnessed, over nearly two years, the worst crime of this century unfold in Gaza—a genocide livestreamed to the world in which Israeli forces have massacred over 64,000 children while the United States provides the bombs, the diplomatic cover, and the funding. And they continue to do so. The contrast could not be starker or more instructive: Donald Trump embraces and celebrates Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Muhammad al-Jolani) a designated terrorist—now president of Syria, while kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and labelling him a "drug kingpin". The terrorist becomes a statesman; the elected president becomes a criminal. The categories of "terrorist" and "drug trafficker" have nothing to do with actual terrorism or drug trafficking—they are imperial designations applied to those who resist and withheld from those who comply.

Afghanistan's opium production decreased ten-fold under the Taliban before 2001, then increased thirty-fold under US occupation—and dropped 95% after the US withdrawal when the Taliban banned poppy cultivation. Venezuela, whose contribution to the global drug trade is marginal according to UN reports, is accused of drug trafficking while Wall Street banks launder cartel money with impunity—Wachovia Bank financed the transport of hundreds of millions of dollars of cocaine, and not a single executive faced prosecution. When JP Morgan's cocaine-laden ships are seized in Philadelphia, only crew members go to prison. The propaganda collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

The global majority—particularly in the Global South—has accumulated too much historical experience of these interventions to accept the narratives at face value. Latin Americans witnessed Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative pour billions into militarization without reducing drug flows while escalating violence against civilians. They watched their region become the most violent in the world—eight of the ten countries with the highest homicide rates—as a direct consequence of the "War on Drugs." Peoples across West Asia and North Africa experienced the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan under the banner of the "War on Terror," watching prosperous societies reduced to rubble and chaos. The consistency of destruction, the predictability of outcomes, the transparent alignment between intervention and resource extraction or geopolitical positioning—all of this has produced what we might call an empirical education in imperial methods.

BCR: Does this imply that resistance to US interventionism has become a consensus of sorts within the Global South? What impact will this have on the current and future international landscape?

Does this represent a fundamental crisis of legitimacy? Yes—but we must understand the historical moment we inhabit to grasp what this crisis means and does not mean.

We have entered a period of historical acceleration. This is a pivotal juncture unlike what came before—dense, turbulent, with developments accelerating toward explosion. This is how great transformations unfold in history: the elements of disintegration accumulate, empires enter their senescent phase, and they begin to strike wildly—north and south, east and west—without rules, without restraint, without the pretense of legitimacy they once maintained.

Trump's recent acts were perfectly clear: "I don't need international law." This is not a slip of the tongue. It is an official announcement that the existing international order offers no protection, a complete exposure of the fiction that UN mechanisms or Western-led institutions will defend the oppressed against imperial violence. Anyone who still bets on the current system—on international law as it exists, on institutions dominated by the very powers committing atrocities, on the United States or its allies appointing themselves defenders of the weak—such a person lives in dangerous illusion. The existing order was never designed to constrain empire; it was designed to legitimate it. What Trump announced is simply what was always true, now stated openly. When empires turn savage in their twilight, colonization and genocide become their instruments—and the institutions meant to prevent such horrors become instruments of permission.

What is crucial to understand is that the US and Israel have not responded to their declining legitimacy with paralysis or retreat. They have responded with internal consolidation. Recognizing that the old mechanisms of consent are failing, they have restructured themselves to operate through coercion alone—and coercion requires unified command, not fractured institutions debating legality and optics.

Trump grasped this with the instinct of a gangster, if not a strategist. He systematically marginalized every institution that might constrain executive action—the Pentagon's caution, the State Department's diplomatic considerations, the intelligence community's procedural objections. What liberals mourned as the destruction of democratic norms was, from the standpoint of imperial consolidation, a necessary clearing of obstacles. The "deep state" that Trump railed against was not a conspiracy but simply the accumulated institutional residue of an earlier hegemonic phase, when the US could afford deliberation because its dominance was secure. That phase is over. Trump's contribution was to align the machinery of American power with the requirements of decline-phase imperialism: act fast, act hard, and do not let internal dissent slow the process.

Netanyahu executed the parallel operation within the Zionist entity. After October 7th, he faced massive internal opposition—protests demanding his removal, military and intelligence officials questioning his leadership, families of hostages demanding negotiation. He ignored all of it. He sidelined the security establishment that had failed to prevent the resistance operation, neutralized political rivals, and concentrated decision-making in a war cabinet that answered to no institutional check. The genocide that followed was only possible because Netanyahu had first resolved the internal contradictions that might have restrained it. The lesson is straightforward: those who consolidate internally can act externally without limit.

