By Prince Kapone – Nov 14, 2025
Operation Southern Spear is not a drug war—it is the first open military strike of a new U.S. doctrine: puncture the Caribbean, penetrate the continent, and weld the Americas into a captive bloc of power in a multipolar world.
The Point of the Spear: Operation Southern Spear and the Recolonization of the Americas
For years, the United States has moved like a desperate empire stumbling toward a familiar refuge. It threatened Panama over the Canal. It escalated sanctions on Cuba. It promised to unleash a “war on narco-terrorists” in Mexico. It bled Argentina through financial coercion. It sharpened its attacks on Venezuela. It even renamed the Gulf of Mexico as if a cartographic tantrum could rewrite geography itself. To most observers, these were disconnected episodes of bluster and bullying—another round of Trumpist excess, a string of chaotic impulses. But there was always a pattern beneath the noise, a deliberate architecture taking shape in slow, brutal strokes. And with the announcement of Operation Southern Spear, that architecture finally reveals itself in the open.The name is not an accident. A spear is not fired broadly; it is thrust into a single point to break open the body. It is an instrument of incision, a weapon designed to puncture and then widen the wound until the whole is compromised. Washington did not choose this symbol lightly. The architects of U.S. power understand perfectly what they are doing: Southern Spear is the tip of a larger campaign, the point of entry into the continent itself. The Caribbean is merely the soft tissue. South America is the organ. The hemisphere is the body the empire seeks to immobilize and reclaim. This is the first openly declared military expression of the doctrine we have been tracing for months: as unipolarity collapses, as China and Russia rise, as the world slips beyond Washington’s grasp, the U.S. ruling class has retreated to the oldest, bloodiest logic in its arsenal—hemispheric domination. Trump’s America cannot dominate the world, so it intends to dominate the Americas. It cannot impose its will on Eurasia, so it fortifies its claim over the Caribbean Basin. It cannot break multipolarity abroad, so it seeks to consolidate an American Pole at home: a captive bloc of states, resources and chokepoints that can sustain U.S. power in a world where the empire no longer reigns by default. Look again at the pattern. Pressure Panama until Canal governance bends. Strangle Cuba until starvation becomes pretext. Threaten Mexico until U.S. forces operate inside its borders. Weaponize the IMF against Argentina until its economy kneels. Surround Venezuela with warships until sovereignty looks like defiance. This is not improvisation. These are rehearsals. These are the softening blows. These are the peripheral cuts around the point where the spear will eventually enter. Southern Spear is not a counternarcotics operation. It is the operational birth of Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the militarized hinge on which the American Pole swings. The drug war rhetoric is a mask for hemispheric recolonization. The “narco-terrorist” label is a passport that allows the U.S. to kill with impunity where it once had to negotiate. And the sudden militarization of the Caribbean is the opening gambit of a broader strategy: to puncture one spot, one zone, one corridor—and from there, pry open the continent that Washington has always considered its inheritance. With Southern Spear, the empire has thrown its weapon. It has chosen its point of entry. And it has announced to the hemisphere—and to history—that if it cannot rule the world, it will attempt to rule its backyard by force. This essay is the excavation of that doctrine: how it emerged, why it is accelerating, and what it reveals about an empire no longer confident in its power, but still confident in its violence.
