Shield of the Americas

Military force and regime change in the Western Hemisphere

For most of the post–Cold War era, the United States has treated Latin America as an afterthought. Successive administrations focused their attention elsewhere — the Middle East, China, NATO’s eastern flank. But that approach is changing, as was evident again over the weekend.

At President Trump’s Doral golf resort outside Miami on Saturday, leaders from across Latin America gathered for what the White House called the “Shield of the Americas” summit — a meeting that looked less like traditional hemispheric diplomacy and more like the unveiling of a new security doctrine.

Flanked by a dozen Latin American presidents, Trump signed a proclamation creating a regional military coalition to dismantle drug cartels. The effort will be led by Kristi Noem, who is being replaced as Secretary of Homeland Security by Senator Markwayne Mullin.

President Trump signs a proclamation at the Shield of the Americas summit

The message was explicit: Washington is no longer treating Latin America primarily as a diplomatic neighborhood to be cultivated. It is increasingly treating it as a security problem to be solved — by force if necessary.

This is consistent with the most recent statement of the administration’s national security strategy, in which it said it would reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere through military power, ideological alignment, and direct competition with China.

The new approach has been seen for months in the administration’s military and intelligence activity in the Western Hemisphere. Just last week, US and Ecuadoran forces carried out what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “lethal kinetic operations” against drug traffickers inside Ecuador’s borders. It followed months of airstrikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

This January, the administration captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — in what Trump called “18 minutes of pure violence” — and brought him to the US to face drug-related criminal charges. And US intelligence supported Mexico’s operation last month that killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — one of the most powerful and violent criminal organizations in the world, and a major trafficker of fentanyl into the United States.

A coalition of the willing — and ideologically aligned

The guest list at the Doral summit tells its own story. Present were the conservative presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. These leaders largely share a worldview: skeptical of China, hostile to leftist governments in the region, and supportive of aggressive law-and-order policies.

Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the US Army War College, told the BBC ahead of the gathering that it would be a kind of “Latin American CPAC” — a reference to the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering that has become one of the defining events of American right-wing politics.

Absent in Miami were Latin America’s three largest powers: Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

It reflected what administration officials describe as an “enlist and expand” strategy: build a core bloc of governments willing to cooperate with Washington on security operations, and then gradually pressure others to join.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, maintains strong economic ties with China and criticized the US operation that removed Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a violation of international law. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has refused to allow US forces to conduct military operations against cartels on Mexican soil. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has been among the most vocal critics of the administration’s militarized approach to stopping drug smuggling.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

None were invited.

“Brazil and Mexico comprise together more than half of the population in the region [and] more than a half of all economic activity,” Benjamin Gedan, director of the Latin America program at the Stimson Center, told The Guardian. “Throw in Colombia and you’ve got the two biggest South American countries. All [of them] completely on the outside of a US hemispheric policy — and this is the hemisphere the US supposedly dominates and [where it] demands pre-eminence.”

The coalition — formally branded the “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” — also involves a specific legal shift.

Partner governments are encouraged to designate major criminal organizations as terrorist groups, a classification that allows military force to be used against them under counterterrorism frameworks. Trump laid out the concept bluntly: “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries. We have to use our military. You have to use your military.” He pledged US airstrikes, precision missiles, and intelligence to any country willing to cooperate.

“You have to just tell us where they are,” Trump said. We’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll use missiles. You want us to use a missile? They’re extremely accurate.”

White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller offered the administration’s rationale during a gathering of Latin American defense ministers earlier in the week. “We have learned after decades of effort that there is not a criminal justice solution to the cartel problem,” Miller said. Cartels, he added, “should be treated just as brutally and just as ruthlessly” as terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The China factor

But it’s not just about drug cartels. Underlying the entire enterprise is an aggressive push to counter China’s economic footprint in a region Washington largely ceded over the past two decades.

Beijing is now the dominant trading partner across much of South America, having invested heavily in ports, infrastructure and energy projects that the Trump administration views as strategic threats. Between 2014 and 2023, China directed roughly $153 billion in financial assistance to the region — nearly three times what Washington contributed.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the moment as a reckoning with that neglect. “Under previous leaders, we grew obsessed with every other theater and every other border in the world except our own,” he said. “These elites reduced our power and presence in this hemisphere, opting for a benign neglect that was anything but benign.”

