I find clichés repugnant, especially when they're meant to be didactic. Generally speaking, historical phrases are summaries of accomplished facts, events in progress, or certainties about what will happen.
There is a general consensus that the current global capitalist crisis is terminal, or at least that we are in a historical transition toward a qualitatively different order in which the unipolar hegemony of the United States is clearly declining and disintegrating. No one is a fortune teller to predict the death of capitalism and empire. But we can all read the United States National Security Strategy and observe its behavior.
“The United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and protect our national territory and our access to key geographies throughout the region.”
It is not a principled document; it is starkly pragmatic. Extremely racist, the rest of the hemisphere is a goat-league with leaders who must be recruited. They renounce their role as Atlas in order to concentrate all their power in "their hemisphere and guarantee the numerous strategic resources located there that the United States should develop."
A look at the complexity of the global, Latin American, and especially Venezuelan situation, with its oil reserves, cannot be resolved with the simplicity of a cliché like the one proposed by Ramón Grosfoguel: “Tactical flexibility and strategic astuteness.” Because, as he knows, this is not a single event, but a structural process sufficiently explained by the theories of dependency and the coloniality of power developed by Aníbal Quijano. In the heat of the moment, the political leadership, in the words of Delcy Rodríguez, clarified: we are facing a nuclear power. “We must act with patience and strategic prudence, with clear objectives.”
History takes shape rhizomatically; it is not an arrow launched in a straight line upward toward that other, secularized sky of socialism. Its continuities are processes fraught with complications, not mere wishes and promises. Chávez summarized in the phrase, “We have 500 years and more of struggle,” a historical process, still in transit, of immeasurable critical and creative thought that falls far short of the deeply racist and colonized notion of cunning.
Facing a nuclear power with a long history of invasions and thousands of victims. But also led by the only country that has been capable of dropping two atomic bombs and carrying out a loooong list of terrorist acts to kill presidents, children, bomb hospitals, and do every evil thing you can imagine.