Although we have entered an era of great power competition, the deeper struggle is civilizational. The various pages across this capsule gather reflections written over the course of more than a decade, all united by a single civilizational concern: What must be remembered and restored for liberty to endure in our hemisphere?

The Monroe Doctrine need not be seen as merely a matter of power projection— a charitable reading would understand it as a civilizational claim: that liberty, law, and human dignity had taken root in the Americas and were to be defended. But that claim cannot hold unless we remember who planted those roots. Long before Madison or Marx, Hispanic Scholasticism laid down a tradition of natural rights, sovereignty, and moral order, rooted in faith and reason. If Hispanic America is to be brought back from the periphery, it must first be remembered — justifiably — as a coauthor of the Western project itself.

But the ideas I’m referencing were not peripheral. They were institutionalized in the universities of the New World — the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino (Santo Domingo, 1538), the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, 1551), and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico (1551) — all founded decades before Harvard College (1636) was even imagined. These were not mere colonial outposts but engines of legal, theological, and economic thought deeply intertwined with their peninsular counterparts— making both sides of the Atlantic World co-authors of our shared civilizational project. 

In 2011, I argued that Latin America was becoming a new ‘arc of crisis’ for the United States, with Cuba’s communist regime working alongside Venezuela to invite external adversaries into the region. I was young and lacked the right language or frameworks, but I sensed the vulnerabilities—strategic and ideological—that continue to shape how I read the hemisphere today.

“Even though the United States has enjoyed regional dominance since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, it now faces the daunting task of preventing “elements hostile to [its] values and sympathetic to [its] adversaries” from gaining influence in its own hemisphere. While the United States has spent years absorbed in an unsustainable war effort, Cuba’s Castro regime has opened the doors of the Western Hemisphere to state and non-state actors driven to destabilize and undermine American global supremacy. As Tim Rush notes in his 1980 piece “Is Cuba Fomenting Revolution to Get to Mexico’s Oil?”, “the ultimate aim of Cuba and the Soviet Union is to create an ‘Arc of Crisis’” in the region. I believe Cuba, with help from its Venezuelan ally, has achieved precisely that.”

I return to that early intuition because the questions it raised still endure—questions not only of strategy, but of memory, meaning, and whether the roots of liberty in our hemisphere will be defended or forgotten.

In Venezuela, more than eight million people have fled in a mass exodus— not only from an ideology of repression and violence, but from the collapse of their currency at the hands of their own government. In 2018, inflation peaked at over 130,000 percent, erasing savings, wages, and whatever was left of the moral contract between ruler and ruled. For the Hispanic Scholastics, such debasement would not be seen merely a failure of policy, but rather a form of tyranny. Jesuit schoolman Juan de Mariana wrote:

“If the prince is not the master but, rather, the administrator of the private possessions of his subjects, then he is not allowed to take away arbitrarily any part of their possessions for this or any other reason, as occurs whenever money is debased, for then what is declared to be worth more is worth less. And if the prince is not empowered to levy taxes on unwilling subjects and cannot set up monopolies over merchandise, then neither is he empowered to make fresh profit by debasing money, because this tactic aims at the same thing, namely, robbing the people of their wealth, no matter how much it is disguised as granting more legal value to a metal than it naturally has. All of this is smoke and mirrors, and it is all doomed to the same outcome, which will be seen with more clarity in what follows.” (De Monetae Mutatione, 1609)

Great power competition is the surface of a deeper war—a contest over memory, meaning, and the moral foundations of order. If the West forgets its civilizational roots, no arsenal or alliance can save it.