When read chronologically rather than rhetorically, a coherent strategic architecture becomes visible: deny permissive hemispheric nodes to rival coalitions, institutionalize regional alignment, and pressure hinge states that facilitate cross-theater coordination — all in service of constraining China’s ability to convert economic penetration into geopolitical access. What appears episodic in isolation begins to resemble geostrategic sequencing.

The Venezuela campaign illustrates the logic of node denial. The 2019 recognition of Juan Guaidó was not merely symbolic diplomacy; it reframed the Maduro regime as a sanctionable infrastructure rather than a conventional sovereign interlocutor.

The subsequent expansion of sanctions to encompass Venezuelan state assets and penalize third-party enablers transformed the case from targeted punishment into perimeter enforcement. This mattered because Venezuela had evolved into a permissive geopolitical platform — financially intertwined with China, diplomatically synchronized with Iran, and operationally useful to actors seeking sanctions resilience.

From a structural perspective, the issue was not regime change per se but hemispheric denial: preventing the consolidation of forward operating nodes through which external powers could embed durable influence within the Americas.

That logic aligns with a longer historical pattern. The Monroe Doctrine asserted exclusion in declaratory form; Cold War hemispheric policy operationalized it through alliance management and regime stabilization. What distinguishes the present iteration is the recognition that twenty-first-century penetration occurs less through expeditionary militaries than through infrastructure, finance, and regulatory entrenchment.

Craftily, China’s expansion across Latin America has been infrastructural rather than theatrical — port concessions, telecommunications architecture, lithium extraction, sovereign lending, and long-term energy contracts. These instruments create embedded dependencies that can mature into diplomatic leverage and strategic access. The concern surrounding Chinese control stakes in major logistics nodes such as Peru’s Chancay port reflects this anxiety precisely: infrastructure becomes optionality, and optionality becomes leverage.

Against that backdrop, hemispheric presidential diplomacy and renewed regional coordination take on strategic weight. They are not nostalgic revivalism but institutional hardening — an attempt to reduce Beijing’s depth of penetration before economic presence translates into geopolitical durability. Alignment management, in this view, is preventive rather than reactive. It seeks to shape the regulatory and political environment in which external capital operates, thereby constraining the long-term conversion of trade into influence.

Only after hemispheric consolidation does the Iran dimension resolve analytically. Tehran functions less as a primary systemic competitor than as a connective hinge within a broader revisionist constellation. The withdrawal from the JCPOA, the reimposition of layered sanctions, and the unprecedented designation of the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization collectively aimed to constrict Iran’s financial and operational bandwidth.

While framed publicly in nuclear or regional security terms, sustained economic coercion also strains the connective tissue linking adversarial actors. Iran’s discounted hydrocarbon flows to China under sanctions pressure, and its coordination with Russia across theaters, illustrate how hinge states facilitate cross-regional resilience. Pressure, even absent regime collapse, diverts resources inward and complicates coalition durability.

A hierarchy of threat prioritization becomes discernible. China represents the primary systemic competitor due to industrial scale, technological ambition, financial reach, and capacity for long-term structural influence. Russia remains disruptive but economically narrower. Iran is destabilizing yet materially constrained. Strategy under such conditions demands sequencing rather than simultaneity. Concentration of effort in the near abroad reduces strategic exposure elsewhere and denies rivals efficient forward platforms within the United States’ immediate geopolitical environment.

This produces a controversial but analytically coherent proposition: the Western Hemisphere is treated as existential terrain, while other theaters are competitive terrain. Classical realism permits calibrated ambiguity in distant arenas if dominance within the core sphere is secured. Preventing durable Chinese entrenchment in the Americas therefore takes precedence over maximal confrontation in secondary theaters. The logic is not abandonment but prioritization under constraint.

What emerges is not spectacle but compression. Deny permissive nodes. Harden institutional alignment. Raise the transaction costs of adversarial coordination. Grand strategy is geometric: it shapes the corridors, access points, and political-economic conditions under which competitors translate economic mass into geopolitical leverage.

Thus, if China’s ascent cannot be halted outright, it can be narrowed, made more frictional, and deprived of reliable hemispheric anchor points. Contain the hemisphere, and you contain the leverage. That is the new world order.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)