The Caribbean as the Empire’s Test Range and Gatehouse
To understand why Southern Spear begins in the Caribbean, you have to understand what the Caribbean has always been to the United States: not a sea, but a gatehouse; not a region, but a strategic organ whose circulation determines the empire’s health. Every empire has a place it cannot afford to lose. For the British it was the Indian Ocean. For the French it was North Africa. For the United States, since the first slave ships and sugar plantations, it has been the warm waters wrapped around Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela—the maritime hinge connecting the Atlantic to the Canal, and the Canal to the Pacific. It is here that the United States learned to intervene, to blockade, to install dictators, to crush revolts, to test its new weapons and doctrines in low-cost laboratories of violence. The Caribbean is the empire’s first classroom, and now, in its decline, its last refuge.Southern Spear treats this sea as a laboratory once again. Months before Hegseth unveiled his “narco-terrorist” narrative, the U.S. Navy quietly announced that it would be “operationalizing” a new mix of robotic and autonomous systems in these waters—unmanned surface vessels tracing invisible gridlines, vertical-takeoff drones stitching the ocean into a map of pixels, medium-altitude craft circling endlessly in the sky. The language was bureaucratic, the tone antiseptic, but the meaning was unmistakable: the Caribbean would be wired into a permanent surveillance and interdiction architecture, a maritime nervous system whose purpose was not to monitor cocaine but to monitor power. What began as an experiment in maritime domain awareness was always destined to graduate into a live-fire instrument of imperial enforcement.And graduate it did. No sooner had the robotic flotilla taken shape than the United States began launching lethal strikes on small boats across the region. The official story was that these were “drug runners.” But the truth is that the targets were whatever vessels happened to be intercepted, and the deaths were whatever corpses the empire could justify. The point was never interdiction; it was demonstration. A great power in crisis needs to show the world that it still has the capacity to rearrange flesh and metal across entire coastlines. It needs to show its rivals—China with its deepening presence in Panama, Russia with its oil diplomacy in Caracas—that the Caribbean remains a U.S. stronghold, a territory patrolled with the same casual cruelty once reserved for Fallujah or Helmand. Southern Spear is that signal. It says: the Caribbean is not neutral water; it is a U.S. operating theater. But the Caribbean is not being militarized merely as a buffer. It is being militarized as a gate—a mechanism for determining which states may access global markets on sovereign terms and which must do so under U.S. supervision. The Panama Canal may belong to Panama on paper, but in practice the empire sees it as the choke chain that keeps the hemisphere leashed. Energy flows from Venezuela, shipping lanes from Brazil, supply chains touching Mexico and Central America—all of these routes converge in or around the waters now patrolled under Southern Spear. A drone circling off Aruba can surveil a Venezuelan oil tanker. A naval destroyer stationed near Jamaica can pressure any Caribbean government drifting toward Chinese financing. Every sensor, every strike, every patrol is part of a single imperial proposition: only Washington decides what passes through its maritime gates. This is why Southern Spear feels less like a counternarcotics mission and more like an occupation conducted at sea. The region is being treated not as an international commons but as a domestic security zone—an extension of the U.S. border wrapped around the hemisphere’s waist. In a moment of imperial contraction, when the empire cannot impose its writ on Eurasia without provoking a wider war, it turns to the waters it believes it can still dominate. But domination in decline looks different than domination in ascent. It is jittery, erratic, heavy-handed. It reaches for technologies that promise omniscience and winds up revealing desperation instead. The Caribbean, once the offshore heart of U.S. confidence, is now the proving ground where a wounded empire tests the weapons it hopes will preserve its shrinking world. Southern Spear makes this plain. It is not about boats running drugs. It is about an empire running out of time. It is about a ruling class that cannot accept that multipolarity has made geography political again. It is about the recognition that if the United States loses control of the Caribbean—of its lanes, its currents, its chokepoints—then it loses the core of its hemispheric project. Southern Spear is the reminder, spoken in gunpowder and steel, that the empire intends to hold the Caribbean as the armored threshold of the American Pole. And as always, it intends to do so not with diplomacy or development, but with the quiet thunder of engines and the cold certainty of distance weapons seeking targets on dark water.
