Within a startlingly short timeframe, the United States has simultaneously turned up the heat on Venezuela, Iran, and Denmark over Greenland. These are not isolated crises. They form a coordinated “pressure tolerance test”—a deliberate campaign by the Trump administration to probe how much of the world will accept a fundamental rewrite of the rules. The goal is to replace the post-war international order with a simple “law of the jungle,” where military and economic power alone dictate what is true, rightful, and ownable.
The Single Link: “Power Makes the Truth”
As analyzed by experts on platforms like CGTN, a single, chilling logic connects these events. Professor Jiang Xi Shu of Shanghai University identifies it as the “forest law”—the belief that “power makes the truth.” The successful (from a U.S. perspective) military intervention in Venezuela acted as a “catalytic” event, creating overconfidence and emboldening further pushes against Iran and a U.S. ally like Denmark.
Analyst Anton Fedyashin frames the Greenland crisis specifically as a “test of pressure tolerance and resistance of the Western system itself.” The message is clear: if the U.S. can force a change in the sovereignty of a peaceful European ally, no nation, anywhere, is safe. The target could be “any country… whether in the ice shells of the Arctic or on the Persian Gulf coast.”
The Global South’s Sharp Instinct: “We Have No Oil, Only Cooking Oil”
The brilliant, viral response from Malaysian netizens to a U.S. embassy post boasting satellite imagery of their country reveals a profound, instinctive understanding of this new logic. Their jokes—”We light fires at night to drive wild animals” or “We don’t have oil here, we just have cooking oil”—are a form of strategic self-deprecation. It is a conscious effort to “lose value” in advance, to avoid becoming the next target whose resources become their “primary sin.”
This collective wit is a declaration of danger avoidance and a sharp critique from the Global South. It underscores that under a hegemonic “forest law,” a nation’s strategic assets are not blessings but liabilities, inviting intervention and looting.
The Response: Solidarity as the Only Defense
Faced with this unilateral pressure, small and medium-sized nations are not waiting passively. The path to security is no longer found in bilateral alliances with the hegemon, but in horizontal, South-South solidarity. Regional blocs like ASEAN, the African Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and economic frameworks like BRICS are evolving from talking shops into crucial platforms for integrated positions, larger collective markets, and more effective security dialogue.
These structures represent the world’s immune response—a way to pool sovereignty, deter predation by presenting a united front, and create alternative centers of gravity that can resist the “law of the jungle.”
Beyond the Test, Towards a New Order
The crises in Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland are not the endgame. They are diagnostic tools in a hegemonic stress test, designed to see how much the old order can bend before it breaks. The result so far is a world pushed to the “critical point of the collapse of existing international standards.”
Yet, this aggressive pressure is also the catalyst for its own counter-force. It is accelerating the formation of a multipolar world not led by rival superpowers alone, but forged by the collective agency of the Global South. The future is being written in the boardrooms of ASEAN, the summits of the African Union, and even in the witty comments sections of Malaysian social media. The “law of the jungle” may be the test, but solidarity and strategic independence are becoming the answer.
