By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Why the Western Hemisphere Is Turning Away from America and Toward China

No great power sustained as dominant a position over its neighboring region as the United States did during most of the twentieth century. But in recent decades, Washington has largely disregarded its neighbors. Since a free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and a military initiative to help Colombia combat drug cartels were negotiated more than 25 years ago, United States policy in the Americas has consisted mostly of failed measures to stem flows of migrants and drugs across U.S. borders. This neglect has opened the door for China and Russia to exert increasing influence across the Western Hemisphere.

Since the beginning of his political career, U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled his intention to reassert U.S. dominance in the region. He hopes to resist China and Russia’s growing diplomatic, economic, and military engagement with countries that have traditionally been within the United States’ sphere of influence, and doing so while delivering on issues important to his base, including securing favorable trade terms and stopping flows of both migrants and fentanyl. During Trump’s first administration, these goals were largely aspirational. He and his officials frequently invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration asserting exclusive U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere, when they opposed Russian military cooperation with Latin American countries, say, or framed Chinese economic expansion in the region as a security threat. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, called the doctrine “as relevant today as when it was written.” Ultimately, these appeals amounted mostly to rhetorical posturing and, because of policy inconsistencies and incompetence, effected little concrete change. In his second term, however, Trump is accompanying radical rhetoric about regional hegemony with real action.

In a matter of weeks, he has discarded any pretense of transactional diplomacy and adopted a predatory approach. Taken aback by the thrust and speed of his initiatives, many countries have bent the knee. Consider Panama, one of the countries in the Western Hemisphere that has historically been most supportive of the United States. In response to Trump’s threats of reclaiming the Panama Canal, which the United States controlled for much of the twentieth century, it immediately withdrew from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, resulting in the cancellation of several planned infrastructure projects. This represented a major blow to Beijing’s ambitious port diplomacy in the region. Panama also waived fees for U.S. Navy vessels and granted them priority passage through the canal, a significant concession. And U.S. pressure prompted a Hong Kong-based company to sell its ports at both ends of the canal to a consortium led by the American investment firm BlackRock, a move cast by the Trump administration as a strategic victory.

Mexico has faced the prospect of 25 percent tariffs and a U.S. designation of several Mexican-based cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—a branding that would allow the United States to launch cross-border military operations against those groups. It secured a reprieve by deploying 10,000 of its national guard troops to the border and allowing U.S. marines to enter the country and train Mexican special forces. Trump proceeded with the terrorist designations anyway and continues to threaten Mexico with tariffs. El Salvador, for its part, agreed to take in migrants of any nationality who are deported from the United States in exchange for an extension of temporary protected status for Salvadorans already in the United States.

These initial successes may support the perception that Trump is building up U.S authority across the Western Hemisphere. But extracting a series of concessions from weaker neighbors is not an effective strategy in the long term, because it doesn’t take into account rapidly shifting regional dynamics that the United States is unwittingly accelerating with its belligerent behavior.

Many countries in the Western Hemisphere are shrewdly hedging their bets—neither turning away from the United States completely nor closing themselves off to U.S. competitors. China, in particular, has made significant inroads in Latin America, where it is often seen as a reliable source of the kinds of investment and diplomatic engagement that the United States no longer consistently provides.

Trump’s threats and intimidation tactics cannot provide a stable foundation for long-term U.S. primacy in the region. For a president who prides himself on “the art of the deal,” he has, in Latin America, made significant demands while offering few benefits in return. Far from rejecting transactional diplomacy, regional leaders crave genuine give-and-take relationships in which their priorities receive consideration. If the United States wants to counter China’s influence, it must offer tangible alternatives that address local concerns. The U.S. demander in chief must learn that real deals are predicated on mutual advantage. He must position the United States as a source of opportunity rather than one merely of pressure.

U.S. President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One, Washington, D.C., March 2025

 

A Door Left Open

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has taken its hemispheric dominance for granted, focusing on conflicts in the Middle East, European security, and Asian competition while offering the Americas little substantive engagement. This neglect created opportunities for China and Russia to advance their strategic interests while satisfying the region’s investment and partnership needs.

