Geopolitics for idiots

Between the local tyrant and the global empire

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We live in an age in which geopolitics has been reduced to moral theatre. We no longer speak of interests, power, balances or sovereignty, but of “values”, “democracy” and “liberations”. Great powers do not conquer: they liberate; they do not impose: they protect; they do not plunder: they assist. War has been repackaged as humanitarian action, and interference as an ethical duty. The result is a childish political analysis that does not eliminate violence, but obscures its causes.

In this global theatre, the United States plays the role of the principal moral actor: both judge and party to an international order that it claims to defend while reshaping it in its own image. Like every empire in an advanced stage of maturity, Washington is not driven by universal principles, but by a cold and consistent logic of strategic, energy and financial interests. There is nothing especially new in this. What is striking in this specific case is how rhetoric ends up coinciding with reality: the mask of the righteous avenger slips, and what remains is the uncovered face of the executioner.

The systematic alignment of the United States with Morocco against Spain over issues such as Western Sahara or the Perejil islet does not stem from any profound moral dilemma, but from a simple hierarchy of interests. Morocco is a privileged partner in the region, a functional ally in controlling migration, military dynamics and the geopolitics of North Africa. Spain, by contrast, is a secondary ally — disciplined, predictable, whose loyalty is taken for granted. When a choice must be made, the decision is automatic. And it is always dressed up as responsible pragmatism.

In the same way, the absence of any serious attempt by the United States to pursue legal action against Mohammed VI for his alleged involvement in drug-trafficking networks is not an anomaly, but a logical consequence. Valuable allies enjoy structural immunity. International justice, like human rights, is applied selectively — not because the system is flawed, but because it works exactly as designed.

This pattern is not new. It has a precise genealogy that goes back to the Monroe Doctrine — that founding dogma according to which the entire Western Hemisphere had to remain under U.S. tutelage “for its own good”. In the name of opposing European interference, the United States claimed a permanent right to intervene, to condition governments, to overthrow regimes and to redraw the sovereignty of others. Latin America was not conceived as a collection of nations, but as a projection space: a backyard where self-determination was tolerated only when it coincided with the interests of the imperial centre. The language has changed; the logic has not.

The Monroe Doctrine was not a historical anomaly, but a rehearsal for contemporary globalism: a hierarchical sovereignty in which some decide, and others obey; where independence is a revocable privilege; where intervention is legitimised as long as it is articulated in the proper language. Those who fail to grasp this continue to believe that imperialism ended the moment it began to call itself a “rules-based international order”.

Yet what appears truly grotesque in this landscape is not the behaviour of the empire, but the almost religious devotion of its peripheral apologists. Television intellectuals, paid analysts, and well-meaning citizens who celebrate every move by Washington as if it were a moral crusade — incapable of distinguishing between the legitimate rejection of a local tyranny and the cynical instrumentalisation of that rejection for geopolitical ends that have nothing to do with it.

The Venezuelan case is exemplary. Maduro’s regime does not need defenders: its historical record is catastrophic. A devastated country, a shattered economy, an impoverished society, a mass exodus, and a ruling elite that replaced popular sovereignty with a clientelist, corrupt and repressive system — all wrapped in an empty anti-imperialist rhetoric used as an alibi to justify internal plunder and perpetual power.

It must be said without ambiguity: rejecting the U.S. agenda does not in any way imply indulgence toward the Chavista-Madurista regime. That regime destroyed Venezuela from within, hollowed out its institutions, and delivered the country to a mixture of corruption, militarisation and external dependence.

The idea that the United States — and particularly the Trump administration — acts out of a desire to “restore democracy” in Venezuela does not even hold up as propaganda. Unlike earlier phases of imperial discourse, Trumpism largely abandoned universalist moral language and adopted a more naked rhetoric centred on security, territorial control, drug trafficking and strategic resources. Democracy was not the core of the message; it became a projection later imposed by a binary public opinion that needs to transform every foreign intervention into a redemptive crusade. In this sense, it is not the United States that promises democracy, but specific sectors — especially among Venezuelans — that attribute it to Washington, even going so far as to justify plunder and the subordination of sovereignty as the necessary price for a liberation that was never truly central to the real narrative of U.S. power.

Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most obscene example of this imperial consistency. A theocratic monarchy, devoid of political freedoms, exporter of Wahhabism and chief ideological sponsor of global jihadism, repackaged as a privileged partner of the West. Not only are its crimes forgiven, but it is also sold weapons, granted diplomatic cover, and presented as a pillar of regional stability — all while solemn sermons on human rights are delivered from perfectly air-conditioned podiums.

Syria offers another revealing case. After years of war, the country has ended up under a new leadership born out of Islamist militias, now recycled as respectable interlocutors. The former terrorist is, by diplomatic miracle, reborn as an “acceptable” president. Barbarity does not disappear — it is laundered. Beheadings cease to be crimes and become merely embarrassing precedents. Legitimacy no longer comes from origin, but from usefulness.

To applaud these dynamics uncritically is to sell one’s soul to a greedy devil wrapped in a democratic flag. Yet there exists a whole legion of devotees ready to do so with enthusiasm — not because they have abandoned critical thought, but because they are incapable of exercising it. For them, to criticise the United States is to be a communist; to question global liberalism is to defend dictatorships; to speak of sovereignty is to confess an ideological sin.

This voluntary collapse of intelligence is not an accident, but the product of a system that has replaced thinking with moralism and analysis with slogans. Geopolitics has become a secular catechism in which only two camps exist: the good and the evil. Any attempt to stand outside this dichotomy is immediately treated as suspicious.

