The new millennium opened with a swing in Latin America toward left-populist governments that embraced and encouraged the apparent tendency toward a multipolar world system that would reduce the weight of United States hegemony in the region. Global multipolarity would increase the autonomous power of Latin American countries to implement economic and constitutional experiments and to forge new regional security and economic projects.
Extra-Regional Powers in Latin America, by Ekatarina Kosevich, an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at HSE University in Moscow, takes us on a deep dive into the policies and power capabilities of three “extra-regional actors,” China, Russia, and Europe, and also of the United States, for whom “extra-regional” must be considered a contested status. Kosevich herself brings an “extra-regional” perspective on these actors, but she is informed not only by work at HSE but also by extended periods doing research and lecturing at universities in Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, and currently in the United States.
In Chapter 1, Kosevich provides a tour de force review of the influential foreign policy thinkers in the region. Her interest is in how the ideas and perspectives of foreign policy intellectuals in Latin America have shaped the policies and goals of the governments, and how different strains of thought in the region have tended to converge on multipolarity.
Charter 2, “Interamerican Relations at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” portrays an antagonism between Washington’s goal of maintaining its hegemonic power, especially in the arenas of security and geopolitics, and the global systemic changes that since the end of the Cold War have fostered a “hybrid” system with both multipolar and unipolar characteristics. By the 2020s, toward the end of Trump’s first term, the US presidency, the decline in institutional programs supporting democracy promotion and free trade, she concludes, had weakened the influence of Washington in the region, including in the OAS. The Biden administration showed little interest in Latin American priorities, especially on addressing the underlying causes of migration and dealing with the roots of urban violence.
Kosevich, understandably, cannot be faulted for failing to anticipate direct military intervention, much less the military and intelligence operations launched by the Trump regime against Venezuela in January 2026. She did anticipate that military power, in the form of military aid and missions, had become the key power resource for the United States to advance its geopolitical interests and security. Washington was little interested in addressing hemispheric issues, such as transnational crime and migration, of greatest concern in Latin America.
Turning first to Chapter 4, devoted to the European Union, Kosevich highlights how the Union’s internal divisions had weakened its influence and pursuit of its main goal, the expansion of trade and economic cooperation. While the EU has pursued new trade agreements, more pressing for Latin America was help in dealing with crime, migration, inequality, and other social issues identified in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Consequently, the EU missed an opportunity “to become a strategic partner for Latin America.” Insightful as the chapter may be, it would have benefited from closer attention to the role and goals of the Iberian members of the EU, the countries best positioned to develop European gateways into the region.
Chapters 3 and 5 are key ones for supporting Kosevich’s thesis on the weakening of US hegemony and the region’s receptiveness to closer relations with an alternative economic pole, China, and with a military pole, Russia. On China (Chapter 3), Kosevich reviews the expansion of China’s trade, investment, and economic aid programs, adding little new to other treatments.
Where the chapter shines is in the detailed (but not fastidious) reviews of Beijing’s successes and failures in deploying its economic resources in different countries, and in the wide-ranging review of influential Chinese academic research, such as Hibei University’s briefing paper, “Seeing China through Peruvian Eyes” (p. 108). Such studies provide Chinese foreign policy makers with an understanding of Latin America’s priorities superior to their counterparts in other regions.
Beijing’s willingness to share telecommunication technologies, its long-standing agreements for Antarctic research with Southern Cone countries, and the well-known infrastructure projects associated with the “Belt and Road Program” all have laid a strong foundation for continued Chinese influence in the region. Not all Chinese initiatives prospered. Venezuela was to be the spearhead for what was to be, officially, Beijing’s “Fast and Furious” policies in Latin America. While China remains present in Venezuela, the inability of its government to service the billions of dollars in loans extended to it made clear that Caracas was not going to catalyze Beijing’s regional ambitions.
In Chapter 5, Kosevich examines Russia’s goal to expand both its economic and political influence in Latin America and how it ultimately came to understand how its own weaknesses have limited its success. One such weakness, she argues, is that Moscow’s economic ambitions are tied to the activities of Russia’s oligarchs, whose corporate deals have been implicated in major scandals in Latin America. This raised concerns among regional officials and sectors of the elite about “corrosive corruption” (p. 191). Still, Russia’s technological capabilities allowed it to advance influence in Venezuela, Argentina, and most importantly, Brazil.
Kosevich treads carefully on the topic of Russia’s invasion (my term) of Ukraine, which she terms a “military action.” Nonetheless, few realists would quarrel with her conclusion that the unwillingness of most Latin American countries to materially contribute to Kyiv’s resistance points to erosion of US hegemony and the region’s quest to foster multipolarity. Latin American leaders’ call for multipolarity is reinforced, she says, by the Russian government’s “insistence that it will continue to defend its autonomy by force from Western aggression.”
However, Kosevich’s linking of multipolarity to erosion of US hegemony was put to proof, post-publication, by the Trump regime’s naked use of military force to depose and kidnap Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. In January 2006, Russia’s commitment to defending Latin America’s autonomy “by force” lay visibly shattered by burned-out hulks of the high-tech weaponry that failed to shield Venezuela from the capacity to defend itself from aerial attack. China’s sunk investment in Venezuelan oil faced the threat of expropriation by a hegemon that once championed the sanctity of contract over sovereign ownership of natural resources.
A different reading of the Venezuela debacle reinforces Kosevich’s conclusion that US hegemony now depends more on military resources than cultural or economic “soft” power. Regardless of the short-term reinforcement of US unilateralism, the longer run efforts of the Trump regime to control Venezuelan oil and its threats to intervene militarily may eventually blow-back upon US hemispheric unilateralism. Kosevich’s book provides invaluable context to evaluate whether global multilateralism may reinforce more autonomy for Latin America or a tightening of US regional hegemony.
Kosevich, who locates herself within the realist school of International Relations, endorses “strengthening the foundations of a multipolar world” (p. 1) to counter “the main sources of the destruction of humanistic social structures and moral values” (p. 1). More revealing of her own values is the Introduction’s epigraph quoting Pastanak’s Doctor Zhivago: “… [Y]ou must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune. To do otherwise is to neglect our duty.”
