The foundations of America’s hegemony have displayed cracks of many kinds. With a fractured and precarious society, a growing challenge to its legitimacy and worldview, an increasingly contested military power, and the rebellion of much of the Global South, it is not in the best position to impose its power on the world, writes Ana Esther Ceceña.
The United States is confronting very large challenges that have compelled it to update its strategic posture and to put the pieces and priorities of the game back on the board. Its hegemony is threatened by serious internal constraints that were not anticipated when it could draw freely on global wealth, labour, and territory. But it is also threatened by the emergence of forces that restrict that availability and that, simultaneously, have begun to undermine the very foundations of US power—especially in several fields that signal both a reconfiguration of the world system and of its internal hierarchies.
What is now identified as the Global South—despite its internal heterogeneities—composed mainly of countries not included in the Collective West and subjected until now to relatively unfavourable conditions of engagement (in terms of trade, policy impositions, financial sanctions, etc.), is shaping the creation of spaces of reciprocal understanding that challenge dominant commercial circuits (the BRI and bilateral agreements) and, far more importantly, that are gradually circumventing the use of the dollar as a universal medium of exchange. Losing monetary control is, at this moment, a real risk.
These same dynamics of Global South coordination point to the forging of new kinds of consensus in international rules, updating the experiences and institutional frameworks of the recent past that are being hollowed out by their own central creators. A new world order, with a new institutional architecture and with effective commitments, offers an alternative that puts the keys to global governance at stake.
The organisation of global production after the Second World War was structured around the US technological paradigm (Fordism and neoliberal post-Fordism). Production processes not only adopted Fordist mass-production techniques (assembly lines and the division of labour by time and motions), but also assimilated the internationalisation of production in phases, leaving centralised control of the overall process in the hands of large firms, mostly US-based.
With the technological innovations introduced in recent years—and even more so with the deployment of AI—the axis of production is undergoing a dizzying transformation. The degree and pace of innovation in this field are intensely contested. The consolidation of leadership in AI and in the organisation of social processes around it places at stake both innovative ingenuity and the spectrum of functions and problems that can be solved through automation. It also entails material control of this technology through the centralisation, capture, generation, and manipulation of data, as well as the capacity to create and control the infrastructures that support its operation: data processing centres, satellite systems, and the cables through which information flows.
This is a major wager, to which the United States is responding through the cartelisation of firms in the sector or through initiatives such as the “Pax Silica.” Other countries, however—China among them—are investing in more efficient and less costly chip varieties, advances in quantum technology, non-extractive or more data-friendly systems of data capture and processing such as DeepSeek, and the construction of infrastructures aimed at occupying ever larger spaces in this dispute.
Technological advances are already beginning to shape the fabric of the reproduction of life on the planet. This means that materiality itself is changing. And the materiality of the processes that redefine both general organisation and power structures rests on tangible elements. The dynamics of production, which also require mobility and speed, are grounded in the fundamental use of energy sources, minerals and metals, water, and biodiversity. Energy resources and minerals—and within them rare earths, cobalt, tungsten, lithium, gold, silver, tantalum, and platinum-group minerals—occupy a central place in the current dispute.
To date, the United States has sustained its sufficiency through an extractivist relationship with the rest of the world. However, the conditions under which international relations occur, the alternatives that have emerged, and decolonisation movements in some regions—most notably in Africa—have altered previous possibilities for extraction. The point is that most of the elements required to sustain this system are located in parts of what we consider the Global South.
The trajectory in this field leads, on the one hand, to the search for control over territories containing the largest reserves. This can explain a substantial share of contemporary wars or interventions, such as those involving Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and even, in part, Gaza. It can also help explain interest in Greenland and Iran—not as the sole reason, but given that Venezuela and Iran together account for 34% of the world’s oil reserves, it can be accepted as a significant explanation.
Venezuela holds 19.35% of global oil reserves, and another 46.83% are located in four Middle Eastern countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. This also indicates the main areas of current geopolitical tension. Russia holds 18.75% of global gold reserves. A total of 47.2% of silver reserves—important as the best-known conductor of electricity—are concentrated in Peru, Russia, and China, while Mexico has historically been the principal producer. Seventy-five percent of lithium is located in the triangle formed by Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Some 54.55% of cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is besieged by destabilisation measures and armed incursions from Rwanda. Cobalt is essential for corrosion-resistant superalloys and for rechargeable batteries; thus, the 4.55% located in Cuba—so close to the United States and under conditions very different from those of the Congo—forms part of the explanation for the intensified blockade to which it is currently subjected.
South Africa and Russia hold 97.53% of platinum reserves. China holds 52.17% of tungsten (60.87% when combined with Russia), 48.89% of rare earth reserves (76.44% when Brazil and Russia are added), as well as the largest tantalum reserves, although the leading producer, with 42%, is the Congo, followed by Nigeria (19%) and Rwanda (17%).
A final element of special significance is the mobility of capital embodied in tangible goods. Currently, sea shipping accounts for 85% of world trade. Shipping lanes are of paramount strategic importance, especially when there are bottlenecks. The Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, that of Bab al-Mandab, and all alternative routes that may be enabled are the nodes of contemporary circulation of commodities, but also of military resources for controlling the seas, which make up most of the world’s territory. The dispute encompasses control over these passages—which open and close the valve of global transit—as well as the possibility of creating new ones, such as canals in southern Mexico (the Isthmus of Tehuantepec) and Central America, and opening the Arctic gateways, which today fall largely under Russian jurisdiction.
The Arctic is of particular importance because it shortens routes between the Atlantic and Pacific basins and because, with ice melt, it is opening fields for the exploration and exploitation of materials such as oil, rare earths, and diverse extremophile species, while also offering a vast endowment of freshwater—which are necessary, among other uses, for AI data centres.
Conclusion
All the elements presented here would require more extensive development, but they help delineate the critical fields of dispute in the global geopolitical arena. It would be important to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the conditions of fragility or solidity in which the hegemon that has led the world for the past 70 years now finds itself. Some of these are noted in the 2025 National Security Strategy, which concludes:
