The American empire appears to be in retreat. Humiliated by Russia in Eastern Europe, outmaneuvered by China in East Asia, and bogged down in a conflict with Iran in the Middle East, the United States has turned its gaze southward. Unable to win the great power competition across Eurasia, the Trump administration has increasingly embarked on the most aggressive militarization of Latin America policy in a generation, seeking victories in what Washington has long considered its backyard. The result has been what observers are calling the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, a framework that envisions the Western Hemisphere as an American strategic priority zone requiring military suppression of cartel networks and exclusion of Chinese influence.
The most dramatic expression of this new posture came in early January 2026, when President Donald Trump ordered the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The operation, codenamed Absolute Resolve, mobilized approximately 150 aircraft from around twenty land and sea bases. American special forces stormed Maduro’s presidential compound in Caracas, exchanged fire with Venezuelan and Cuban security personnel, and extracted both Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. They were flown to Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York to face federal charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy. Trump publicly acknowledged that beyond the official narco terrorism pretext, control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves was a central motivation. As he stated, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
Yet the kidnapping of a sitting head of state represents only the most visible escalation. Beginning in early September 2025, U.S. Southern Command launched a systematic campaign of lethal strikes against suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. By February 2026, the U.S. military had carried out over forty-four confirmed strikes, killing at least 151 people. The military described the targets as navigating known narco trafficking channels, but provided no proof in most cases that the vessels were carrying drugs. Controversy intensified when it was revealed that American forces conducted a follow up strike on survivors of an initial boat attack. Legal experts have condemned these operations as extrajudicial killings, noting the military had no legal basis to classify boat crews as combatants simply for suspected drug trafficking.
The military footprint has expanded across the region with remarkable speed. In Puerto Rico, the administration quietly reopened Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in fall 2025, a base that had been closed since 2004. F-35B fighter jets and other aircraft were deployed there, with satellite imagery confirming major airstrip renovations, new tent cities for construction personnel, and upgraded communications infrastructure. Puerto Rico now hosts at least five U.S. military operating locations. At Ramey Air Force Base, air operations were reactivated in late August 2025, more than fifty years after its closure.
In Panama, Trump came into office vowing to reclaim the canal and directed U.S. Southern Command to develop military options. In April 2025, the United States and Panama signed a memorandum of understanding allowing U.S. military personnel to deploy to Panama controlled facilities for training, exercises, and other activities. American troops and Marines began training at the former Fort Sherman, a previously handed over base near the canal. In Ecuador, the Pentagon announced in March 2026 that U.S. forces had joined Ecuadorian security forces in joint operations against designated terrorist organizations, marking a new phase of land-based U.S. military engagement in South America. A temporary U.S. Air Force deployment to Ecuador’s Manta air base had been formalized in December 2025, despite Ecuadorian voters rejecting a referendum that November that would have permitted permanent foreign military bases, with over 60% voting against the measure.
The centerpiece of Trump’s Latin America strategy is the Shield of the Americas, formally known as the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. Launched on March 7, 2026, at a summit held at Trump National Doral Miami, the initiative commits participating nations to share intelligence on cartel networks, coordinate military and law enforcement operations, expand maritime interdiction, and use lethal military force against designated “narco-terrorist” organizations. Trump likened the coalition to the anti-ISIS campaign, declaring, “Just as we united to eliminate ISIS, we now require a coalition to dismantle the cartels.”
Seventeen countries were listed as participants, with twelve attending the summit in person. These included Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña, and Honduras’s Nasry Asfura. Notably absent were the three largest economies in Latin America. Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia were deliberately excluded due to ideological misalignment with the Trump administration. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum reaffirmed her country’s non-intervention policy and rejection of any U.S. military operations on Mexican soil. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro criticized the coalition’s “17 small, weak countries that lack experience in dealing with cocaine,” noting that Colombia, the world’s top cocaine producer with decades of counternarcotics experience, had been sidelined. China’s embassy in Washington mocked the initiative by publishing an AI generated video ridiculing the summit.
Policy critics have warned that the Shield of the Americas agenda risks diminishing crucial efforts to build better police in Latin America. A militarized approach has historically produced negligible reductions in drug trafficking while generating waves of human rights abuses. Foreign Policy analysts described the initiative as “strategic minilateralism” designed to bypass inclusive multilateral forums like the OAS in favor of ideologically compatible, smaller coalitions. Legal scholars and human rights advocates have condemned the underlying military campaign, particularly the boat strikes, as extrajudicial killings carried out without legal basis connecting drug trafficking to an actual armed attack.
The tragedy is that none of this is necessary. The United States could pursue a benign hegemony in the Western Hemisphere that is consistent with the original spirit of the Monroe Doctrine. Such a framework would keep external actors from installing military facilities in the region while still allowing these countries to trade with whomever they please. There is no need for military interventions, sanctions, coups, or CIA operations under these circumstances. A confident America would understand that economic ties between Latin American nations and China or any other power do not threaten American security. What does threaten American security is the blowback that inevitably follows when Washington treats its neighbors as subjects rather than partners.
But that is not the path the Trump administration has chosen. Facing pushback in Eastern Europe from Russia, in the Middle East from Iran, and in East Asia from China, the United States appears to be retreating to the Western Hemisphere not to build but to dominate.
The kidnappings, the strikes on fishermen and informal workers, the revival of Cold War era bases, and the construction of an ideological coalition that excludes the region’s largest nations all point to an administration desperately clinging to some form of hegemony. Having failed to impose its will across Eurasia, Washington seems determined to get back in the win column by knocking over a government or two in its own backyard. It is a strategy born of weakness, not strength, and it will produce consequences that will outlast any administration.
