Guillermo Valdés Castellanos
The violent and illegal intervention by the US in Venezuela to imprison a heartless and savage dictator is a brutal confirmation of the direction in which the world and relations between nations are moving. Venezuela is to the US what Ukraine is to Russia. ‘I invade another country because it suits my country’s interests, because I can, and because the rest of the world does not dare or cannot stop me’. Will China continue with Taiwan, and will the US continue with Greenland? Violence fueled by fear and passivity. A world without rules.
The efforts of the last eight decades to build a peaceful, more rational, humane, and sustainable world order (multilateral organizations, international law, human rights charters, courts of justice, trade regulatory organizations, agreements to address climate change, etc.) are crumbling like sandcastles in the face of raw power sustained by increasingly sophisticated and lethal weapons. Will three powers divide up the world before the stunned gaze of the rest of the nations?
This text by the director of the British intelligence service, Blaise Metreweli, sums up the complex global security situation with great precision: “Around the world, we now face not a single danger, but an interconnected network of security challenges: military, technological, social, and even ethical—each one reshaping the others in more complex ways. We are moving in an intermediate space between peace and war. This is not a temporary state or a gradual and inevitable evolution; our world is being actively transformed, with profound implications for national and international security (…) New blocs and identities are emerging, and alliances are being reformulated. Multipolar competition is coming into tension with multilateral cooperation.”
This context, aggravated by the US intervention in Venezuela—whose leader claims that his power has no limits other than his own morality, which has led him to face legal proceedings for fraud, corporate bankruptcy, tax evasion, sexual abuse, falsification of records, and obstruction of justice—is what Mexico faces with an additional significant risk: the MAGA movement has decided that our country is a threat to US national security, an enemy, no longer a reliable partner.
Governments have two policies at their disposal to navigate the turbulent waters of geopolitics: foreign policy and national security policy. Unfortunately, Mexico has lacked both for seven years. AMLO boasted of reducing foreign policy to domestic policy, that is, to his whims, such as demanding an apology from Spain for the conquest, an emblematic act of 4T diplomacy. National security policy simply disappeared from the face of Mexico and became a refrain to justify the opacity of public works and cover up corruption: information is withheld for reasons of “national security.” National risk agenda? There is none. What’s more, what is that?
The current government has not changed these legacies. The current foreign policy prefers to give oil to the Cuban dictatorship, for supposedly humanitarian reasons, rather than eliminate risks that jeopardize the revision of the USMCA. What an interpretation of national interests. And it has been confirmed that the National Intelligence Center (CNI), responsible for generating intelligence for national security, is changing its focus and now dedicating itself to judicial investigations to support public prosecutors, as ordered by the president at the last meeting of the National Security Council in December. Is it not necessary to develop scenarios for possible US interventions in Mexican territory and strategies for response and damage minimization? It does not seem so. The CNI’s priority now is investigating the files against extortionists.
Mexico is heading into deep waters with a category five hurricane forecast, without a compass, without radar, and with a captain without maps or professional sailors. Pure improvisation, disguised as a cool head. May God have mercy on us.
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