In December, which has just passed, the U.S. Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2025 (FY25 NDAA).
Not only does it establish a framework for military spending and national defense, but it also reveals the real intentions of the northern country in the world and the region, generating profound direct implications for Our America.
What does this Law contain?
The FY25 NDAA Act authorizes perhaps the highest budget in this country’s history, totaling $843 billion, with a focus on modernizing military capabilities, research, and technological development; of course, for the war and subjugation of peoples.
Of note, the creation of a hybrid architecture that links satellite ground stations with the private and commercial sector, that is, private technology and commercial communications companies, with a technological framework at the service of the Department of Defense, in this same logic the implementation of a space control strategy is projected.
In the same direction is a policy on artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear weapons. It is worth saying that the use of AI in the planning and execution of military strategies of population control and mass destruction is already being experimented, as in the case of the Genocide against the Palestinian people and in Ukraine.
This hybridization between the public and the private in matters of defense and security will undoubtedly bring difficulties for people, NGOs, organizations, progressive governments, defense and guarantee of rights, persecution, segregation, stigmatization, criminalization, etc.
This Law includes a strong component of missile defence and nuclear modernisation, which means the intensification of the arms race, with the clear purpose of increasing tensions in an already fragile context.
International agreements to control the increase and rise of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction are gradually fading, while the international order is collapsing along with the organizations in charge of sustaining peace, justice and human rights, of peoples and the environment.
Progress is being made towards control through an underhanded state of global war, reaffirming the so-called interoperability, which is nothing more than arming the war with public resources, weapons and men from the “allied countries”, a re-engineering of colonialism.
Continue to provide resources to NATO, allied countries in Europe and strengthen the military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
This logic will generate greater regional tensions, to which is added the change of leadership of the “office for the management of North American affairs in the region”: the OAS.
The Law reflects a focus on geopolitical competition focused on “stopping” the advance of China, Russia, adding Iran, North Korea, the best excuse to advance in the militarist trend that, in the end, turns out to be a desperate formula not to lose its hegemony in the face of the advance of a new global order.
One aspect that seems to go unnoticed is its environmental component, as it includes provisions to promote practices that claim to reduce the environmental impact of military operations; however, it is this militarization that entails the control of strategic areas, for the extraction of natural resources, generating enormous environmental impact and displacement of native communities, increasing the risk and threat to the environment and the rights of the peoples.
This constant and acute militarization projected for 2025, present in this Law, translates into intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries “allied and non-allied”, which will undoubtedly further impact communities, which already face significant challenges such as poverty, violence, social exclusion
Not to mention the construction of a territorial peace with real transformations.
This law makes clear the objective, to undermine sovereignty under colonial logic, in a context characterized by the emergence of a new multipolar order and the weakening of U.S. global hegemony.
This is how Biden leaves and Trump resumes.
By: Antonio García, First Commander of the ELN