中文
By Warwick Powell
Lead: Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi's China visit provides a model for Latin American nations seeking to resist U.S. pressure by forging partnerships that respect their independence.
Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi's state visit to China in early February 2026 was both a diplomatic success and a revealing geopolitical marker. As the first Latin American head of state to visit Beijing in the new year, Orsi led a 150-member delegation that included business leaders as well as government officials. The visit secured more than a dozen cooperation agreements.
The two sides signed a joint statement deepening their comprehensive strategic partnership and committed to expanded collaboration in agriculture, clean energy, digital economy, artificial intelligence, Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure, fisheries, intellectual property and emergency management.
Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized strategic alignment in emerging fields — green development, AI, clean energy — while Orsi reaffirmed Uruguay's adherence to the one-China principle and its ambition to elevate bilateral ties to new heights.
The timing carried extra symbolism: the visit coincided with the 38th anniversary of diplomatic relations and came just as Uruguay prepares to assume the 2026 chairmanship of the Group of 77 and China. Xi explicitly pledged support for Uruguay in that role and for joint efforts to promote an "equal and orderly multipolar world," inclusive globalization and a community with a shared future for humanity.
This constructive, results-oriented engagement stands in sharp relief against the coercive posture the United States has increasingly adopted across the Western Hemisphere. Orsi's trip unfolded barely a month after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a military operation — an action followed by Washington's declared intention to "run" Venezuela and direct the flow of its oil.
The move, frequently labeled a revival of the Monroe Doctrine (or its "Trump Corollary"), has been accompanied by renewed pressure elsewhere: intensified sanctions and embargo tightening against Cuba, and earlier judicial and political maneuvers in Panama that unreasonably stopped the contract renewal for the franchise of the Panama Canal ports operated by a Hong Kong, China-based multinational.
These actions reflect a zero-sum strategic outlook codified in the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy, which identifies "extra-hemispheric powers" as threats and justifies intervention to secure strategic geography, resources and supply chains.
The pattern — direct military action, asset seizures, economic strangulation and divide-and-conquer tactics — echoes decades of U.S. interventionism in Latin America and leaves little space for sovereign policy discretion. This imperial approach extends even northward, as seen in Washington's escalating pressures on Greenland, where threats of tariffs and economic coercion aim to wrest control of Arctic resources and strategic positioning from Denmark, framing it as a hemispheric security imperative.
A poignant northern bookend to these southern dynamics emerged at the World Economic Forum in Davos just weeks earlier, on Jan. 20, 2026, when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a landmark speech titled "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path." Carney declared the end of the "pleasant fiction" of a “rules-based international order,” lambasting a world where a certain great power operates without constraints, using economic integration as a tool of coercion.
He urged middle powers like Canada to build strategic autonomy through domestic strength, diversified partnerships and issue-specific coalitions. Explicitly referencing the Greenland crisis, Carney affirmed Canada's unwavering support for Denmark's sovereignty, opposed U.S. tariffs and called for collaborative Arctic security.
His address challenged the Rubio-Trump vision of regional spheres of influence and the modern Monroe Doctrine head-on, positing that middle powers must unite to create a "third path" of genuine cooperation, rejecting subordination to hegemonism. This northern defiance mirrors Latin America's struggles, underscoring a hemispheric rejection of U.S. unilateralism.
Pivoting to China, Carney highlighted Canada's recent strategic partnership with Beijing as a pragmatic step in this diversification, aligning with a multipolar framework where economic ties foster mutual benefit without hegemonic demands — precisely the ethos China promotes globally.
Chinese President Xi Jinping holds a welcome ceremony for President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay Yamandu Orsi in the Northern Hall of the Great Hall of the People prior to their talks in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 3, 2026. Xi held talks with Orsi, who is on a state visit to China, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. [Photo by Ding Haitao/Xinhua]
China's approach, by contrast, rests on mutual benefit, non-interference and respect for sovereignty. Beijing presents itself as an enabler rather than a hegemon, imposing no ideological conditions or demands for alignment against third parties.
