Venezuela and the Cost of Abandoning South American Collective Defense

E-International Relations  |  Guilherme Frizzera

A unilateral United States military operation on 3 January 2026 resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, exposing the vulnerability of South American nations following the collapse of their collective defense architecture. This intervention was enabled by the prior dismantling of regional political instruments designed to prevent external military interference.

Historically, South American states sought strategic autonomy through initiatives like the Congress of Panama in 1826 and the 2008 Council of South American Defense, which aimed to manage crises without foreign tutelage. However, post-2016 ideological polarization led governments to abandon the Union of South American Nations in favor of ad hoc groupings like the Lima Group. This fragmentation internationalized the Venezuelan crisis, transforming the nation into an arena for great power rivalry involving China and Russia. Reversing this strategic regression requires a recalibration toward Active Non-Alignment to rebuild a non-partisan defense framework capable of absorbing political divergence.

Comment

The collapse of the Council of South American Defense in the face of the Venezuelan crisis reveals the fragility of regional security architectures when subjected to intense domestic ideological polarisation. By replacing a formal treaty-based mechanism like UNASUR with informal, non-binding coalitions such as the Lima Group, South American states voluntarily degraded their collective bargaining power against extraregional superpowers. This institutional vacuum directly facilitated the unilateral United States military operation in Caracas, establishing a precedent where regional sovereignty is subordinated to external security mandates. Consequently, the transition from structured collective defense to ad hoc diplomatic groupings has effectively reverted the South American continent into a passive theater of great power competition between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

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