(a) Latin America has made moderate success in countering US-led global economic order by forming various organizations…

(a) Latin America: Regionalism vs. US-Led Economic Hegemony

Latin American regionalism has periodically sought to establish counter-hegemonic frameworks to insulate the region from the Washington Consensus and US geopolitical predominance. Institutions such as MERCOSUR (Treaty of Asunción, 1991), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA, 2004), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR, 2008), and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, 2011), which pointedly excludes the United States and Canada, were designed as instruments of sovereign economic integration and alternative south-south development.

The moderate success of this regional push is visible in initiatives promoting de-dollarization in bilateral trade, the conceptualization of regional development banks like Banco del Sur (whose 2009 charter never produced a functioning lender), and CELAC’s success in engaging extra-regional partners like China without US mediation. However, these counter-hegemonic efforts face severe limitations. Internal ideological fragmentation—oscillating between the 'Pink Tide' and conservative shifts—alongside the protracted Venezuelan political crisis, has weakened institutional cohesion: most members suspended participation in or left UNASUR in 2018-19, a right-leaning PROSUR was launched in 2019, and Brazil rejoined UNASUR only in 2023. The market-oriented Pacific Alliance (2011) shows that part of the region chose open trade over counter-hegemony, and MERCOSUR's own trade agreement with the EU, concluded in December 2024, is about diversification rather than confrontation. Furthermore, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) anchors Mexico, the region's second-largest economy, to the US orbit, and free trade agreements tie Chile, Colombia, Peru and Central America to the US market. Structurally, geographic proximity to the US, persistent commodity dependence (re-primarization of exports), and entrenchment within IMF and World Bank conditionalities constrain Latin America’s capacity to institutionalize fully autonomous regional economic governance.

(b) ASEAN Plus Three: Problem-Solving Efficacy and Structural Dilemmas

Established in the wake of the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, with its first summit in December 1997, the ASEAN Plus Three (APT—ASEAN, China, Japan, and South Korea) institutionalized East Asian regionalism. Its primary operational successes include financial stabilization mechanisms like the Chiang Mai Initiative (2000), multilateralised as the CMIM in 2010 and backed by the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), food security resilience through the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve (APTERR, 2012), and helping lay the groundwork for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP, in force from January 2022). Yet even its flagship is untested: the CMIM has never been drawn upon, as members in distress have preferred bilateral swap lines or the IMF.

However, APT has proved inadequate in addressing acute political and security flashpoints. It was never designed for security: the South China Sea disputes are handled through ASEAN-China channels, where a Code of Conduct promised since the 2002 Declaration remains unconcluded, and the Myanmar crisis following the 2021 coup has been left to ASEAN's largely unimplemented Five-Point Consensus. The grouping also exhibited severe coordination deficits during the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, where uncoordinated border closures disrupted regional supply chains. Crucially, the asymmetry of economic power within the grouping has led to concerns regarding the erosion of 'ASEAN centrality' in favour of Chinese economic dominance, complicating cohesive regional problem-solving.

(c) Trump's Re-election: Catalyst for European Strategic Revival

Donald Trump’s return to the White House presents a disruptive shock to transatlantic relations, acting as an acute catalyst for the European Union's push toward strategic autonomy. Trump’s transactional view of NATO, threats of unilateral tariff escalations, and isolationist rhetoric have exposed Europe’s excessive reliance on the American security umbrella and US-dominated technological supply chains.

In response, the EU is accelerating investments in sovereign defence capabilities through the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF), and, since March 2025, through the ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan with its €150 billion SAFE loan instrument, while pursuing technological and industrial resilience via the European Chips Act (2023) and the competitiveness agenda of the Draghi report (2024). At NATO's Hague summit in June 2025 European allies accepted a target of 5 per cent of GDP for defence and related spending by 2035, and Germany loosened its constitutional debt brake for defence in March 2025. This is reinforced by Germany's Zeitenwende defence posture and renewed Franco-German convergence on European self-reliance. Nonetheless, substantial domestic constraints persist: fiscal fragmentation across member states, severe industrial and economic stagnation in Germany, and political fractures driven by the Visegrad group’s divergent security postures threaten to stall this autonomous transition.