Are we entering the age of conditional sovereignty?

Recent developments in US-Venezuela relations under Trump 2.0, including attacks on vessels framed as counter-narcotics operations, strikes on Venezuelan territory and the detention of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, have reignited debate over whether the western hemisphere is entering a new phase of US power projection. 

A more compelling interpretation centres on a marked shift in Washington’s approach to Latin America. Under Trump 2.0, longstanding regional problems are increasingly mobilised as instruments of power, reflecting changes in strategic interpretation rather than in regional conditions themselves.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Latin America occupied a relatively limited place within US foreign policy considerations. Even during Donald Trump’s first term, the region was not treated as a strategic theatre in its own right. Trump 1.0 focused largely on campaign-driven objectives, such as renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), border security, and immigration enforcement.

Trump 2.0 represents a marked shift rather than a continuation of earlier practice. Within roughly a year, Latin America received a higher level of strategic attention, and the instruments applied to the region became more explicitly securitised and militarised. Crucially, this shift does not reflect a sudden deterioration of regional conditions. Drug trafficking networks, governance challenges and transnational crime have long been present. Nor is it new that Latin American states maintain relations with actors beyond the US; this reflects the ordinary condition of sovereign states rather than an exceptional development.

What has changed is Washington’s interpretation of these realities, and the degree to which they are now incorporated into a broader strategic approach that has the effect of asserting power.

Prior to Trump 2.0, US policy toward Latin America largely treated regional challenges as issues to be managed rather than strategically mobilised. Over the past year, this orientation has shifted in a way that is visible across multiple policy instruments.

Since August, US actions targeting Venezuela have followed an escalating pattern, including increasing the bounty on President Maduro, deploying naval assets on a sustained basis in the Caribbean, attacking alleged drug-trafficking vessels and detaining oil tankers under enforcement rationales. These actions were not isolated incidents, but components of a cumulative process that gradually converged into a more force-intensive military orientation.

This trajectory was formalised in the December release of the new US National Security Strategy, which explicitly elevated the western hemisphere as a core foreign policy priority and emphasised what the document described as the restoration of “American preeminence” in the region. Against this backdrop, the 3 January 2026 strikes on Venezuelan territory and the capture of the Venezuelan president, despite their abrupt execution and timing, were not accidental outcomes of ad hoc decision-making.

In policy terms, Trump 2.0 marks a shift toward practices that establish new precedents in the exercise of external power. Military force, domestic judicial mechanisms and control over strategic resources are no longer treated as separate instruments, but are combined in ways that blur the boundaries between coercion, jurisdiction and governance.

The issue lies in the assumption that political outcomes within a sovereign state can be determined from the outside. Once sovereignty is treated as provisional and legal boundaries flexible, the analytical focus necessarily shifts away from questions of policy choice toward questions of order and legitimacy — who legitimately holds power and how political order is maintained.

Actions undertaken through coercive capacity may produce immediate effects, yet they are grounded in the overriding of sovereignty and the disregard for established legal constraints. This condition is not incidental. It defines the approach itself and shapes its political consequences. Authority exercised through the violation of sovereign authority alters the relationship between power and order, not only within the affected state but across the wider region.

China’s relationship with Latin America has deep historical roots and has expanded steadily since the early 21st century across trade, investment, finance, infrastructure and people-to-people exchanges. During the Obama administration, senior US officials, including the president and those responsible for western hemisphere affairs, publicly indicated that China’s engagement in the region was understood as beneficial rather than threatening. At that time, China’s growing presence was not treated as a zero-sum challenge to US interests and was instead framed in relation to broader regional well-being.

The current shift therefore reflects less a response to any concrete change in China’s role in the region than a transformation in US strategic perception. Sensitivity toward “external actors” in Latin America has been significantly amplified and absorbed into a securitised narrative, pushing US policy toward more radical instruments.

China’s relations with Venezuela and the region more broadly have not undergone a fundamental policy reorientation. China’s most recent policy paper on Latin America reiterates longstanding principles of mutual benefit, development-oriented cooperation, and respect for sovereignty. While the securitisation of US policy is reshaping the environment in which China engages with the region, these effects are subject to adjustment and do not inevitably lead to confrontation.

What ultimately stands out in the current escalation is not only the use of force, but the manner in which sovereignty itself has been treated as negotiable. Latin America is not a strategic vacuum, nor a space awaiting external management. It is a region shaped by a long history of colonial domination and repeated intervention, a history that gives sovereignty and political autonomy a meaning extending well beyond formal legal doctrine.

For Latin American states, sovereignty is not an abstract principle but a lived historical experience that shapes perceptions of power, legitimacy, and external influence. Actions that disregard this context risk producing consequences that extend well beyond any single case. They unsettle regional norms and revive historical memories that many societies have sought, with difficulty, to transcend. 

In this sense, the question raised by recent US actions is not only about Venezuela, nor even about strategic competition in the western hemisphere. It concerns whether sovereignty remains a meaningful boundary in international politics, or whether it can once again be overridden by claims of necessity, security or exceptionalism. How this question is resolved will shape not only the future of US–Latin America relations, but the credibility of the hemispheric order itself.

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