China has made widespread and durable inroads in Latin America to secure reliable supplies of energy, minerals, and various food products; identify targets for Chinese investment, such as hydroelectric dams in Ecuador and railway projects in Argentina; cultivate diplomatic support from the Latin America caucus in the United Nations; and gain leverage over the United States by showing that it can operate in Washington’s traditional sphere of influence. Today, China has displaced the United States as the primary trading partner for several major economies and persuaded most countries in the region to break off formal ties with Taiwan. Nascent programs for Chinese cooperation with police and military forces in Latin America have laid the groundwork for expanded security relationships. Crucially, China has achieved these pragmatic gains through diplomacy and without directly confronting the United States.

Moscow has pursued a narrower strategy focused on security relationships. Russia has built military ties with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, providing these states with weapons systems, military training, and intelligence support. It has also launched disinformation campaigns that exploit and inflame grievances with the United States. Although Russia’s presence in the region is less visible than China’s, its influence operations continue to frustrate the United States, and at little cost to the Kremlin.

Consensus is growing in Washington about the seriousness of these threats, as evidenced by bipartisan congressional statements and Pentagon assessments. General Laura Richardson, the commander of U.S. Southern Command from 2021 to 2024, recently warned that China is “playing chess” in the Western Hemisphere while the United States is “playing checkers”—a reference to the success of Beijing’s patient and holistic approach to the region.

The first Trump administration and the Biden administration both failed to meaningfully diminish Beijing’s economic footprint or Moscow’s strategic presence. Cuba’s communist government, which maintains close ties with both China and Russia, kept its grip on power despite renewed U.S. economic restrictions that further damaged the Cuban economy. Washington’s recognition of an opposition candidate’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency in 2019 failed to dislodge Nicolás Maduro from power, and a botched coup attempt the same year led by former U.S. special forces members only complicated the relationship further. (The U.S. government denied involvement in the coup attempt.) In 2019 and 2020, the White House tried to exclude the Chinese technology giant Huawei from Latin American 5G networks by warning governments about security and surveillance risks. But it offered no incentives for compliance; Huawei remained the most cost-effective option, and the persuasion campaign failed.

Even apparent victories have proved hollow. The first Trump administration managed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, but the intended effects—bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States and reducing the country’s trade deficit with Mexico—have hardly materialized. In 2020, the administration installed Mauricio Claver-Carone, a National Security Council official, as the first U.S. president of the Inter-American Development Bank, a significant funder of development projects in Central and South America. The purpose was to curtail China’s influence in the institution—an ironic move, given that a decade earlier, Washington had invited Beijing to help capitalize the bank in order to reduce U.S. operational costs. The move backfired: the bank’s board of governors, on which China remains an observer, removed Claver-Carone after allegations of improper behavior involving a subordinate. The gambit did nothing to reduce Chinese investment flows across the region.

Such failures arose from the first Trump administration’s toxic brew of ideological rigidity, bureaucratic incompetence, and interagency feuding. When the administration could agree on a Latin American strategy, it was almost always advanced via unilateral demands rather than through diplomacy with the relevant countries. The administration’s failure to grasp Latin America’s growing agency—its ability to pursue policies independent of the United States and despite U.S. pressure—resulted in diplomatic tone-deafness. Washington demanded that countries steer away from China without offering any meaningful economic or political alternatives, essentially asking them to forgo billions of dollars’ worth of critical investments and strategic partnerships while receiving nothing in return.

The second Trump administration appears more focused and is centering its regional policy on a few clear priorities: stopping migration, instituting tariffs, and preventing the trafficking of fentanyl. This time, U.S. neighbors are experiencing real effects. Deportation rates have surged. Punishing tariffs have been imposed on Brazil, Canada, and Mexico, disrupting established trade patterns. The administration has also placed unprecedented diplomatic and economic pressure on Mexico to curtail synthetic opioid manufacturing within its borders. But can such a predatory approach, however disciplined, succeed in realigning the Western Hemisphere with U.S. interests?

 

The Power to Choose

For many countries in the region, this newfound independence from the United States stems not from ideology but self-interest. Unlike in previous decades, Latin American countries have economic alternatives, and have found stable sources of capital, technology, and export markets in China, the European Union, and Gulf states. This economic pluralism has reshaped their geopolitical calculus: diversified economic and diplomatic relationships help mitigate the risks posed by the United States and embolden some countries to more confidently defy U.S. preferences.

