The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the reconfiguration of global geopolitics. It accelerated and sharpened pre-existing trends (Acharya 2020; Haass 2020a; Rodrik 2020). In so doing, the pandemic has highlighted something even more challenging than the virus itself, namely, the global competition between the United States and China (Actis and Creus, 2020a).

The current international order is in transition, marked by a pandemic outbreak with highly disruptive effects, within the setting of a structural process of a global dispute between the two main international powers. The scope and magnitude of the impact of both processes pose a huge challenge for the rest of the actors in the system, be they states, companies, or international organizations.

Latin America was affected by this like no other region in the world (Nugent and Campell 2021). The pandemic undermined the region’s power capabilities and starkly exposed its weaknesses. At the same time, the increase in tensions between the United States and China exacerbated strategic dilemmas and revealed the need for Latin American countries to redefine and rethink their place in the new order. This chapter analyzes the impact on Latin America of this global power dispute.

The first section discusses the nature of the international order in the making from the perspective of entropic bipolarism. The second section reflects on the place of Latin America in this dynamic, a place marked, perhaps paradoxically, by a condition of both structural weakness and potential strategic relevance, resulting from a renewed interest in the region on the part of the great powers. The third section highlights the need for a sub-systemic approach since the challenges are not uniform and differ throughout the region. South America is identified as the most problematic area and the focus is placed there. Finally, and as a conclusion, some normative issues are addressed, and the strategic options available for the countries of the subregion are discussed according to possible scenarios, placing special emphasis on the gap between what is desirable and what is possible.

The Era of “Entropic Bipolarism”

In 2014, Randall Schweller pointed out that in geopolitical terms the world was leaving behind the “era of order” to give way to the “era of entropy” (Schweller 2014).