This is why the crisis of legitimacy, though real, has not translated into diminished imperial capacity. The narratives are failing—but narratives were tools of the consent phase. The pretexts are exposed—but pretexts mattered when the empire sought approval. International public opinion has turned decisively against the US and Israel—but public opinion is a constraint only for those who still operate through hegemonic mechanisms requiring popular acceptance. The Global South majority has stopped believing the propaganda. And the empire has stopped caring whether they believe it.

The US bombed Venezuela and faced no consequences. It continues to fund and arm Israel's genocide regardless of ICJ rulings, UN resolutions, or the documented horror broadcast daily to billions of people. Trump declares "I don't need international law" and proceeds to act on that declaration. The machinery of empire, having shed the institutional constraints of its hegemonic phase, now operates on pure coercive capacity. It does not require belief. It requires only the absence of effective counterforce.

The world sees through the lie. But seeing through the lie, by itself, does not stop the bombs.

BCR: Indeed, we can observe that as the old pretenses gradually lose their legitimacy, the United States no longer attempts to conceal its true intentions. Many characterize contemporary international politics as having entered an era where "might makes right," with no effective international order to counterbalance or constrain such unchecked power. What is your view on this? Will this be the central axis of the international landscape in the coming years?

To answer these important questions, we would like to draw on two important Marxist thinkers. First, Antonio Gramsci's observation that "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters" captures precisely the transitional crisis underlying the apparent regression to "might makes right." At the same time, Xi Jinping's words on V-day, emphasizing that "mankind is faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum" incarnate the dialectical reality of our historical moment—where these opposites (peace and war) exist in unity, interpenetrate, and transform into each other under specific material conditions.

The apparent breakdown of international institutions actually represents the emergence of a primary contradiction between two fundamentally opposed modes of social reproduction. US-led imperialism has evolved into a system of "accumulation by waste" where systematic destruction becomes capitalism's primary form of value creation and political control under monopoly finance conditions. This dying order cannot simply yield to multipolarity; it intensifies its commitment to organized violence as the only remaining mechanism for maintaining hegemonic control. The apparent stability of Western societies requires continuous destabilization of peripheral regions—the "peaceful" international order celebrated by liberal institutionalists is rooted in the longue durée of Western-led genocides from the Americas to West Asia, and the weaponization of humanitarian discourse to justify imperial intervention. “Peace,” according to the dictates of the Western empire, necessitates the material conditions for permanent war in the Global South, revealing how these supposed opposites transform into each other through the logic of accumulation by waste. The "choice" between peace and war is not a simple binary but reflects how these opposites already coexist within the current global system.

The contradiction between imperial waste production and socialist construction manifests most acutely in regions like the Middle East, where both logics intersect violently. Gaza represents the crystallization of accumulation by waste in its most concentrated form, while the broader Axis of Resistance creates conditions for heightened anti-imperial consciousness among semi-proletarianized populations. This dialectical relationship explains why prolonged conflicts serve multiple functions—they resolve capitalist overproduction crises through military consumption, eliminate potentially resistant populations, destroy competing national economies, and create new markets for reconstruction, all while generating the very contradictions that produce fractured resistance movements.

Gramsci's "monsters" manifest precisely when neither the old nor new order can achieve decisive victory. Today's monsters include the increasingly glaring corruption of international institutions where UN mechanisms (as discussed earlier) become vehicles for intelligence gathering and targeting operations. Humanitarian organizations become instrumentalized for military purposes, and human rights discourse becomes weaponized against emerging seekers of autonomy against imperial dominance. 

The apparent regression to "might makes right" actually signals the exhaustion of traditional imperial mechanisms rather than their triumph. Unable to maintain dominance through economic integration or political legitimacy, the imperial system resorts increasingly to direct violence and systematic destruction. Xi's emphasis on choice reflects the reality that people’s agency operates within these dialectical contradictions rather than above them. It further indicates that this intensification generates its own contradictions, creating material conditions where the choice for peace, dialogue, and win-win cooperation becomes not just morally preferable but historically necessary for human survival.

The synthesis required involves the convergence of China's demonstrated capacity for alternative development with the organizational power of popular movements throughout the Global South. This represents neither pure peace nor pure war, but a transformative process where struggle itself creates new possibilities for regenerative social relations. Rather than permanent regression, we confront a civilizational wager whose outcome remains undetermined. Imperial forces will likely intensify their commitment to genocide and violence as traditional exploitation mechanisms reach their limits. Yet understanding peace and war as dialectical opposites reveals why this transitional period appears so chaotic, because it contains unprecedented possibilities for systematic transformation beyond the logic of organized destruction. 