Xi's remarks during the Orsi visit underscored support for Latin American and Caribbean countries in defending their own security and development interests while rejecting unilateral bullying and bloc confrontation. The natural complementarity — Uruguay's agricultural strengths meeting China's demand and technological capacity — illustrates pragmatic, win-win cooperation that strengthens rather than subordinates partners.
This model extends to broader initiatives like the Belt and Road. The initiatives have brought investment in Latin American infrastructure without the strings attached to U.S. aid or International Monetary Fund loans, which have often been criticized for enforcing austerity and political concessions.
The visit also aligns with broader regional trends. The EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement and Interim Trade Agreement, signed on Jan. 17, 2026, create one of the world's largest free trade zones and signal Latin America's intent to diversify economic relationships away from over-reliance on the United States.
Uruguay's outreach to China fits neatly into this multi-vector strategy, allowing Montevideo to pursue a balanced foreign policy and safeguard autonomy amid rising external pressures. Similarly, Carney's speech emphasized Canada's aggressive pursuit of trade pacts with the EU, India, ASEAN and Mercosur, alongside defense enhancements and critical minerals coalitions, demonstrating how middle powers can leverage collective action to mitigate great power dominance.
Yet any discussion of these shifting dynamics must include one final word of caution. Latin American countries remain acutely vulnerable to American coercion. This reality is rooted in decades of direct experience with regime-change operations, U.S.-supported coups, economic blockades and covert destabilization campaigns.
As nations in the region seek robust economic and diplomatic engagements beyond Washington's traditional reach, U.S. anxiety is likely to grow, raising the short-term risk of punitive or even aggressive responses. We live in delicate and perilous times.
Strength in numbers, however, remains the most realistic defense. Countries of the Global South must deepen collaboration and alignment to dilute the leverage of any single external power. Beijing is proving to be a reliable economic partner and an advocate of multipolar governance; it is neither willing nor positioned to replace the United States as a military-security hegemon in the Western Hemisphere or in the global architecture more broadly.
China offers trade, investment, infrastructure and diplomatic support — it does not offer the so-called security guarantees, nor does it seek to supplant existing regional security arrangements. This distinction is crucial, as Carney's Davos address implicitly acknowledges: while middle powers like Canada and Uruguay can partner with China for economic empowerment, true resilience requires intra-regional solidarity and diversified alliances to counterbalance U.S. pressures.
For Latin America, President Orsi's journey to Beijing crystallizes a fundamental choice: submission to a coercive, U.S.-centric hemispheric order that restricts sovereign decision-making, or pursuit of genuine multipolarity in which smaller states can engage multiple partners on their own terms.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's vision of multipolarity as a return to formalized spheres of influence stands in direct opposition to China's stated preference for an "equal and orderly" system that rejects imperial logic. Carney's call for middle powers to "name reality" and build coalitions echoes this, suggesting a convergence where Canada's northern pragmatism complements Latin America's southern aspirations, potentially forging a trans-hemispheric front against hegemony.
In a turbulent global landscape, Uruguay's engagement with China is both modest and meaningful. It quietly affirms that sovereign nations need not accept subordination, that diversified partnerships are possible and that collective action among Global South countries offers the best shield against coercion.
The path ahead is not going to be easy. But the contrast between Washington's revived imperial playbook and Beijing's enabling multilateralism has rarely been starker. As Carney warned in Davos, nostalgia for a bygone order is no strategy. Middle powers that aim to be “principled and pragmatic,” he suggested, must seize “the rupture” to construct a more equitable future, concluding new strategic partnerships and pursuing different coalitions for different issues. The visits by Carney, Orsi and other leaders have plainly shown that China is an irreplaceable partner for middle powers and the Global South nations in their pursuit of strategic autonomy, sovereignty, and prosperity.
Warwick Powell is an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology.
