I want to pause and name how the current moment appears when viewed from outside the structures that are claiming to manage it.

Across Venezuela, Honduras, and the United States—and simultaneously across China and Russia—we are watching a shared imperial dynamic assert itself: coherence is being aggressively consolidated within centers of power, while the coherence of the broader world—social, civic, ecological, and moral—is increasingly destabilized as a consequence.

The bombings in Venezuela and the removal of Nicolás Maduro are framed as restoring order and democracy. The pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández, alongside the continued fragility of Honduras’s electoral process, signals closure without collective reckoning. The circulation of the Epstein files once again demonstrates how extensive documentation of harm can coexist with deep insulation for elites. These are not anomalies. They are expressions of a system protecting itself.

At the same time, we see parallel processes unfolding across contemporary empires.
China consolidates internal coherence through surveillance, economic discipline, and narrative control, exporting instability through supply chains, debt regimes, and geopolitical pressure.
Russia secures coherence through militarization, repression, and territorial assertion, externalizing disorder through war, displacement, and energy leverage.
The United States maintains coherence through financial dominance, selective intervention, narrative authority, and legal insulation for elites, while exporting instability through militarization, sanctions, electoral interference, and structural abandonment.

These empires differ in ideology and method, but they are converging in form. Each is responding to internal strain by tightening control inward and displacing consequence outward. Each is managing legitimacy rather than repairing trust. Each is protecting coherence for some by fracturing it elsewhere.

This pattern is fractal. It repeats at every scale. The same logic that governs empire shows up in institutions, movements, organizations, and relationships: coherence is preserved for those with power by transferring uncertainty, risk, and harm onto others. What appears as stability at the center is experienced as volatility at the margins.

In the Americas, the Monroe Doctrine sits at the historical center of this architecture. It normalized intervention, conditional sovereignty, and asymmetrical legitimacy as tools of order. That logic did not disappear; it dispersed. Today it operates alongside other imperial doctrines, forming a global system in which coherence is hoarded and instability circulates.

In The Creation of Coherence Across the Americas, we describe how this architecture trained societies to manage rupture rather than repair its causes—to prioritize control over continuity, and dominance over relational responsibility. What we are witnessing now is not a deviation from that trajectory, but its continuation under accelerated conditions.

This brings us to the question of solidarity.

In this moment, solidarity cannot mean alignment with a side, a state, or a narrative of order. Those are precisely the mechanisms through which selective coherence is justified. Solidarity now means disciplined refusal of false coherence—the refusal to accept stability for “us” that depends on invisibility, disposability, or chaos for others.

Because the pattern is fractal, solidarity must operate at every scale. It is not enough to critique empire “out there” while reproducing the same logic inside our own institutions, strategies, or relationships. Solidarity requires staying with consequence rather than spectacle, resisting moral shortcuts, and refusing to stabilize ourselves by allowing harm to pool elsewhere.

For those of us working in governance, philanthropy, organizing, and civic leadership, this places a particular responsibility on how we practice coherence. Our task is not simply to respond to events, but to notice where we are being asked—explicitly or quietly—to protect coherence for ourselves by exporting instability to others.

The work ahead is not reaction, alignment, or moral sorting. It is reckoning. It is learning to recognize this structure clearly and refusing to duplicate it, even when doing so appears efficient, defensible, or inevitable.

I offer this as an orientation, not a conclusion. The moment requires that we stay in relationship long enough to see the full pattern—and brave enough to interrupt it where we stand.