MIAMI – In the East Room of the White House in December 1823, President James Monroe delivered a message to Congress that would echo through two centuries of hemispheric history: Europe must stay out of the Americas. The Western Hemisphere, Monroe declared, was closed to further colonization and foreign interference. It was, in the context of its time, a protective declaration—an assertion by a rising republic that its neighbors to the south would eventually come to loathe.
What followed, however, was not protection. It was something considerably more complicated—and Latin America has never forgotten it.
A Doctrine That Became a Justification
Monroe’s original proclamation was defensive in spirit. But in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt transformed it into something far more muscular. The Roosevelt Corollary asserted that the United States had a legal right to intervene in Latin American nations that experienced chronic wrongdoing or an inability to meet their international obligations to prevent European powers from stepping in to collect their debts.
Washington, in other words, appointed itself the hemisphere’s policeman—not to protect its neighbors, but to ensure they remained compliant with the capitalist order the United States was building.
The legacy across Latin America was an entrenched and lasting distrust of the United States and its pronounced ambitions for Pan-American unity.
What followed over the next century gave that distrust ample justification: several invasions of Nicaragua in the 19th century, U.S. support of Panamanian separatists in Colombia in 1903, the U.S.-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected government in 1954, CIA involvement in the Chilean coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in ’73, U.S.-backed dictators in El Salvador and Honduras, the invasion of Panama to remove Noriega in ’89, and decades of covert operations, proxy wars, and economic coercion across Central America and the Caribbean.
The Cold War era then saw the Monroe Doctrine invoked as a defense against communism from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to the Reagan administration’s support of the Contra rebels against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
Each invocation added a new layer to a regional memory that has never fully healed.
The Trump Corollary: Old Wine, New Bottle
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, embedded in the December 2025 National Security Strategy, is described as “a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.” The strategy asserts that the Western Hemisphere must be controlled by the United States, politically, economically, commercially, and militarily.
Nothing makes the doctrine’s reach clearer than a recent post on X by the U.S. State Department: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”
The possessive is not accidental. It is the Monroe Doctrine distilled to its purest expression—and it lands in Latin American capitals with precisely the resonance its authors intended, and the alarm its critics feared.
While Trump’s first term was characterized by a transactional foreign policy, his second has also included coercion through threats of tariffs, sanctions, and military action to pressure governments to advance his administration’s own priorities—focusing on stopping migration and the flow of illicit drugs, while also aiming to limit Chinese influence in the Americas.
The U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro in January—a sitting head of state removed by foreign special forces in eighteen minutes—has reactivated every historical reflex in the region. China’s official diplomatic analysis characterized the operation as a hegemonic act that fundamentally violates international law—a framing that resonated not only in Beijing but in Bogotá, Brasília, and Mexico City—capitals of countries whose governments have been the staunchest opponents to Washington’s new regional security alliance.
The Shield of the Americas: A Real Opportunity in Imperfect Packaging
And yet. Strip away the historical grievances and the ideological sorting of the Doral guest list, and what remains is a security problem that is entirely real—and that the region’s left-leaning governments have conspicuously failed to solve on their own terms, and the U.S. can be characterized as somewhat justified in attributing the rise of these criminal elements in Central and South America to several governments that if not complicit in the growth of criminal enterprise, at least politically unwilling to address its spread.
Drug cartels operate across borders. Their money moves across borders. Their trafficking routes stretch across entire continents. Yet governments have often fought them one country at a time. The Shield of the Americas is an attempt to change that—creating a coalition of countries willing to cooperate more closely on intelligence sharing, cartel enforcement, and regional security operations.
The Shield of the Americas conference also represents the first multilateral meeting with Latin American heads of state convened by the United States in Trump’s second administration—and it arrives just weeks before a planned Trump-Xi summit in China, making the counter-China dimension of the alliance more than symbolic.
Trump’s strong-arming of Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and review long-term port contracts held by a Hong Kong-based company over the Panama Canal was the first demonstration of a more muscular approach.
More recently, the capture of Maduro and Trump’s pledge to run Venezuela threatens to disrupt oil shipments to China—the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude—and bring into Washington’s orbit one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region.
Several countries, including Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala, have already signed reciprocal trade agreements with the United States that include strong counter-China clauses covering areas beyond trade, such as space cooperation.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sensing its grip over the Western Hemisphere slipping, has established a task force aimed at preserving its gains in the region and anticipating future U.S. actions.
The opportunity is genuine. CSIS analysts have proposed an “Americas Energy Compact” that would offer Latin American countries access to U.S. liquefied natural gas—reducing Chinese dominance of energy generation and electricity distribution across the region—alongside a “Hemispheric Security Network” that goes beyond fighting drugs to address human trafficking, illegal migration, and money laundering through coordinated intelligence sharing.
These are proposals that transcend ideology and address needs that every government in the region—left, right, and center—genuinely shares.
What the Alliance Needs to Become
The Shield of the Americas’ central challenge is not its objectives—it is its architecture. Richard Feinberg, who helped design the original Summit of the Americas in 1994 under President Clinton, described the Doral gathering as projecting “a crouched defensiveness, with only a dozen or so attendees huddled around a single dominant figure’’—a stark contrast to the first Summit of the Americas, which included 34 nations and projected inclusion, consensus, and optimism.
The Monroe Doctrine’s historical legacy means that every unilateral action Washington takes—however justified on security grounds—is filtered through two centuries of accumulated grievance before it reaches its intended audience.
Beijing, the United States’ hegemonic adversary in the Americas, can simply be swept away. Beijing is a major source of capital for the region and buys an enormous volume of regional goods—a reality that means Latin American governments will always hedge their relationships with Washington against their economic dependence on Beijing, regardless of their ideological alignment.
The path forward requires Washington to do something historically difficult: treat its Latin American partners as genuine sovereigns rather than client states, offer economic alternatives to Chinese investment that are competitive on price and terms, and build the alliance incrementally through demonstrated results rather.
Latin America is no longer simply America’s backyard—it is increasingly an arena of rivalry between Washington and the Asian dragon. The governments that attended the Doral summit know this. So do the ones that stayed home.
Two hundred years after Monroe first drew his line in the Western Hemisphere, the question is not whether the United States has the right to lead in its own region. It is whether it can convince its southern neighbors that it is in their interests to keep one hegemony, rather than replacing it with another.
