Today the political, dialectical, and circular spectrum that animated Western democracies after the Second World War is unraveling—the spectrum that once guaranteed a discursive pause to manage crises, however severe they might be: the dispute between left and right.
And it does not unravel in order to give way to a “new order,” for Francis Fukuyama’s liberal fantasy¹ was little more than an academic advertisement meant to moralize a global capitalism destined to build bridges from the Federal Reserve to China, while preserving the ideological disputes that the American political scientist had declared finished between left and right, embalmed as a substrate in the showcase of the triumphant market. In Hegelian terms, this would amount to a new Geist, a universal spirit. Neither one thing nor the other. History did not come to an end, nor did liberal democracy and its “free market” dissolve the dynamics of Western power, which persist in part as a centripetal model—namely, the cyclical reformulation of the Roman Empire.
When one speaks of Empire, moral alarms automatically sound. In academic circles, this triggers a set of commonplace ideas that are as superficial as they are highly profitable. We will not delve here into the conceptualization of Empire as a political-organizational category, for besides being contentious it is deeply contaminated by the false ideologization that Lenin² imposed on the concept, transforming Empire into “imperialism”—that is, a mixture of partisan morality, historical falsification, and the demonization of capital. Still, it is worth identifying a few characteristic elements of Empire in order to understand the current political condition of the West.
By Empire we mean political power exercised over a vast territorial extension. Such hegemony may fluctuate between economic supremacy, military dominance, or cultural influence—or, more generally, an organic combination of these traits. This mixture produces periods of rapid expansion and stability, provided that imperial influence succeeds in integrating conquered spaces while preserving certain local identities. The paradigmatic example: Rome.
Empires have never been angelic formations; no human political organization has ever been so. Violence, of course, has been employed insofar as extraction has been more or less aggressive, as seen historically in an empire of commercial exploitation (the British Empire) or in an empire that generated civilization and stable cultural hybridity (the Spanish Empire). Having outlined these characteristics—necessarily simplified for reasons of scope—we may now proceed to the point.
GEOPOLITICS, OR THE INVISIBLE BORDERS OF REAL POWER
Although Halford John Mackinder was not the originator of the term geopolitics, his Heartland Theory, or “pivot area,” represents one of the most graphic and compelling syntheses of the political use of geography. It is no coincidence that his ideas about Eurasia were later adopted by geostrategists and advisers to the United States government, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski. Geopolitics does not prescribe moral action based on the political use of geography; rather, it describes and establishes the geographical limits of the economic, territorial, and political incentives that move real power—power that possesses the capacity for violent coercion in order to impose its structural contents and its “worldview.”³
Political ideologies are illusory packages, discursive entertainments that generally obstruct critical access to the real movements of financial and political power. Such power tends to operate beneath grand ideological proclamations, changing labels while preserving permanent structural operations.
Political modernity and its process of secularization allowed the gradual attenuation of imperial weakening by turning the nation-state into a new administrative vehicle by the eighteenth century, even as sovereignty rooted in the Peace of Westphalia remained a historical reference. The French Revolution, in turn, projected a novel political archetype: the aspiration to universal projection grounded in the singularity of a territory legitimized through a new politico-ideological niche—“the national.” Even so, imperial identity does not vanish. Nations assemble themselves from imperial remnants and assume their imaginaries of prestige and historical projection.
Napoleonic centralization, even without the temporal longevity required to produce a stable imperial form, reactivated imperial behavior. The subsequent interstate system shaped after the Napoleonic wars—underwritten by London’s financial predominance as the central articulator of economic dominance and political influence—continued to operate according to an imperial logic. This logic later translated into territorial contraction combined with accelerated mercantile and extractive expansion: colonialism.
The Balkanization of Hispano-America, paradoxically, propelled the emergence of the great hegemon that assumed the historical transition of the imperial cycle—the translatio imperii: the United States of America.
Up to this point, and in broad strokes, the aim has been to demonstrate the persistence of the imperial model, which prevents power vacuums and constitutes itself through prestige over time and cultural inheritance. This inheritance runs from the Roman Empire—historically resurrected by the Franks, the Germanic peoples, Christianity as a cultural ethos, and successive designs of European unity shattered by Protestantism yet enduring across time. Geopolitics merely traces these historical and spatial lines in order to reveal the underlying nuclei of power, which cannot be critically accessed through moralism or emotionalism without failing in the attempt.