The proclamation Trump signed Saturday commits to preventing “malign foreign influences from outside the Western Hemisphere” from gaining influence — language that stops just short of naming Beijing but leaves little ambiguity about the target.

The Venezuela template

When US forces captured Venezuela’s Maduro on January 3, it was the first ground attack by the US military on a South American country in nearly 40 years. At the weekend summit, Trump described it simply: “We went right into the heart and took him out.”

International lawyers and UN officials condemned the operation as a violation of sovereignty. The administration instead framed it as a proof of concept: a hostile leader removed, an interim administration installed, and American oil companies returning to Venezuela’s energy sector.

Trump noted that US firms are now “taking out tremendous amounts of oil” from the country. Diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas were restored last week. The message to other governments in the region is unmistakable: Cooperate and benefit. Resist and risk becoming the next Venezuela.

Oil refinery in Venezuela

One foreign capital likely paying attention is Havana. Maduro’s removal disrupted Venezuela’s long-standing oil lifeline to Cuba, worsening the island’s energy crisis. Trump suggested last week that the fall of the Cuban regime is “just a question of time.” The strategic objective appears to be the elimination of one of the last Cold War–era adversaries in the hemisphere.

Ecuador: the doctrine in practice

The Ecuador operation appears to be the next phase of that strategy, demonstrating how U.S. military power could be used to disrupt trafficking networks more aggressively than traditional law-enforcement cooperation has allowed.

U.S. officials describe the operation as a cross-border strike targeting trafficking networks operating along the country’s northern frontier, where cocaine routes from Colombia converge with maritime smuggling corridors in the Pacific. Working with Ecuadorian security forces, US military and intelligence assets reportedly helped identify and strike what the Pentagon called a “narco-terrorist supply complex” used to move drugs, weapons and money through the region.

The operation marked one of the clearest examples yet of the model the administration is trying to build: American surveillance, intelligence, and precision-strike capabilities combined with host-nation authorization to hit cartel infrastructure inside Latin American territory.

Ecuador’s willingness reflects both a genuine security crisis and a political alignment. The country has experienced a sharp surge in gang violence in recent years, transforming from one of the region’s safest countries into one of its most dangerous. Its president, Daniel Noboa, is also a close ideological ally of Trump. That combination makes Ecuador the administration’s preferred template — particularly compared with Mexico, where the cartel problem is most acute but which has rejected US military operations on its territory.

History’s long shadow

The administration has branded its approach to Latin America the “Don-roe Doctrine,” invoking

invoking both the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers against interfering in the Western Hemisphere, and Theodore Roosevelt’s later expansion of it, which asserted a US right to intervene there as an “international police power.”

That doctrine once justified decades of US intervention in the hemisphere — including military occupations and support for coups in Guatemala and Chile.

For Richard Feinberg, who helped design the original 1994 Summit of the Americas — a gathering launched by the Clinton administration to bring together democratically elected leaders across the hemisphere to promote trade, cooperation, and democratic governance — the contrast between that model and the gathering on Saturday could not be sharper.

Western hemisphere leaders, including US President Bill Clinton, at the inaugural Summit of the Americas in 1994

“The first Summit of the Americas, with 34 nations and a carefully negotiated comprehensive agenda for regional competitiveness, projected inclusion, consensus, and optimism,” he told CBS. “The hastily convened Shield of the Americas mini-summit conjures a crouched defensiveness, with only a dozen or so attendees huddled around a single dominant figure.”

A hemisphere reordered

Shortly after the summit concluded, Trump left Florida for Dover Air Force Base to attend the dignified transfer of six US soldiers killed in Kuwait — casualties from the administration’s newly launched war against Iran.

The moment underscored the scale of the strategic shift underway. Even as the United States opens its largest overseas military campaign in two decades, the administration is simultaneously expanding the use of American military power closer to home, redefining Latin America not as a diplomatic neighborhood but as a security theater.

For decades, US policy toward the hemisphere rested on a different premise — that trade agreements, development programs, and multilateral institutions would gradually shape the region’s politics and economics. The Trump administration is discarding that assumption.

Whether its new strategy of military partnerships, ideological alignment, and direct competition with China produces stability or revives the tensions that once defined US intervention in the region remains an open question. What is clear is that the era of benign neglect in Latin America is over. Washington is back, and it is returning with missiles.