“It takes a century to go from barbarism to civilization; from civilization to barbarism, only a day.” (Will Durant)
In the autumn of 2026, as leaves begin to fall on the gardens and the corridors of the Capitol fill with the nervous hum of primaries and polls, Washington is breathing a tension that is nothing new. Donald Trump, the man who turned American foreign policy into an exercise in personal will and strategic predation, faces the real possibility of losing one or both chambers in November.
The numbers don’t lie: the House of Representatives hangs by a thread, the Senate is a battleground, and the specter of divided government looms over the White House. For many observers, especially in Latin America, this scenario looks like a chance to breathe, a possible end to the era of the Donroe Doctrine—that updated, brutal version of the old Monroe Doctrine that Trump has turned into a doctrine of state. Yet those who understand how power truly works in the United States know that the ballot box rarely strips elites of their spoils. Change, if it comes, will be cosmetic. Deep power—the kind wielded from Silicon Valley boardrooms, Treasury offices, and the headquarters of war corporations—does not submit to election cycles.
The Donroe Doctrine was not born of an improvised speech. It was born of a deliberate strategy, codified in the National Security Strategy of November 2025. It is not just about oil. It is about critical minerals—lithium, copper, niobium, rare earths—about supply chains, about expelling China and Russia from the hemisphere, and about turning Latin America into the strategic reserve of an empire that no longer trusts the liberal order it itself built after 1945.
We argue that the post-midterms scenario does not mean the end of Donald Trump’s policies and methods, let alone the Donroe Doctrine, but rather their institutionalization. Technological, financial, and military elites will not back down in their attempt to control the commodities of the Global South. What will change is the method. The Doctrine is the symptom of a deeper structural shift: digital-military capitalism has retreated to the American continent and no longer needs democracy to expand. Instead, it builds infrastructures of control—data, satellites, minerals, energy—that operate above states. Latin America is the laboratory. And only Latin Americans can stop them.
In the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) underscores the high probability that Democrats will retake the House and the limited but real impact this would have on Trump’s legislative capacity. The CFR has examined the 2024 coalition—Hispanics, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, evangelicals, white working class—and how these groups’ foreign policy views may influence 2026 and 2028: immigration and war spending as pocketbook issues, Israel and Gaza as a divider, and skepticism toward prolonged interventions.
Others warn that foreign policy rarely decides midterms, but the war with Iran and the associated inflation are eroding support. The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) offers one of the most useful frameworks: it divides post-Trump Democrats into three camps—revolutionaries, renovators, and revivalists. Revolutionaries see the system as inherently unjust and propose structural changes: less militarism, strong criticism of Israel, European strategic autonomy without militarization. Renovators focus on corruption and interest capture, and see Europe as a partner on democracy and taxation if it takes on more of its own security. Revivalists blame right-wing populism and want to restore institutions and bipartisan cooperation, though no longer on the terms of the previous division of labor. The ECFR’s key conclusion is that any Democratic victory in the midterms will not immediately reverse Trump’s policy—the executive can bypass Congress—but it will shape the post-2028 landscape. Classic Atlanticism will not return.
One can imagine, with operational facts, what role those elites will play in a post-midterms scenario. The Donroe Doctrine is the explicitly transactional and coercive version of Pan-Americanism, which subordinates all policy toward Latin America to U.S. security and capital accumulation. In practice, it means control over 40% of world oil production, including the Gulf Basin, Venezuela, and the rest of Latin America; geopolitical primacy without energy constraints—for the first time since the 1940s, Washington can act militarily without the cost of oil modulating its decisions; and direct intervention, whose crudest expression was the capture of Maduro and the installation of a friendly interim government in Caracas.
In less than five months, a series of extraordinary events in three different countries revealed the same logic. The U.S. company USA Rare Earth announced the purchase of Brazilian miner Serra Verde Group for about $2.8 billion. The mine, in the state of Goiás, is the only large-scale producer outside Asia of four magnetic rare earth elements essential for advanced magnets. Without those materials, there are no electric vehicles, no precision electronic systems, no next-generation military equipment.