The ultimate question confronting our historical moment is whether transformative forces can intervene decisively before imperial waste production destroys the material foundations upon which human civilization depends. 

BCR: Turning specifically to the Global South, we can observe another trend. On the one hand, these nations are often able to voice their opposition to these injustices more forcefully than major Western powers—as evidenced by the stances of leaders from South Africa, Cuba, and Colombia. Yet on the other hand, the Global South's actual capacity to shape the situation remains very limited.

This contradiction—between the Global South's moral clarity and its material incapacity—is the central political problem of our historical moment. It is not enough to see through the lie; what matters is the capacity to act on that clarity. The gap between recognition and effective action is where the peoples of the Global South remain trapped, and closing this gap is the urgent task before us.

We must begin by acknowledging what this gap reveals. South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice represented an act of extraordinary moral courage, drawing directly on the historical experience of apartheid to name what is unfolding in Gaza. Brazil under Lula has recalled ambassadors, compared Israeli actions to the Holocaust, and consistently condemned the genocide. Colombia under Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and declared solidarity with Palestine. Mexico has joined the ICJ case. These are not insignificant acts—they demonstrate that a substantial portion of humanity refuses to accept the normalization of genocide, that the moral consensus the imperial powers once commanded has fractured irreparably.

Yet these principled positions have not stopped a single bomb from falling on Gaza. They have not ended the genocide, halted the starvation, or forced the opening of humanitarian corridors. The contradiction is stark: the Global South speaks, and the empire acts as if it heard nothing.

Why does this gap exist? Because the forces that oppose empire have not restructured themselves for the historical moment in the way that empire has restructured itself.

As we discussed earlier, Trump and Netanyahu understood that you cannot wage existential struggle with a fragmented interior. They resolved internal contradictions, marginalized opposition, and consolidated decision-making structures capable of acting without restraint. The Global South has not undertaken equivalent restructuring. Progressive governments operate within inherited state structures designed for dependency. Regional institutions remain weak or have collapsed—UNASUR is defunct, ALBA weakened, the African Union remains constrained by neo-colonial economic arrangements. National bourgeoisies, even when nominally progressive, maintain ties to transnational capital that limit how far they can push. The result is moral positioning without strategic capacity.

But the problem runs deeper still. The Global South is not merely failing to unite—it is being actively fragmented from within.

As the Arab Marxist, Adel Samara, argues, we are witnessing what can be understood as a third wave of nationalism, but unlike the first wave (European bourgeois nationalism that consolidated nation-states while colonizing the world) or the second wave (anti-colonial liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century), this third wave is an imperial manufacturing project designed to shatter the states that emerged from decolonization. The mechanism is precise: imperial powers cultivate alliances with comprador bourgeoisies—parasitic local elites whose class interests align with external domination rather than national development—and deploy them to fragment existing states along ethnic, sectarian, or regional lines. The result is the proliferation of dependent micro-entities that function as permanent spearheads against their mother states and regions: projects of endless war disguised as self-determination.

Look at what is unfolding across the Arab world and the Horn of Africa. The UAE—an entity ruled by families whose wealth derives entirely from petroleum rents and whose strategic orientation is entirely subordinate to US and Israeli interests—has become a primary agent of regional disintegration. In Yemen, the Emirates armed and funded southern separatists to fracture a country already devastated by Saudi bombardment, calculating that a unified Yemen poses threats their fragmented client cannot. In Sudan, Emirati support for the Rapid Support Forces has transformed what began as political crisis into civilizational catastrophe, with millions displaced and the country's future as a unified state increasingly uncertain. Now, in Somaliland, we witness the same logic: the recognition of a breakaway entity serves no purpose except to weaken Somalia, establish another node of imperial presence on the Red Sea, and demonstrate that African sovereignty means nothing when Gulf money and Western approval align against it.

Syria represents perhaps the most comprehensive application of this fragmentation strategy. A coalition of Arab regimes, Gulf monarchies, Western powers, Turkey, and Israel spent over a decade funding, arming, and providing diplomatic cover for forces dedicated to destroying the Syrian state. The installation of Ahmed al-Sharaa—a figure with documented al-Qaeda leadership credentials—as president, with immediate Israeli expansion into Syrian territory and the systematic destruction of Syrian military infrastructure, reveals the objective with perfect clarity: not the liberation of Syrians but the elimination of a state that maintained an independent regional posture. The Syrian Arab Republic lived by the slogan 'Unity, Freedom and Socialism'—three words that explain why it had to be destroyed, and three words that name exactly what the Global South must now defend.

