Thomas Hobbes arrived and sat at the head of the table to remember an ancient and brutal truth that we had forgotten among so many diplomatic cocktails: sovereignty is solely and exclusively that which is physically defended. And it became clear in Latin America that nothing can be defended.
For decades, the region lived a collective hallucination, a fantasy of equality sustained by United Nations bureaucracy, family photos at the G20 and rotating seats on the Security Council, believing that international law was an impenetrable shield when, in reality, it was just a courtesy of the hegemon. This illusion ended the day the United States came to remove a president from his house and take him away without asking permission, without consulting and without warning, leaving Brazil and the rest of the continent with the only option of sadness and irrelevance.
While Brasilia organized phone calls and sent gauze, Washington deployed brute force, demonstrating that Brazil’s supposed regional leadership was a fiction that only existed because the owner of the north allowed it to exist.
Awakening to this condition of vassalage is traumatic because it exposes the strategic nakedness of nations that believed they were playing in the major leagues. The generals who today complain about the lack of budget for airplanes or submarines belatedly admit that without supplies there is no voice and that “soft power” diplomacy is a useless toy when the interlocutor decides to use the stick.
Countries like Argentina or Ecuador, in an act of instinctive realism, celebrated the intervention because they understood something ancient before anyone else: in the hour of the vassal, the only thing that guarantees survival is quickly aligning yourself with whoever has the firepower. The old pretension of speaking as equals, of condemning or approving the actions of the empire, was revealed as a permitted arrogance that evaporates the moment true power acts.
But if physical intervention was the blow that whitened vassal status, artificial intelligence is the lock that will close it forever. Until now, the disparity was logistical and ballistic, a gap that could theoretically be narrowed with decades of investment, but the arrival of military artificial intelligence changes the very nature of the domain. The United States will not hand over this technology as a commodity or a basic service that is contracted in the cloud; will jealously guard it as the ultimate asymmetric advantage. If today the region is powerless in the face of a naval task force, tomorrow it will be absolutely irrelevant in the face of autonomous systems that make tactical and strategic decisions at speeds that the human mind and Latin American bureaucracies cannot even process.
Artificial intelligence does not democratize power, it concentrates it in such an absolute way that the very idea of national autonomy becomes laughable. Vassalage will no longer be a negotiable political condition, but rather an inescapable technical reality, where the north will have the ability to “step in the face” of any dissent without even sending a soldier, simply by shutting down or controlling the digital and cognitive infrastructure of its neighbors.
Knowing yourself as a vassal today is understanding that the time for rhetoric is over and that the immediate future is a management of obedience, where the only rational option is to understand your place in the hierarchy before technology makes that lesson painful.
Things as they are.
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international topics like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast The International Observeravailable on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
You may also be interested
