Correct, the protocol is only permissionless and zero-trust for the people projecting the most physical power. But an adversarial equilibrium emerges. This is described by Satoshi in the whitepaper in regards to a 51% attack, but the same logic applies to writing blocks to the chain.
It's conceivable that China and Russia could combine hashrate to potentially censor their adversaries transactions . This is why it's really important for the US and her allies to control enough hashrate to ensure we can still regularly add blocks to the chain. Unless our adversaries can completely censor our transactions which would require much more than 50% hashrate they are highly incentivized to continue acting in an honest way.