Securitising commercial interests

US shifts to a strategic logic where military power serves commercial interests, raising stakes globally

The Monroe Doctrine was all about the protection of American interests in the Western Hemisphere. It was about not allowing any distant power to put forces in the Western Hemisphere or allying with any country in the Western Hemisphere. A classic example is how the United States reacted when the Soviet Union tried to put its forces in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Seen in this context, the current American action in Venezuela is all about power politics and has nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. The new world that President Trump is trying to create is one in which national security and economic power are fusing into a single strategic logic: the logic of securitising commercial interests.

The biggest casualty of this new strategic logic is the casualty of universal norms and international law. Just ten months earlier, on 14 February 2025, the world was shocked to hear the United States Vice President JD Vance lecturing European countries on their retreat from the fundamental values at the Munich Security Conference. He was referring to the sliding democracy in Europe, in which Romania had cancelled the results of presidential elections on the basis of the argument that Russian disinformation had affected those elections. He showed concern and said that the Americans feel for the first time that both America and Europe now believe in different values. He tried to persuade the Europeans by telling them that there is no room for firewalls, and that you either uphold the principle or you don't.

Ten months later, the US is the one not upholding the dictates of the universally recognised UN Charter and invading a sovereign country in Latin America. The signal that Americans send globally is that the core realist logic of not persuasion, but the act of pressure, is what defines power politics. America will not have the patience to change minds by persuasion, so instead it will shape constraints.

For the rest of the world, especially the diverging world, the United States will raise the cost of resistance so high that the only option left with the targeted country will be to comply. Winning hearts and minds was an old American strategy that it tried to practice in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and where it failed. The new strategic logic of securitising commercial interests is about structuring and manufacturing a field of action, like the ones in Venezuela and Iran. Resisting this manufactured construct for the targeted countries will be extremely costly, and their choice of action is being limited by the realisation that it is no longer a matter of 'if they agree' but 'can they afford not to comply.'

America is setting a trend in which military power is becoming a silent partner of economic strategy. This American-led new era of securitisation of commercial interests is now being defined by a shift from the war of occupation to the war of access. The access to markets, technologies, resources and networks. In international relations, in a previous world, traditional security revolved around borders, territories and armies, and the economy around trade, growth and welfare. In this new era, this arrangement is collapsing, and under the new strategy, supply chains are becoming the valued security assets of great and medium powers. So, be it oil reserves of Venezuela or the Iranian threat to the flow of Middle Eastern oil, supply chains are more important than the distrusted regimes that may lead, influence and control them.

Therefore, for the US, securitising commercial interests is not about looking at a commercial activity just from the point of view of economic but also geopolitical gains. This the US has done before. In 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the US intervened to prevent a war being imposed on Egypt by a joint military action of London, Paris and Tel Aviv. All President Eisenhower had to do was to tell the British Prime Minister that 'if his forces didn't get out by tomorrow, the US would not support the fragile British post-war economy.' All three countries withdrew their forces, but what the US achieved with its economic power play was motivated more by geopolitical than economic gains. It managed to recruit a client state in Egypt, which became the first country to sign a peace deal with Israel, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and later had President Hosni Mubarak leading the American client state for over three decades.

The brief interruption by the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi was also cut down when General Sisi, as military dictator, sidelined the government and took over the office of the Egyptian presidency. The American threat of not supporting the fragile British war-torn economy was a use of an economic tool to achieve long-term strategic and security objectives in the Middle East.

The strategic logic remains the same, using economic instruments for geopolitical benefit. What has changed in the American-driven new era is that strategic industries have replaced strategic territories as important geographic spaces. Territory mattered in the industrial era; what matters today are transit routes, supply chains, semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and so safeguarding them. Using them is equivalent to defending national borders. In days and months to come, both Venezuela and Iran will stand out as the pilot projects of the success or failure of this new strategic logic of securitisation of commercial activity in targeted countries.

President Trump is already projecting this new logic as more stable than the effects of an outright military confrontation. People in both countries have been given American reassurance of a better future and the promise of aid if the targeted countries' regimes take any violent action against them. Such blatant political interference in the internal matters of other countries has not been witnessed before, which reason why this is being termed as the new strategic logic.

Yet beneath the surface of this newfound logic lies a profound paradox. The securitisation of commercial activity may be good at a macro level, but at the micro level, it has all the ingredients to accumulate instability. This is because it is right in the line of fire of the age of nationalism, in which governments may lend themselves to pressure, but people you must persuade.