IMPERIAL MALAISE
On January 3rd, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was removed in a prophylactic operation carried out by the United States Army. A proto-totalitarian regime—the chavismo—twenty-eight years in duration, animated and organized by the totalitarian regime that has ruled Cuba for sixty-seven years: Castroism. This event evidences a geopolitical movement of imperial re-demarcation, in which the United States withdraws in order to rearticulate itself. In other words, it marks a phase of decline driven by economic erosion resulting from persistent, elephantine indebtedness—born of industrial dismantling in favor of unchecked credit expansion and the transfer of supply chains to China.
China, with a model seemingly unintelligible to Western observers, has constructed a system of low-grade yet persistent and effective economic imperialism: Made in China. As a result, the reaffirmation of regional power boundaries compels the United States to reassert its military and extractive muscle in order to sustain a hegemonic structure eroded by historical time.
In the face of this, both left and right demonstrate their total exhaustion, expressed in their inability to comprehend this geopolitical movement, which reflects the pragmatism of an imperial entity seeking its own continuity.
Confronted with this fact, and driven by the rancid ideological stubbornness of the Cold War, the left revives Lenin’s ideological effigy: imperialism, as previously noted. As if the illusory virginity of sovereignty imagined by the French Enlightenment—its “noble savage” deposited on this side of the Atlantic—had finally been violated. Sovereignty and normative frameworks are designed by those who monopolize force, and if they must be broken in pursuit of their own interests, so be it: Realpolitik. This disillusionment emerges from an archetype of national autonomies that were always mediated, ever since Creole elites—seduced by Enlightenment siren songs—chose to dismantle Hispanidad and fragment it into disastrous republics. This fragmentation accelerated the rise of the northern hegemon and fixed a sense of frustration and historical displacement among Hispano-American elites. The left feeds on this resentment, characteristic of peoples who orbit more powerful ones.
The right, for its part, chants libertarian slogans and proclaims the superiority of a salon liberalism whose emblematic victory is embodied by Javier Milei. This paradigm is nothing more than the marketing of economic freedom, incapable of doing anything other than widening the chasm of chronic debt via IMF–FED mechanisms, further mortgaging societies’ short-term futures. When the problem is structural, ideological explanations merely decorate fragile triumphalism.
“Imperial malaise” now courses through the hemisphere, inflaming mutual prejudices fixed at the end of the nineteenth century between Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic elites, when one empire died and another took its place. There was no reflection on this historical transition. Hispanidad internalized guilt and deepened its defeat by importing noxious ideologies that entrenched Europe’s most archaic collectivism, today embodied in the Spanish case. The meteoric rise of the United States did indeed consolidate a global empire, but its speed led it to sacrifice productive robustness in favor of excessive speculative growth. Today the current empire contracts in a movement of rearticulation that prioritizes structural order over freedom.
This should not be conflictive if the aggrieved nations of Hispano-America were willing to reflect on their own responsibilities and if their corrupt political elites did not cripple their capacity to exploit, to their advantage, the power of the reigning historical empire.
For the moment, the Venezuelan people will have an opportunity to rebuild the devastation wrought by socialism, while resource management will be organized by transnational corporations and investment funds. Rather than lamenting an inherently nonexistent sovereignty, they should seize the historical opportunity to grow prosperous once again, for this is the only path to stability and prosperity. “Imperial malaise” is the preferred excuse when societies refuse to assume responsibility for their own calamities.
Notes
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Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Planeta Publishing, 1992.
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The term “imperialism” had been used earlier by John A. Hobson in 1902, but it was Lenin who gave it its most ideological and negative meaning in communist propaganda with Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism(1916).
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The only global mercantile revolution that has not unleashed a preceding or subsequent armed conflict has been China’s commercial globalization, facilitated by Western exhaustion derived from political errancy and industrial dismantling in favor of a debt-based system.
Image: Alexander’s Battle at Issus (1528–1529), by Albrecht Altdorfer.