In this context, the geopolitical restructuring underway is not — as liberal catechisms endlessly repeat — a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, but a recomposition of spheres of influence in a world that is no longer unipolar. Rising powers do not contest the system because it is unjust, but because they do not control it. Declining powers do not defend it because it is just, but because it still serves their interests. Morality is the paint; the steel underneath is always the same.

Meanwhile, Europe watches this transformation from a position of growing irrelevance. Not because it lacks resources, population or history, but because it has voluntarily renounced thinking of itself as a political subject. Turned into an administrative conglomerate, governed by technocrats without a people and regulations without a nation, Europe has traded sovereignty for comfort, strategy for consensus, and politics for management.

While the United States, China and Russia think in terms of power, influence and historical projection, Europe debates inclusive language, green taxation, or the regulatory size of paper straws. This is not a caricature — it is a symptom. When a civilisation stops taking itself seriously, others notice immediately. And act accordingly.

The paradox is that Europe has never had such favourable objective conditions to recover its sovereignty. A multipolar world, far from being an inevitable threat, offers a historic opportunity for European nations to redefine their interests, rebuild strategic autonomy and abandon the permanent tutelage under which they have lived since the end of World War II. But this possibility requires a prior rupture: leaving the comfort of the protectorate and accepting the intrinsic risk of sovereignty.

Today, sovereignty is treated like a dirty word. It is automatically associated with authoritarianism, xenophobia or reactionary nostalgia. It is the last taboo of global liberalism: everything can be questioned except the very framework that strips people of the power to decide their own destiny. In the name of an abstract universalism, concrete communities are deprived of their right to exist as historical subjects.

Diversity is preached while uniformity is imposed. Difference is celebrated — as long as it never challenges the system. Freedom is invoked, but reduced to choosing between products rather than collective projects. The citizen becomes a consumer; politics becomes administration; the nation becomes an obstacle.

That is why it is almost comical to watch certain circles exalt foreign leaders as providential saviours. They hate the local tyrant but applaud the external hegemon. They denounce domestic corruption but justify global interference. They criticise one side’s propaganda while swallowing the other’s without filter — all under the comforting illusion of being on “the right side of history,” as if history had a permanent ethics committee.

The result is an intellectually disarmed citizenry, incapable of thinking beyond pre-fabricated frames. For this mentality, complexity is suspect and ambiguity unforgivable. Faced with this, disdain is not arrogance — it is intellectual hygiene. Not everything deserves debate when the terms of discussion are already closed in advance.

The decisive question of our time is not who governs this or that country, but who truly holds the power to decide. And today that power does not reside in people, but in opaque transnational structures, faceless markets and asymmetrical strategic alliances. Recovering sovereignty does not mean isolation or autarky, but restoring centrality to political decision-making against economic and geopolitical imposition.

If Europe aspires to anything more than a decorous irrelevance, it must relearn to think of itself as a historical subject. It must abandon the fiction of permanent moralism and accept that politics is conflict, choice and risk. Sovereignty does not guarantee justice — but its absence guarantees insignificance.

In a world being reshaped by blunt reality, clinging to edifying fairy tales is not a virtue: it is historical suicide.

The most tremendous success of the contemporary global order has not been ruling the world, but persuading people that governing themselves is a bad idea. No sophisticated conspiracy was needed. It was enough to associate sovereignty with everything uncomfortable — conflict, risk, responsibility — and to sell tutelage as a sign of political maturity. The result is a citizen trained to distrust any power that is close, and to venerate, with a mixture of fear and gratitude, every power that is far away.

In this elegant state of permanent minority, the local tyrant performs an essential pedagogical function. He reminds us every day that our own politics will always be clumsier, more corrupt and more dangerous than anyone else’s. And when the local tyrant falls — or is made to fall — what is celebrated is not emancipation, but the change of guardian. Freedom, conveniently redefined, becomes obedience to someone more “competent”.

The Venezuelan case illustrates this logic with almost textbook clarity. Maduro’s grotesque and ruinous regime devastated an entire country while declaiming sovereignty through slogans and filling its pockets with privilege. Rejecting it requires little intellectual effort. What is truly demanding, instead, is resisting the temptation to turn that rejection into automatic genuflection before any power that promises order, dollars or democratic redemption on comfortable geopolitical timelines.

Because the empire does not liberate — it administers. It does not redeem — it manages. And when it intervenes, it is not so that people may decide, but so that decisions can be made for them more efficiently. That this elementary truth still causes scandal only shows how deeply political analysis has been replaced by a secular form of faith — a faith that feels insulted when contradicted and denounces as heresy anyone who dares to ask what interests hide behind proclaimed values.

Europe, for its part, has elevated this abdication into a virtue. It has achieved something remarkable: losing power without losing moral superiority. While delegating its own security, diplomacy and strategic autonomy, it consoles itself with the conviction of standing on “the right side of history” — a history that, incidentally, always seems to move in the opposite direction of Europe’s solemn declarations.

Perhaps this is why sovereignty now appears so obscene. Not because it is dangerous, but because it is vulgar: it forces you to get your hands dirty, to choose without guarantees, to own your mistakes instead of denouncing those of others. Against this, global governance offers a far more hygienic alternative: decisions without responsible actors, power without a face, and consequences without culprits.

In the end, we are not facing a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, nor between good and evil, but something far more prosaic and far more unsettling: the choice between peoples who accept being permanently administered and peoples who risk deciding again. Between the illuminated comfort of the protectorate and the uncomfortable adulthood of sovereignty.

And as so often happens, what is truly unforgivable is not choosing poorly — but refusing to choose at all. This, of course, is an inconvenient reflection. Freedom has one unforgivable flaw: it cannot be delegated.

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Geopolitics for idiots