AMID Brazil’s bold denial of its ports to US vessels and Russia’s naval probing, China’s reaction to the US intervention in Venezuela has been rhetorically sharp but materially restrained. Beijing’s foreign ministry condemned the operation as a “serious violation” of sovereignty and international law, demanded the release of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and backed calls at the UN for an emergency Security Council session.

Chinese commentaries framed the US action as evidence of hegemonic bullying and a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, with implicit warnings that such behavior has implications for Taiwan and other flashpoints.

Yet analysts tracking Beijing’s moves agree that China has deliberately confined its response to diplomatic and normative channels, avoiding military deployments or major economic reprisals tied directly to the crisis. One study of Xi Jinping’s 2026 foreign policy posture notes that Venezuela is a partner where China has “tangible but limited” interests — energy investments, loans and political ties — but not a stake vital enough to justify risking confrontation with the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

First of two parts

THE Marcos regime’s insistence on enacting a 2026 budget, so vulnerable to corruption as the 2025 one was, has fixated the national discourse on how to remove this corrupt administration. However, largely unnoticed here is that there is a tectonic shift in global geopolitics occurring, which, if these take a turn for the worse, could overwhelm our local problems.

US global hegemony that started right after the last world war and started to fade in the late 2000s — the so-called “unipolar moment” — appears to be reaching its end. “America’s imperial collapse is now unstoppable,” declared Ray McGovern, a 26-year CIA veteran and much-respected expert on geopolitics. His lecture on YouTube with that title should be required reading for Filipinos.

A multipolar world in the long term would result in a peaceful period for the world: It has been the US military-industrial complex that has started most of the wars during the unipolar world, the latest of which has been its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, history has shown that a fading hegemon fights first its rivals in a war that affects the entire world.

EVERY Jan. 9, as dawn cracks over Manila’s smog-choked skyline, a human tsunami engulfs Quiapo. From midnight onward, streets meant for cars become rivers of bare feet, sweat, blood and delirium. By daybreak, the traslación is in full madness. Millions of “devotees,” according to organizers themselves, surge toward the Black Nazarene — a blackened wooden statue of Christ mounted on a gaudy, medieval-looking carriage called the “andas.”

Men claw at its ropes; women scream prayers, hoarse from exhaustion; bodies topple and are trampled; and ambulances wail uselessly through impassable streets.

Each year, deaths are written off as “accidents” and injuries as “offerings.” In 2024 alone, five died and more than 1,500 were injured — many crushed, dehydrated or suffocated. Yet the ritual repeats, unquestioned and unexamined, a grotesque annual pilgrimage of pain sold as piety. This is not faith. It is a cult of suffering — colonial in origin, pagan in form and crippling in consequence.