Venezuela: The First Battlefield of the American Pole
No operation centered in the Caribbean can be understood without naming the gravitational force at its core: Venezuela. Every map of Southern Spear’s activity bends toward its coastline; every deployment, every strike, every briefing to Trump about “options in the region” circles around the same political problem. Venezuela is not merely a state Washington dislikes. It is the hemisphere’s most durable experiment in sovereign development, the anchor of anti-imperialist politics in Latin America, and a key node in the multipolar order Washington hopes to delay, deflect, or defeat. If the Caribbean is the empire’s gatehouse, then Venezuela is the door it is trying to keep shut. That is why the first major escalation of Southern Spear was not an interdiction on the high seas but the arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier on Earth—into the SOUTHCOM theater. An aircraft carrier strike group is not deployed to chase smugglers; it is deployed to intimidate states. Its presence casts a shadow large enough to be seen from Caracas itself. And it arrived just as Trump’s top generals briefed him on potential land strikes against Venezuela, a detail reporters buried in their coverage but one that reveals the real strategic calculus. Southern Spear is not a drug mission; it is the forward screen of a pressure campaign designed to test Venezuela’s defenses, probe regional reactions, and condition the American public for the idea that violence against a sovereign state can be justified by the word “narco.”But Venezuela is not simply being targeted for ideological reasons. It sits at the crossroads of every imperial anxiety. It possesses the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. It has deepened military and economic ties with China, Russia, Iran, and the broader Global South. It has resisted sanctions, coups, and diplomatic isolation. Its ports open onto shipping lanes that feed the entire hemisphere. And in an era where Washington’s supremacy is eroding, the idea of a stable, multipolar-aligned Venezuela thriving in “America’s neighborhood” is an existential nightmare for the U.S. ruling class. A sovereign Venezuela signals that the hemisphere is no longer the private estate of the United States. Southern Spear is the attempt to reverse that signal, to reassert dominance not by negotiation but by force of example.The tactic is as old as empire: frame the enemy as a criminal, then treat their sovereignty as contraband. By labeling Venezuelan-linked actors as “narco-terrorists,” Washington fuses the drug war with the war on terror, transforming political resistance into criminal insurgency and criminal insurgency into a justification for extrajudicial killing. That fusion is not rhetorical. It is operational. The lethal strikes at sea—lauded by officials as successes in removing “narco-terrorists”—function as a rehearsal for broader military action. Each strike normalizes the idea that U.S. forces can kill suspected Venezuelan affiliates without evidence, trial, or transparency. Each briefing to Trump about “land options” becomes easier to justify when the public has already accepted the premise that Venezuela is a hub of hemispheric criminality.What is unfolding, then, is not a counter-narcotics effort but a campaign of geopolitical conditioning. The empire understands that it cannot simply invade Venezuela outright without risking regional revolt and global backlash. So it advances by increments: a strike here, a deployment there, a public briefing hinting at military options, a slow tightening of maritime and aerial surveillance around Venezuelan airspace and waters. Southern Spear is the slow, deliberate saturation of the region with U.S. military power until the abnormal becomes ordinary, until the presence of a U.S. carrier near Venezuelan waters feels as routine as a Coast Guard cutter off Florida.Venezuela, in this sense, is the test case for the entire American Pole doctrine. If the United States can police, pressure, and punish a revolutionary government on its own continent—without provoking a unified regional backlash—then Monroe Doctrine 2.0 becomes more than rhetoric. It becomes enforceable. The empire wants to demonstrate that multipolarity may be rising, but not here, not in the lands and waters it still claims as its inheritance. And yet, this is also where the doctrine encounters its first contradiction: Venezuela is no isolated outpost. It is embedded in regional solidarities, BRICS+ partnerships, South–South trade networks, and a long tradition of anti-imperialist struggle that refuses to be extinguished.Southern Spear presses toward Caracas not because the empire is confident, but because it is uncertain. It is a probing strike, an imperial question posed in the language of missiles and maritime patrols: will the hemisphere submit, or will it resist? And in that question lies the heart of the American Pole project. The empire believes it can rebuild its power from the Caribbean upward, from Venezuela outward, welding the hemisphere into a defensive perimeter that shields its decline and prepares it for future confrontations. But Venezuela’s defiance makes clear that the spear, once thrown, unites not only those it seeks to dominate, but those who refuse to live again under the shadow of U.S. dominion. In striking at Venezuela, Southern Spear reveals the shape of the empire’s ambition—and the contours of the struggle that will define the hemisphere’s future.
