“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper following the US’s military invasion of Venezuela.

Miller then went on to underline and even amplify this might-makes-right argument when pressed by Tapper about whether the use of military force in Greenland could be ruled out, considering assertions by President Donald Trump indicating that the US “needed” Greenland for security reasons.

His on-air statements may come across as the type of unrefined answer typical of a robust and unedited television exchange. Yet it is aligned with the official ‘National Security Strategy’ signed by Trump in November; one guided by a ‘peace through strength’ principle and a reframing of the Monroe Doctrine that seeks to reassert American dominance over the ‘Western Hemisphere’.

The strategy, together with developments in Venezuela, suggest that the world’s dominant superpower is preparing to extricate itself from the international system put in place after the Second World War and one that former US administrations helped to craft and defend.

That system gave pre-eminence to diplomatic skill over military might in the resolution of conflicts, and set in place rules that were meant to be applied equally across all powers, big or small.

Such rules have never been equally applied in reality. Nevertheless, on the whole, there was an in-built intolerance for military adventurism, colonialism and imperial aggression.

It would be an overstatement to argue that the international community has given up on those rules and on diplomacy. There are many signs, however, that they are under extreme pressure and the risk of tipping into an unfettered law-of-the-strongest era is all too real.

Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs offered a glimpse of what that could mean economically, while the invasion of Venezuela pointed to what it could mean militarily.

These were also not isolated incidents, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal aggression in Gaza and cross-border attacks having also offered clear signposts of what an embrace of hemispheric hegemony could look like. The question now is whether China will also succumb to the obvious allure of such hemispheric dominance in relation to Taiwan.

For South Africa, these developments pose serious political and economic dangers.

The country’s peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy is a rare diplomatic success story. It also made South Africa a strong and credible advocate for the retention and extension of a multilateral rules-based system that still has room for sovereign choices.

Should this system be further weakened or abandoned, South Africa will be more vulnerable than most.

Under an order characterised by ‘spheres of influence’ rather than rules, South Africa’s policy of non-alignment will be tested. At some point, it might not even be tolerated, with potentially dire economic and diplomatic implications.