Coercion without consensus: The US and the new imperial disorder

The year 2025 witnessed escalated threats from the United States to the Global South.

In the span of months, Washington declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety”, threatened to invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” to protect Christians from an alleged genocide, and demanded that the Taliban return Bagram airbase with warnings of unspecified consequences.

These are not isolated episodes of Trumpian bluster. They are symptoms of a deeper structural crisis in the way US power manages its relationship with the rest of the world.

What we are witnessing might be termed ‘coercion without consensus’. As the ideological appeal of US-led globalisation fades and economic leverage weakens, the imperial centre increasingly resorts to naked force and threats.

The mechanisms of consent that once sustained US hegemony have lost their purchase. What remains is coercion.

The weaponisation of finance

Consider Venezuela. Since August 2017, the US has imposed escalating sanctions targeting the country’s oil sector, financial institutions and government officials.

The stated objective has never been hidden: regime change.

The humanitarian consequences have been devastating. A 2019 study by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs for the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that sanctions caused over 40,000 deaths between 2017 and 2018.

Sanctions cut Venezuela off from the dollar-based financial system, preventing debt restructuring. International companies were threatened with secondary sanctions. The import of spare parts for the oil industry became impossible, accelerating production collapse.

Weisbrot and Sachs concluded that these impacts “would fit the definition of collective punishment as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions”.

Following the August 2017 sanctions, Venezuelan oil production fell at more than three times its previous rate. The International Monetary Fund revised its growth forecast from negative 5% to negative 25% for 2019, driven primarily by the sanctions regime.

This confirms what Samir Amin theorised about contemporary imperialism operating through control of global finance in his book. 

The dollar’s role as reserve currency, combined with US jurisdiction over global payments, provides Washington with the “exorbitant privilege” of imposing economic isolation on any defiant country.

The 2025 escalation takes this further. Trump’s declaration that Venezuelan airspace should be considered closed, while lacking legal jurisdiction, functions to intimidate commercial carriers.

The deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford to the Caribbean, combined with strikes that have killed over 80 people since September, suggests Washington is prepared to complement economic strangulation with military violence.

The case of Colombia in January 2025 is equally instructive. When President Gustavo Petro refused deportation flights on US military aircraft, President Donald Trump responded within hours with threats of 25% tariffs and visa revocations.

This pressure tactic had a clear message: alliance with Washington provides no protection when imperial priorities demand otherwise.

Selective humanitarianism

The threatened intervention in Nigeria reveals a different modality of imperial assertion: the appropriation of humanitarian discourse to legitimise military action.

In November 2025, Trump designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious persecution and threatened to “wipe out the Islamic Terrorists” allegedly committing genocide against Christians.

The claim does not survive empirical scrutiny. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project tells a more complex story.

Between January 2020 and September 2025, Acled recorded 385 attacks targeting Christians where religious identity was a factor, resulting in 317 deaths. During the same period, 196 attacks targeted Muslims, resulting in 417 deaths.

The violence is real and devastating, with over 20,000 civilian deaths since 2020. But its causes are more complex than religious extermination.

Researchers have documented how farmer-herder conflicts, desertification, competition for resources, and the breakdown of traditional mediation mechanisms account for much of the violence.

Organisations like Boko Haram employ anti-Christian rhetoric, but their attacks are largely indiscriminate.

As Nigerian analyst Bulama Bukarti stated: “All the data reveals is that there is no Christian genocide going on in Nigeria. This is a dangerous far-right narrative.”

Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the Save Darfur movement illuminates this instrumentalisation of suffering. He explains in his book, titled Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, the genocide framework and how it transforms political conflicts into moral dramas requiring external salvation, positioning Western powers as saviours and African populations as victims incapable of resolving their own problems.

The selectivity is impossible to ignore. While threatening action against Nigeria, Washington has provided Israel billions in military aid during operations killing tens of thousands of Palestinians.

“Genocide” in US discourse is not an analytical category demanding consistent application, but a political instrument deployed selectively.

Imperial weakness, not strength

The demand for Bagram airbase from the Taliban represents the refusal to accept defeat. The largest US installation in Afghanistan, its abandonment symbolised the failure of the longest war in US history.

Trump now demands its return, justifying this because the base is “an hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles”. Afghanistan is to be instrumentalised as a platform for containing China.

Regional powers have uniformly rejected this. The Moscow Format consultations have brought together Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and India in coordinated opposition. Despite their differences, this coalition represents the multipolar coordination Samir Amin advocated through his concept of “delinking”: nations refusing to subordinate their security to imperial priorities.

The Tricontinental Institute’s study Hyper-Imperialism provides a framework for understanding this conjuncture. Nato states account for three-quarters of global military spending. Yet military supremacy cannot compensate for eroding economic power. The US faces China’s rise and Brics’ growing weight. The 2008 financial crisis and dysfunction of US democracy have tarnished the Washington Consensus.

This explains what might appear paradoxical: why declining hegemony produces more aggressive behaviour. When mechanisms of consent weaken, mechanisms of coercion intensify. The threats against Venezuela, Nigeria and Afghanistan are symptoms of imperial weakness, not strength.

For India and the broader Global South, the implications demand attention. The assumption that US-led globalisation represents the only development path has been challenged.

Alternative institutions – from the Brics New Development Bank to bilateral currency arrangements bypassing the dollar – create possibilities for subordinating external relations to national priorities.

The Global South’s interests lie not in choosing between great powers but in building solidarities that expand space for sovereign development. The construction of a genuinely polycentric order remains the horizon towards which progressive forces must work. – Globetrotter

Atul Chandra is the co-coordinator of the Asia desk at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Support our work by making a donation. Tap to download the QR code below and scan this QR code from Gallery by using TnG e-wallet or most banking apps: