For decades, experts have accused American presidents of neglecting the Western Hemisphere in favor of faraway conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Both Republicans and Democrats have carried out a policy of either “benign” or “malign” neglect, allowing threats to grow and missing valuable opportunities.
No one can accuse the new Trump administration of neglecting the United States’s backyard. Instead, it’s seen a flurry of regional activity fairly unprecedented in modern times.
Trump devoted a significant part of his inaugural address to demanding that Panama return control of the Panama Canal. It’s not quite clear if he’s joking by repeatedly suggesting that Canada should become the 51st state, but he has made it quite clear he’s serious about taking control of Greenland — considered geologically, if not politically, part of North America — from Denmark. One of his first executive orders renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
Less than a week into his presidency, he threatened punitive tariffs and visa restrictions on Colombia — a longtime close US ally — after that country’s president, Gustavo Petro, blocked military aircraft from returning migrants deported from the United States. The standoff ended in an agreement, and Trump appears to have won the dispute, though the specifics are still a little unclear.
The Colombia fracas was just a preview of this week’s brinksmanship, in which Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then postponed the tariffs for 30 days in exchange for agreements by those governments to beef up border security. Meanwhile, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, went to Central America, where he pressured the government of Panama to reduce the Chinese presence around the canal. He also stopped in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele made the unprecedented and probably illegal offer to put US deportees of any nationality — including Americans — in his country’s notorious prisons.
On top of all that, Trump’s “envoy for special missions” Richard Grenell traveled to Venezuela, where he met with the country’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro — who is not recognized as the country’s legitimate leader by the US government — and secured the release of six detained Americans and claimed to have reached an agreement for the return of Venezuelan deportees, including gang members.
Rubio’s trip ended up being somewhat overshadowed by Trump’s meeting at the White House with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and proposal for the US to take an “ownership position” in the Gaza Strip. Trump has already threatened to use economic pressure against South Africa and reinstated so-called “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran. And there are indications that the EU may be next in his crosshairs for a tariff fight. But even if the administration turns to other parts of the globe, this focus on the Western Hemisphere is still a historical anomaly.
The focus is intentional. “For many reasons, US foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own,” Rubio wrote in a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal called “An Americas First Foreign Policy. “As a result, we’ve let problems fester, missed opportunities, and neglected partners. That ends now.”
The Trump/Rubio approach to the Americas and its embrace of “spheres of influence” thinking hearkens back to the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.
In its original form, it was a vague statement from President James Monroe in 1832 that European powers should not intervene in Latin America. Over the years, it has come to be widely viewed as the US acting as a preeminent — some would say paternalistic — power in its region.
The Trump administration is not shying away from the comparison. In an interview with Fox News shortly before Trump took office, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said that part of the administration’s “America first” agenda will be “reintroducing America in the Western Hemisphere” — an approach he said could be called “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.”
“The Trump administration is trying to create a kind of a security perimeter, a zone of security in our own shared neighborhood first, before they begin to look at other theaters of the world,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
During the Obama administration, Secretary of State John Kerry grandly declared, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, first declared it to be back in 2018. Now, it seems, it’s back again.
But the other nations in the neighborhood may not welcome it. “This is a continent that has been raised on the Monroe Doctrine as synonymous with US aggression, with US interventionism, with Yankee imperialism,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States.
But what will this look like in practice and how will the region respond?
What Trump wants from the Western Hemisphere
A number of the administration’s main priorities have a strong regional component — especially immigration. Trump and Rubio have pressured governments throughout the region to accept deportation flights. The government of Brazil has raised objections to the treatment of deportees on the flights, including the fact that deportees were handcuffed. Mexico even refused one flight.
These incidents got relatively little attention. That was not the case with Colombian President Petro, who chose to go toe-to-toe with Trump on social media, announcing in a 4 am message on X that he was refusing entry to two military deportation flights.
The Trump administration responded by threatening a 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods, financial sanctions, and a visa ban on Colombian government officials — a response that was about as aggressive as it gets, short of a military threat. After Petro first threatened retaliatory tariffs, then posted a lengthy diatribe that referenced Walt Whitman and called Trump a “white slaver,” Colombia eventually agreed to accept deportation flights going forward.
The incident sent a message, backed up by the later tariff showdown with Mexico and Canada, that US allies would not be immune from US threats. Colombia is a longtime US security partner and one of the few countries in the region that still has the US, rather than China, as its largest trading partner. While relations have been a little more strained under Petro, a leftist former guerrilla leader, Colombia has accepted dozens of US deportation flights in recent years.
“Basically, the bilateral relationship, which is the single most important security relationship for the United States in South America, almost imploded in a matter of hours,” said Beth Dickinson, a Colombia-based analyst for the International Crisis Group.
One country that took a keen interest in the affair was China. During the crisis, Beijing’s ambassador to Colombia posted comments to his social media accounts claiming that Colombia-China relations were at their “best moment” since they established ties 45 years ago.
The question of Chinese influence is also central to Trump’s fixation on Panama. As is often the case, it can be a little difficult to separate the president’s bluster from the actual issues at stake.
Trump has inaccurately claimed that Chinese troops are operating the canal, through which about 5 percent of global maritime trade travels. But it is true that Hong Kong-based companies control the ports on either end of the canal. During the Biden administration, military commanders raised concerns that these ports may be used for military purposes.
A possibly generous reading of Trump’s approach is that the talk of retaking the canal is a negotiating ploy to pressure Panama into agreeing to curb the Chinese presence around the canal. The administration also wants Panama to do more to curb migration through the Darien Gap, connecting North and South America. After the meeting, Panama denied the State Department’s claim that it had agreed to let US warships transit the canal for free.
But could threats like the ones Trump used against Petro backfire and push more countries closer into China’s orbit?
“Trump’s tactic may have worked, but it’s also clearly going to push people in the region to think about alternatives,” said Dickinson. “The catastrophe that nearly fell upon us is not something that I think we can risk happening again.”
Canadian jitters
The “Americas First” foreign policy does not only apply to countries south of the Rio Grande. Since taking office, Trump has devoted a surprising amount of attention to Canada, which — according to him — “we pay hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize.”
The ostensible reason for Trump’s tariff threat was the fentanyl crisis, but relatively little fentanyl enters the US from Canada. Trump has lodged an array of other complaints against Canada, including its low military spending and banking regulations, and repeatedly suggested it should become the 51st state. This has prompted a public backlash in Canada ranging from “buy Canadian” campaigns to the booing of the US national anthem at NHL and NBA games.
“I’ve been an analyst in this country for 50 years. I’ve never seen outrage like this,” Janice Stein, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, told Vox. The reason, in her view, is that “the president of the country that we have thought of as our best friend chose to do this.”
Canadian President Justin Trudeau and Trump seem to have forestalled a trade war for the time being. (Beyond establishing a “fentanyl czar” position, it’s not clear how much Canada’s new commitments go beyond what it has already promised on border security.) But it seems unlikely that the threat of tariffs won’t return.
Chrystia Freeland, the former Canadian finance minister and a candidate to replace Trudeau as prime minister, has called for a summit of countries targeted by Trump, including Mexico, Panama, and Denmark. But, suggests Stein, the country has relatively few good options so long as its southern neighbor is under a hostile government.
“This is our best market,” she said. “We don’t want to diversify to China.”
Back to the 19th century
While Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the new administration’s focus on Latin America is overdue and provides opportunities for productive cooperation, he also noted that countries used to the US government’s “benign neglect” could find the new approach jarring. “Now they have not just the attention in the United States, but a fairly assertive posture,” he said. “We can just do policies that try to build a zone of peace and security within the Western Hemisphere without having to bang our fists on the table and say, ‘Monroe 2.0.’”
Jay Sexton, a professor of history at the University of Missouri and author of a history of the Monroe Doctrine, said it has always been “embedded in culture wars,” and tied to debates between internationalists and isolationists over America’s role in the world.
“Today, we’re living in an era of renewed geopolitical competition, volatility, and uncertainty,” Sexton said. “Regional spheres of influence are the name of the game these days, whether you’re talking about China in its region, or Russians in Ukraine. It kind of looks like the 19th century.”
From the British and French in the 19th century to China today, Sexton says, a throughline in US history is that “the United States is most interested in Latin America when there’s a perceived threat.”
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