Narco-Terrorism: The New Passport of Empire
Every empire needs a story to justify its violence. In the 19th century, Washington spoke of “civilization.” In the Cold War, it spoke of “freedom.” In the war on terror, it spoke of “security.” Today, as the U.S. struggles to hold together even its own hemisphere, it has discovered a new incantation: “narco-terrorism.” This phrase is the magic key that unlocks every door the empire wants to kick down. It collapses criminality and insurgency into a single silhouette. It allows the United States to paint entire coastlines as terrorist havens and entire governments as cartel affiliates. And it lets Washington do what it has always done under new banners: redraw the map, declare exceptions to international law, and call it protection. The genius of the term is not accuracy but elasticity. Anyone can become a narco-terrorist—fishermen, smugglers, migrants, political opponents—if the empire needs them to be. Southern Spear is the fullest expression yet of narco-terrorism as imperial passport. When U.S. officials boast of killing “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean Sea, they offer no names, no evidence, no chain of custody—just an assertion that the targets were legitimate. The public is asked to trust the same institutions that lied about weapons of mass destruction, lied about Afghanistan, and lied about everything from coups to covert wars. But the function of the term is not to persuade; it is to anesthetize. It creates a fog in which legality becomes irrelevant, and in that fog, Southern Spear operates with a freedom no empire should enjoy. The United States declares itself in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug traffickers across an entire hemisphere, and suddenly its lethal strikes no longer require accountability. Maritime space becomes a battlefield. Civilian deaths become operational successes. Sovereignty becomes an obstacle to be “managed.” This linguistic trick, perfected during the war on terror, has now been imported into the hemisphere. By pairing the word “narco” with “terrorist,” Washington gives itself license to treat the Caribbean like Kandahar and the Gulf of Paria like the Horn of Africa. Rules of engagement morph, evidence thresholds dissolve, and strikes that would have been called assassinations a generation ago are now framed as routine law enforcement. It is the same sleight of hand used in Colombia during Plan Colombia, in Mexico during the Mérida Initiative, in Honduras during the coup years—but now fused with open military force and real-time maritime targeting. Every euphemism becomes a precedent. Every precedent becomes a doctrine. And every doctrine becomes a weapon aimed not just at traffickers but at states resisting U.S. hegemony. Narco-terrorism also performs a more subtle function: it collapses the boundaries between domestic and hemispheric control. When Hegseth says that Southern Spear “defends the Homeland,” he is not speaking metaphorically. The drug war has always linked foreign intervention with domestic repression. The same logic used to justify strikes in the Caribbean justifies militarization in Black and Brown neighborhoods, the same language used to criminalize Venezuelan fishermen criminalizes migrants at the border, the same surveillance networks spun over the Caribbean Basin are mirrored in the data warehouses built by ICE and the DHS. Narco-terrorism is the ideological ligament tying hemispheric domination to internal pacification. It tells white America that every person who moves without their permission—whether across the Gulf of Mexico or down a city street—is potentially an enemy of the state. But the most revealing aspect of this narrative is how openly it resurrects the Monroe Doctrine. When U.S. officials say that “the Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood,” they are invoking the oldest imperial claim in the hemisphere: that proximity is ownership, and that ownership justifies force. Narco-terrorism is the 21st-century vocabulary for the same 19th-century principle. It paints the Caribbean and Latin America as sites of pathological disorder, requiring a paternalistic power to maintain “security.” It allows the United States to frame any assertion of sovereignty—whether by Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, or any state leaning toward multipolar alliances—as a threat emanating from criminals. The doctrine becomes self-reinforcing: wherever the empire finds disobedience, it finds “narco-terrorists,” and wherever it finds “narco-terrorists,” it deploys the military to discipline the region. And yet, this very overreach reveals the fragility of the project. Narco-terrorism only works as a narrative because the empire is too weak to impose its will through naked power alone. It needs myth to lubricate its violence. It needs pretexts to disguise its fear. Southern Spear is not the confident stride of a dominant empire, but the lunge of one losing altitude, grasping for a justification that can keep the hemisphere lashed to its mast. In calling its targets “narco-terrorists,” Washington is not describing reality; it is manufacturing consent. But the peoples of the hemisphere have seen this play before, and they know that every time the empire invents a new enemy, what it really fears is the possibility of a world where its enemies choose themselves.
