The Backyard - Power Games in a Rewired Americas
How China quietly conquered Latin America while America wasn't looking and what happens when Washington finally fights back
Executive Summary
On January 2, 2026, U.S. forces entered Caracas and removed Nicolas Maduro from power.
It took less than 48 hours. What took considerably longer, nearly two decades, was everything China had built there that was now suddenly at risk.
Beijing had been patient. Methodical. While Washington spent the 2000s focused on the Middle East, China was quietly rewriting its relationship with Latin America one check at a time. Infrastructure loans. Port deals. Oil-for-credit arrangements.
According to Rhodium Group, Chinese companies invested nearly $4.8 billion in Venezuelan oil infrastructure alone. Across the wider region, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce, Chinese trade with Latin America reached $518 billion by 2024, double the figure from a decade earlier. More than twenty countries had signed onto Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies.
Nobody in Washington had a plan to stop it. For years, nobody seemed particularly alarmed.
Then the ground started shifting.
This paper asks what happens if it keeps shifting. What if Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia all undergo fundamental changes in political leadership and foreign policy orientation, whether driven from within or forced from without? What does the world look like when the dust settles?
The answer reaches far beyond the hemisphere.
A realignment of these states would not just redraw diplomatic maps. It would hit China where it hurts, severing access to discounted energy supplies, disrupting infrastructure investments built over years, and forcing Beijing into more expensive and more vulnerable alternatives. It would strip Russia of its last meaningful footholds in the Americas. And it would hand Washington a degree of strategic depth it hasn’t enjoyed in a generation.
But this is not a simple story about American triumph. Great powers don’t lose gracefully. China doesn’t retreat quietly. Russia doesn’t accept irrelevance without cost. And the nations caught in the middle, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Iran, are not chess pieces. They are countries with populations, histories, and their own ideas about what comes next. Their stability, or instability, will shape whether this transformation becomes the foundation of a more ordered world or the spark for something far more dangerous.
To think clearly about all of it, we define regime change broadly: any fundamental shift in political authority that reorients a state’s foreign policy, whether through elections, internal collapse, or external pressure. We examine both paths. And we examine what follows, the energy shocks, the economic ripple effects, the institutional consequences, and the three distinct futures that could emerge from the same starting conditions depending on how transitions are managed and how displaced powers choose to respond.
The stakes could not be higher. The window may be narrower than it looks.
What follows is an attempt to think clearly, and honestly, about all of it. Let’s dig in.