Despite campaign rhetoric promising alignment with the United States, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has maintained excellent working relations with China, which is his country’s second-largest trading partner. Brazil’s center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has tried to vastly expand economic and diplomatic ties with China. Even Canada, the United States’ closest ally and largest trading partner, has developed its hedging strategy. Despite deep economic integration with the United States through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Ottawa has actively diversified its trading partners, signing agreements with the European Union and joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade accord with ten other countries in the Pacific. When Trump threatened to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement during his first term, Canada responded by accelerating those efforts and refusing to fully align with the United States’ China policy. And Ottawa’s targeted retaliations to Trump’s recent aluminum and steel tariffs further demonstrate that Washington’s economic coercion has at least partially alienated even its most integrated, codependent neighbors.

There’s a real threat of backlash to Trump’s heavy-handed approach. The more aggressively he attempts to reassert U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the more likely it is that regional governments will redouble their efforts to develop alternative sources of support and investment. Trump’s bullying may therefore yield short-term concessions but undermine the kind of long-term influence he craves. Regional countries maintain relations with the United States when it is beneficial to them but have developed the capacity to turn elsewhere when the old regional hegemon becomes too threatening.

Trump’s leadership style may itself be a liability. Latin American leaders are accustomed to their own populists and are thus unlikely to be swayed by the U.S. president’s theatrics. When these experienced politicians watch Trump mix family business with state affairs, appoint relatives to positions of power, use his office to evade legal troubles, engage in bombastic self-promotion, demean his opponents, and display authoritarian impulses, they don’t see the leader of the free world—they see the gringo version of a familiar archetype. In seeking to make America great again, Trump has, from a Latin American lens, instead made it eerily familiar.

 

Crowd Control

Renewed U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere requires something more durable than fear: measures that offer clear paths to prosperity and security. To be sure, the United States remains the region’s dominant power, capable of inflicting significant damage. But in an increasingly multipolar world, its primacy can no longer be taken for granted. Ultimately, the United States needs to work with Latin America to manage transnational challenges—including migration and drug trafficking—that cannot be solved by walls or unilateral action alone. The path forward is a fundamental reimagining of the United States’ hemispheric relations. Washington must revamp its rules, its institutions, and its mindset to create conditions for mutually beneficial cooperation with its neighbors, particularly because many of them can now choose to withhold their cooperation. Coercion cannot substitute for meaningful political engagement.

To start, the United States should not try to force Latin American countries to move away from China. They will not be persuaded by external pressure but by what drew them toward Beijing in the first place: self-interest. As such, the United States should help these countries recognize the dangers of deepening their dependence on Beijing, including how China’s aggressive trade practices can undermine local industries and how Beijing uses its diplomatic and economic partnerships for geopolitical leverage, specifically against U.S. interests. It is especially critical to convince Latin American countries that it is in their own interest to prevent China from developing military and defense capabilities in the Western Hemisphere that could challenge the region’s security dynamics.

To accomplish these aims, Washington could support the development of mechanisms tailored to each country’s needs that can screen investments for national security concerns. It could share intelligence on Chinese and Russian disinformation operations, establish early-warning systems for predatory trade practices, provide satellite and intelligence support to combat illegal fishing operations in territorial waters, and offer technical assistance to protect critical sectors from cyber-espionage. By delivering tangible value and expertise, the United States would position itself as a helpful partner safeguarding regional sovereignty.

This will take time. Most Latin American countries do not currently see Beijing as a threat to their economies, their democratic systems, or the security of their citizens, but as a source of investment, infrastructure, and export markets unencumbered by the historical baggage of U.S. interventionism. There is no doubt that Washington’s red lines will be a hard sell. Countries across the region are justifiably skeptical of any U.S. attempt to define the boundaries of their relationships with other powers. But unlike the current coercive approach, a strategy of persuasion demands genuine engagement and collaborative risk assessment. And its goal would be not to dictate terms but to help regional states recognize how unchecked ties with China could eventually undermine their strategic autonomy. Such an approach would require the United States to reimagine itself as a regional power committed to helping its neighbors preserve their independence.

If U.S. policymakers were willing to think more creatively, they might even contemplate cooperation with China in select areas—such as infrastructure development or climate resilience—that are of concern to both countries and to the region at large. For China, such cooperation would be a means of securing access to markets and resources without provoking a confrontation. For the United States, it would signal a shift from reactive coercion to proactive leadership. And Latin American states would not only escape the strains of great-power competition but also benefit from great-power collaboration. Although this approach demands policy coherence and diplomatic discipline—qualities in short supply in Trump’s Washington—it offers a far more credible path toward renewing U.S. influence in a region that will not be easily coerced into alignment.

 

 

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