That same month, April, Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, arrived in Argentina to settle there, and General Francis L. Donovan, commander of Southern Command, ordered the creation of the SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command, a command dedicated to unmanned systems capable of operating from the ocean floor to space and across the entire cyber domain in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In June, Argentina and Chile joined Pax Silica, and the U.S. Government and North American Blue Energy Partners signed a historic agreement with Venezuela to exploit 17 oil fields for a hundred-year term. NABEP will operate those fields, which hold proven reserves of 65 billion barrels, with the Venezuelan company used as a front. Washington acquires a 35% stake in the company through the Pentagon, plus the right to buy 20% of the crude at cost and veto power on the board. Every move was part of the same geopolitical sequence: U.S. militarization of the region operated under a model of corporate privatization.
Silicon Valley’s tech elites are not a homogeneous bloc, but they share an existential interest: stable, preferential access to the minerals that feed artificial intelligence, batteries, chips, and data centers. Some of their most influential members—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and sectors close to Elon Musk—have already bet on Latin America as a contingency jurisdiction, investing in Argentina, exploring opportunities in Brazil, and positioning themselves for the eventuality of a major confrontation with China. Others, more aligned with the Democratic Party, will prefer the language of sustainability and governance, but they will not give up the strategic objective. For them, the Donroe Doctrine is not an ideology; it is an industrial necessity.
The Treasury Department, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control, is the financial arm of the Donroe Doctrine. It has already demonstrated this with secondary sanctions against more than thirty global oil companies, forcing a 40% reduction in purchases of Venezuelan crude; with direct control of financial flows—airlines operating in Venezuela must pay for fuel directly into U.S. Treasury accounts; and with support for Argentina’s stability. If Democrats retake the House, Treasury would lose the ability to act by decree, but it would gain a new instrument: legislation that turns sanctions into law. This would make them much harder to reverse and give financial elites a stable legal framework for their operations.
A Democratic Congress can force them to talk about human rights and the environment, but it cannot force them to give up the lithium of the Lithium Triangle or the copper of Chile and Peru. The U.S. Treasury, for its part, understands that energy security and supply chain resilience are matters of state, not party. And the war corporations—those giants that manufacture the surveillance systems, weapons, and logistics that protect assets abroad—will see any attempt at retrenchment as a threat to their contracts and their raison d’être.
The military-industrial complex’s pressure on any occupant of the White House is always present. In the context of the Donroe Doctrine, its interests are clear. Contracts in the Caribbean, the naval and air deployment around Venezuela have generated billions of dollars in logistics services, weaponry, and maintenance for companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. Oil companies as political actors: ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron are not just after oil; they actively lobby for policies that recover the privileges they lost with the 2001 nationalization in Venezuela. And the privatization of war: the Pentagon is already planning the use of private military companies to protect Venezuelan oil infrastructure, avoiding the political cost of deploying uniformed troops.
American progressive elites talk about ending forever wars, an arms embargo on Israel, respect for sovereignty, and redirecting resources toward domestic needs. Their rise is real and their ability to influence the Democratic Party’s narrative is growing. But even they operate within a system that rewards moderation when it comes to strategic resources. George Soros’s money and progressive dark money networks can help win primaries; they cannot dismantle the web of interests that binds Silicon Valley to the Pentagon and the Treasury to oil companies. The American left can change the discourse. Elites change the rules only when it suits them.
The electoral spectacle will continue. Narratives of change will flood the media. In Caracas, Brasília, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, people will talk about a possible new era. But in the boardrooms of tech companies, in the offices of the Treasury Department, and in the headquarters of defense corporations, the calculation will be different: adapt the language, adjust the timelines, maintain control. Because true power is not lost in the midterms—it is managed. And in that art, American elites remain unsurpassed masters.