Regional disintegration is the greatest strategic threat this defense must confront. Every successful fragmentation—South Sudan, Kosovo, potentially Somaliland, the de facto partition of Libya, the fracturing of Yemen—weakens the collective capacity of the periphery to resist imperial dictation. Each new micro-state becomes dependent from birth, its comprador leadership owing its existence entirely to external patrons, its economy structured for extraction rather than development, its military positioned against neighboring states rather than external threats. The periphery increasingly destroys itself through narrow-minded elites drunk on the vanity of leadership, serving imperial interests while their populations pay the price. 

BCR: As you mentioned, breaking free from dependency is already an arduous task subjectively; meanwhile, objectively speaking, those nations that manage to persist in resistance often become the primary targets of sanctions or attacks. Faced with such a contradiction, where, in your view, does the key lie for the Global South to break through this current predicament?

Iran and Venezuela stand as acute examples of this challenge—two states that have maintained independent postures and now face the full weight of imperial assault. Iran confronts an open campaign aimed at regime collapse through economic strangulation, social destabilization, Israeli assassination operations, and direct American threats. The Axis of Resistance demonstrated what organized counter-imperial force can achieve, but this network has suffered devastating blows—the assassination of Nasrallah, the weakening of Hezbollah, the fall of Syria. The infrastructure of resistance is eroding, and Iran has yet to reconstitute its strategic posture. Venezuela, having built the most significant anti-imperialist project in the Western Hemisphere, now faces direct military aggression—associates of its president kidnapped, its fishermen bombed under narco-trafficking pretexts, its sovereignty treated as optional. The Bolivarian Revolution showed that another path was possible; whether that path can survive is now being tested in real time. Both face the same structural problem: you cannot confront an imperial assault of this magnitude with internal fragmentation or half-measures. But neither can you confront it alone. Regional unity is the precondition for survival. 

The nations of the Global South must revive the spirit of Bandung—but this time with alignment, not non-alignment. The original Non-Aligned Movement reflected a specific historical moment when maneuvering between superpowers offered space for newly independent states. That moment has passed. Today, non-alignment means alignment with empire by default, because imperial power does not respect neutrality—it exploits it. What is required is alignment of the Global South with itself, against the Western capitalist-imperialist system, in a new internationalism that pools material capacity rather than merely coordinating rhetorical positions.

This new alignment must begin with institutional rupture. Why does the United Nations remain headquartered in New York, where the United States can kidnap any leader, any activist, any voice of resistance who sets foot on American soil? Why does the International Court of Justice sit in The Hague, in a NATO country, in the heart of the imperial metropole? These arrangements made sense—if they ever did—in the immediate post-war period when the illusion of a rules-based order had not yet been fully exposed. That illusion is now dead. The Global South must demand the relocation of international institutions to the Global South, or—more radically and perhaps more necessarily—must begin constructing parallel institutions whose constitutions are not written by Western powers and whose operations are not subject to Western veto.

China is doing its part. The Belt and Road Initiative represents the most significant infrastructure of alternative development in human history. The Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative—these are not merely diplomatic formulations but concrete frameworks for a world organized around construction rather than destruction, dialogue rather than dictation, mutual benefit rather than imperial extraction. China has demonstrated that rapid development outside Western tutelage is possible, that a civilization can modernize without subordinating itself to the Atlantic powers. But China cannot do this alone. The Global South must undertake the difficult work of delinking from imperial financial systems—reducing dependence on the dollar, building alternative payment mechanisms, deepening South-South trade that bypasses Western-controlled chokepoints. BRICS represents a beginning, but only a beginning; it must be developed further or replaced with formations capable of more decisive action. 

But states will not do this on their own. Too many ruling classes across the Global South have made their peace with empire—they are the comprador bourgeoisies who profit from dependency and who will not act unless forced to act. This is why popular mobilization is essential: to pressure states captured by comprador interests, to defend progressive governments against imperial destabilization, to create the political conditions in which alignment becomes possible. Popular mobilization against empire must emerge on all levels—from the streets to the state, from the local to the regional—because history does not wait for those who are not ready.

Rosa Luxemburg, elaborating Marx, posed the choice starkly: socialism or barbarism. That choice is no longer abstract. We are watching barbarism unfold without its mask—in Gaza, in the Caribbean, in the systematic fragmentation of states that dare to maintain independence. The twentieth century proved that confronting colonialism was possible; the twenty-first century offers only two outcomes—victorious resistance or total surrender. There is no gray area, and surrender is the defeat of humanity itself.The answer depends entirely on whether the Global South can transform moral clarity into material capacity, rhetorical solidarity into institutional rupture, and scattered resistance into coordinated counter-power.