Why Latin America is a Lab for the New World Order

World politics is tending towards a paradox. Geopolitics is restoring Cold War dynamics, with states seeking technological autonomy that guarantees superiority over adversaries. However, national governments have scarcer means and more dependencies, on each other and on new actors such as technological multinationals. "No country alone can make an iPhone today," as economist Eric Beinhocker aptly puts it.¹³²

The return of spheres of influence is taking place in a world of hardwired networks, where old alliances have become less certain, with the United States taking distance from NATO.¹³³ This combination is creating new battlefronts for critical technologies, where large and small countries play a new game of appropriation versus autonomy. Many Latin American countries hold an indispensable supply of resources for Deep Tech, from raw materials to energy, yet have had, so far, wasteful institutions and disjointed ecosystems, lending themselves mostly to appropriation.

Now that there is less West and more Rest in geopolitics, how will resource-rich places like LATAM realign to the emerging world dis-order?

# The politics of appropriation in a networked world

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published Science: The Endless Frontier, advocating that the United States invest in what today we would call Deep Tech, to engineer advantages in knowledge into economic and military competitiveness. Eighty years later, Bush’s predictions have become the doctrines of states, from the US to China. Today, geopolitical preparedness is technological preparedness, and vice versa. We are back to the ’60s: competition between states plays out at the technological frontier, ranging from Artificial Intelligence to Quantum Technologies to Biotechnologies. Every investment in inventions is a dual-use investment in a world where alliances are more fragile and conflicts more frequent.

A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.

Vannevar Bush Science: The Endless Frontier (1945)

The Biden administration had started imposing export controls on critical technologies and offering incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act. In 2022, TSMC received $6.6 billion in direct funding and $5 billion in low-cost loans through the CHIPS Act to build a foundry in Arizona; it later announced an additional $100 billion investment.¹³⁴ Today, the United States, China, the European Union and others are trying to repatriate these capabilities, or appropriate them, evident in the Trump Administration’s use of tariffs to coerce adversaries and allies alike into buying or becoming Made in the USA.

Today, geopolitical preparedness is technological preparedness, and vice versa. Every investment in inventions is a dual-use investment in a world where alliances are more fragile and conflicts more frequent.

As for China, they understood early that geography is destiny. Part of China’s National Development and Reform Commission 2024 directives include a strategic positioning of their Deep Tech industries, framed as a response to "a shift in the international balance of power, the rise of the East and a relative decline of the West."¹³⁵ China has been building a network of Silk Roads worldwide, where the silk is the natural resources and minerals quintessential to building new tech. As Ángel Melguizo and Margaret Myers put it, many of China’s ICT and high-end manufacturing companies have sought to engage more extensively with Latin America and the Global South.¹³⁶ If the iPhone cannot come to China, then China goes to the iPhones.