The Cracks in the Spear: When Allies Refuse the Script
Empires rarely falter because their enemies grow stronger. They falter because their allies stop believing in the script. And Southern Spear, for all its martial pomp, is already exposing the fractures inside Washington’s own camp. As U.S. officials crowed about killing “narco-terrorists” at sea, something remarkable happened: key partners refused to cosign the narrative. The United Kingdom—the closest of all U.S. allies, joined at the hip in NATO, intelligence, and war—quietly suspended intelligence sharing for some maritime operations in the Caribbean, out of fear that its data was being used to facilitate unlawful killings. Colombia, governed by Gustavo Petro, went further. It condemned the strikes outright, labeling them extrajudicial executions and warning that Washington was dragging the hemisphere toward a catastrophic escalation under the false banner of counternarcotics. Even the usually compliant governments of the Caribbean Community murmured unease behind closed doors, worried that their territorial waters were becoming a live-fire zone without their consent. These are not small tremors. They are signs that the American Pole project—Washington’s attempt to weld the hemisphere into a single coercive bloc under U.S. command—may be running into the limits of imperial assumption. The assumption that Europe will follow Washington into any theater. The assumption that Latin American governments will nod obediently when the U.S. militarizes their waters. The assumption that fear of Washington outweighs resentment of Washington. Southern Spear is revealing the opposite. It is showing that a hemisphere long treated as a playground for U.S. intervention is now filled with governments, movements, and publics that refuse to accept American ownership as natural law. The contradiction is painful for the U.S. ruling class to confront. For decades, Washington has relied on “security cooperation” to keep governments in line: shared intel, joint task forces, military training programs, and a web of counter-narcotics agreements that make local states dependent on U.S. surveillance and logistics. But the moment the United States converts cooperation into unilateral killing—especially killing carried out without transparency or recognition of local sovereignty—the architecture begins to wobble. The empire believed its partners would tolerate anything so long as the violence was wrapped in the familiar drug war rhetoric. But the world has changed. Petro’s Colombia is not Uribe’s Colombia. Mexico is not a client state. Brazil refuses to play deputy sheriff. The Caribbean is tired of being treated as expendable ocean. Multipolarity has entered the bloodstream of the hemisphere. What makes these cracks even more damning is their geopolitical context. The United States is attempting to build the American Pole at the same moment China deepens its trade networks, Russia expands its energy diplomacy, and BRICS+ offers alternatives to Western finance. In this environment, Southern Spear does not reassure Washington’s allies; it frightens them. It signals that the U.S. is prepared to use violence across the hemisphere even when partners object, even when sovereignty is breached, even when the legal foundations are shaky. That message does not inspire loyalty—it inspires hedging. It pushes states toward diversifying their alliances, toward seeking diplomatic shelter in Beijing, Brasília, and beyond. The spear that was supposed to unify the hemisphere instead drives wedges through it. Even within the imperial core, the cracks widen. European states—already uneasy after a decade of U.S. surveillance scandals, failed wars, and economic coercion—view the American Pole doctrine with suspicion. They see Southern Spear not as a counter-narcotics mission but as the trial run of a new imperial posture that sidelines NATO, sidelines multilateralism, and prioritizes hemispheric domination over transatlantic unity. The message is clear: Washington is no longer interested in partner input. It is interested in obedience. And Europe, no longer living in the shadow of unchallenged U.S. supremacy, is beginning to test how far that expectation can bend before it snaps. For all its fury, Southern Spear therefore reveals a truth the Pentagon cannot put in a press release: the American Pole cannot be built by decree. It cannot be welded together solely through fear, spectacle, and maritime strike packages. It requires the complicity of states that increasingly refuse to play the role written for them. The empire is discovering what every declining power eventually must—that hegemony sustained through habit begins to crumble the moment those habits are broken. Washington hoped Southern Spear would announce its return to hemispheric dominance. Instead, it announced the hemisphere’s growing refusal to bow.
And this is the beginning of the deeper contradiction. The more aggressively the United States pushes Southern Spear, the more it exposes the limits of its reach. The more it tries to militarize the hemisphere, the more states seek protection from alternative poles. The more it leans on the rhetoric of narco-terrorism, the more its allies question its legitimacy. The spear thrusts forward—but the ground beneath it trembles. What comes next will determine whether the American Pole becomes a fortified bloc or a doomed fantasy. For now, the cracks are widening, and the empire’s effort to mask them with firepower only makes the fractures glow brighter in the dark.
