This text links two events – the United States’ military intervention in Venezuela and their explicit threats regarding Greenland – as expressions of a single historical pattern: normative selectivity and international impunity, which enable a world power such as the United States to project their imperial military force in order to effect political change in other sovereign states when strategic risks are at stake, particularly in relation to energy resources and critical minerals.

From a Latin American perspective, these dynamics are hardly new. The vocabulary of imperialism, dependency and coloniality has constituted, for decades, an analytical and political repertoire through which to name processes frequently softened in institutional language as measures of stabilisation or security, undertaken in the name of “democracy.”

My argument is that the so-called liberal, rules-based order is not collapsing as a result of a recent deviation, but is instead revealing – once again and with renewed starkness – its long-standing foundations: the entanglement of imperial and colonial violence, economic expansionism and the control of energy sources that have sustained and reconfigured global hierarchies of power over several centuries.