A Brief Overview of US Military Interventions in the Americas
Southern Spear and the Making of a Hemispheric Order
Every empire has a moment when strategy congeals into doctrine, when scattered maneuvers become a single, coherent project. Southern Spear is that moment for the United States. It is the operational armature of a vision already laid out in the draft National Defense Strategy—a vision that no longer pretends the U.S. can dominate the entire world, but insists it can dominate one vast and vital portion of it. The American Pole is not a metaphor. It is a real attempt to forge the Americas into a captive bloc of territory, resources, markets, and security infrastructure lashed to Washington’s fortunes. In the Pentagon’s quiet language, this is “regional stabilization.” In the plain language of history, it is recolonization. Southern Spear is the spearpoint of a new hemispheric order in which sovereignty is tolerated only if it aligns with U.S. strategic needs, and crushed when it does not. At the core of this project is the belief that the hemisphere can still be shaped like clay in an American hand. U.S. planners see the Caribbean Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Panama Canal as the connective tissue of a continental empire—arteries that must remain unobstructed by Chinese financing, Russian diplomacy, or independent socialist states. They believe that control over these waterways and corridors can anchor a broader system of dependency stretching from Patagonia to the Arctic. Southern Spear is the first step in transforming that belief into a standing military posture: a hemispheric web of surveillance assets, naval deployments, and joint task forces that treat the entire region as a U.S.-policed security zone. It is the maritime enforcement wing of a political project stretching far beyond the horizon line. The American Pole doctrine also depends on integrating the region’s infrastructure into a functional hierarchy under U.S. supremacy. The Panama Canal, already a geopolitical hinge, becomes even more significant as global competition intensifies. Washington’s pressure campaigns on Panama are inseparable from its strikes at sea. The message is unified: the hemisphere’s arteries must remain under U.S. oversight, and any attempt by China or Russia to gain footholds—even through trade, investment, or energy partnerships—will be met with escalating resistance. Southern Spear, despite its narcotics veneer, is ultimately an operation to secure these arteries. It is the policing of a territorial vision in which every port, pipeline, fiber-optic cable, and shipping lane reinforces American power. But the doctrine is not confined to infrastructure. It extends to the political map itself. The United States seeks a hemisphere populated not by sovereign equals but by obedient or manageable clients: governments aligned with Washington on trade, security, migration, and energy; militaries integrated into U.S. command structures; intelligence flows routed through American servers; and legal frameworks tailored to sustain U.S. operational freedom. Southern Spear is one of the mechanisms through which Washington tests compliance. Governments that remain silent in the face of extraterritorial killings are considered reliable. Those that protest—like Colombia or some Caribbean states—are marked for pressure, discipline, or political rollback. In this way, the drug war becomes a litmus test for hemispheric alignment. And yet, Southern Spear also reveals the desperation of this doctrine. The United States is not building the American Pole from a position of overwhelming strength. It is building it because the ground beneath its feet is eroding. China now trades more with much of Latin America than the U.S. does. Brazil pursues multipolar diplomacy. Mexico nationalizes lithium. The Caribbean flirts with renewable energy deals outside Washington’s reach. Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua remain unbroken despite a generation of sanctions and sabotage. Even the hemisphere’s historically compliant states hedge their bets. In this context, Southern Spear is not an expression of confidence but a frantic attempt to freeze the political geography before it slides fully into multipolar alignment. This is why Southern Spear is so central to the doctrine we have been developing. It is the operational backbone of the American Pole, the instrument through which Washington attempts to reclaim the hemisphere as its strategic rear base in an uncertain world. It is the doctrine’s passage from paper to praxis. By hardening the Caribbean Sea into a militarized corridor, by threatening Venezuela with open force, by reasserting U.S. ownership over the hemisphere’s maritime arteries, Southern Spear embodies the logic of the fortress: when global domination becomes impossible, regional domination becomes imperative. The empire contracts, but in contracting, it sharpens its teeth. The future of this hemispheric order is far from settled. Southern Spear could become the foundation of a new regional architecture, one in which U.S. power is entrenched even as global influence fades. Or it could become the overreach that accelerates the collapse of Washington’s credibility, pushing the hemisphere deeper into the arms of multipolar alliances. What is certain is that this operation is not a passing headline. It is a structural moment: the first open attempt to militarize the American Pole into existence. And as such, it clarifies the stakes for every people and nation from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande. The empire has thrown its spear. What happens next will determine who picks it up—and who breaks it.
The Empire’s Reach Meets Its Limits
Southern Spear presents itself as an assertion of strength, but its very existence reveals the limits hemming in the United States. For an empire confident in its supremacy, there would be no need to declare the Caribbean a war zone, to rebrand fishermen as terrorists, or to dispatch aircraft carriers to chase motorboats across turquoise water. These are the gestures of a power trying to convince itself that it still holds the reins. The ruling class knows it has lost the ability to dictate terms across Eurasia and the Global South; now it fears losing the hemisphere it once treated as an extension of its own coastline. Southern Spear emerges from that fear. It is a performance meant to reassure Washington that it can still shape events beyond its borders. But performances are fragile, and this one is cracking under the weight of its contradictions. The first contradiction is strategic overreach. The United States is still trying to impose a 20th-century imperial solution on a 21st-century multipolar world. It wants a hemisphere that behaves like it did during the Cold War—aligned, obedient, and terrified of the consequences of disobedience. But this is not 1965. Latin America has options. China is a major investor and trade partner across the continent. Russia maintains military and diplomatic ties from Caracas to Managua. BRICS+ offers an alternative economic architecture. South–South cooperation has deepened into real institutional relationships. In this environment, a U.S. strike on a boat off Venezuelan waters does not frighten the hemisphere back into line—it alerts it to the dangers of continued dependency on Washington. The world is no longer a battlefield with one general; it is a negotiation with multiple centers of power. The second contradiction is political legitimacy. Every extrajudicial killing the United States commits under the banner of “narco-terrorism” erodes the moral authority it once wielded. Even Washington’s closest partners see what is happening. They understand that the drug war language is a fig leaf hiding a strategy of regional militarization. And they know that when the United States brushes aside international law to kill suspected traffickers at sea, it opens the door to doing the same against political enemies on land. Far from rallying allies, Southern Spear alarms them. It signals that the U.S. will act without consultation, without respect for sovereignty, and without restraint. In the era of multipolarity, such behavior no longer commands deference—it encourages defection. The third contradiction lies within the United States itself. The fortress project demands enormous resources—military budgets, policing budgets, surveillance budgets—that drain the social foundations of U.S. society. The working class is being stripped to the bone to fund the machinery of hemispheric domination. Schools crumble while drones circle the Caribbean. Hospitals close while the Pentagon adds another destroyer to its task force. Housing becomes unaffordable while defense contractors cash in on the latest maritime “interdiction” technologies. Southern Spear is not simply a campaign abroad—it is a siphon at home, channeling public wealth into private militarization. And this siphon deepens the internal instability of a state already cracking under inequality, climate catastrophe, and political polarization. The fourth contradiction is historical. The United States is attempting to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine in a hemisphere that has spent two centuries resisting it. From Cuzco to Caracas, from Chiapas to Port-au-Prince, the memory of invasion, occupation, and sabotage is not a footnote—it is a living wound. Every generation has watched the United States install dictators, overthrow governments, and weaponize suffering. Southern Spear tries to restore the old order by force, but history is not clay. People remember. Movements organize. Governments hedge. Sovereignty, once awakened, is not easily smothered. The empire is trying to impose a doctrine from the past on a region that has already begun building its future. And beneath all these contradictions is the final truth: the spear thrown into the Caribbean is a confession. It confesses that unipolarity is gone. It confesses that Washington cannot dominate the world and must instead try to dominate a smaller one. It confesses that the American Pole is a fallback strategy, not an ascendant vision. And it confesses that the empire is no longer expanding but contracting—hardening its periphery, militarizing its waters, and lashing itself to a hemisphere in hopes of surviving the storms ahead. Southern Spear is not a sign of renewed power. It is a sign of imperial panic decorated in the language of security. It is a doctrine wielded like a weapon because the ruling class no longer trusts its own shadow. Yet decline does not automatically mean defeat. The empire is weaker than it was, but it remains dangerous. A cornered power lashes out, and Southern Spear is precisely such a lash—reckless, theatrical, and aimed at preserving an order already slipping beneath the tide. The task of the hemisphere is to perceive the moment clearly. The task of revolutionaries is to understand that every contradiction is an opening. And the task of history is to decide whether the spear marks the consolidation of a new American century or the dying thrust of one long past. The outcome depends not on the empire’s intent but on the people’s response.
