Trump meets with Latin American leaders and focuses attention on the Western Hemisphere

President Trump encouraged Latin American leaders to unite to combat violent cartels as his administration seeks to demonstrate that it is still committed to sharpening the U.S. foreign policy focus in the Western Hemisphere, even as it faces five-alarm crises around the world.

The meeting, which the White House called the “Shield of the Americas” summit, came just two months after Trump ordered a bold US military operation to capture Venezuela’s then-president. Nicolas Maduroand bring him and his wife to the United States to face drug conspiracy charges.

In his opening remarks, Trump said the assembled leaders are united in “the conviction that we cannot and will no longer tolerate anarchy in our hemisphere.”

He was joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Also in attendance were former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was recently named special envoy for the Americas Shield – Western Hemisphere, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

Trump focused a portion of his comments on the cartels that rule Mexico, saying that the “epicenter of cartel violence” comes from the country. He added that the cartels are fueling and orchestrating “deep bloodshed and chaos” in the hemisphere, before signing a proclamation that the president said will establish a coalition against the cartels in the United States.

“The only way to defeat these enemies is to unleash the power of our armies,” Trump said. “We have to use our army. You have to use your army.”

Even more serious is Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a war against Iran a week ago, a conflict that has left hundreds dead, convulsed global markets and destabilized the entire Middle East.

The president’s time with Latin American leaders will be limited: he is ready to fly to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, to be available for the dignified transfer of the six American soldiers dead in a drone attack against a command center in Kuwait, a day after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran.

But with the summit, Trump sought to focus attention on the Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment. He has pledged to reassert American dominance in the region and roll back what he sees as years of Chinese economic encroachment on America’s backyard.

“Under previous leaders, we became obsessed with every other theater and every other border in the world except our own,” Hegseth told regional leaders and defense ministers who gathered in Florida this week for talks about fighting drug cartels. “These elites reduced our power and presence in this hemisphere, opting for benign neglect that was anything but benign.”

Leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras and the Dominican Republic joined the meeting at the Republican president’s Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort where he will also host the Group of 20 summit later this year.

The idea of ​​a summit of like-minded conservatives from across the hemisphere arose from the ashes of what was to be the 10th edition of the Summit of the Americas, which was scrapped during the U.S. military buildup off the coast of Venezuela last year.

The then-host Dominican Republic, under pressure from the White House, had prohibited Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from attending the regional meeting. But after left-wing leaders in Colombia and Mexico threatened to walk out in protest – and without Trump committing to attend – Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader decided at the last minute to postpone the event, citing “deep differences” in the region.

The Shield of the Americas moniker was intended to speak to Trump’s vision of an “America First” foreign policy toward the region that leverages U.S. military and intelligence resources not seen in the area since the end of the Cold War.

It should be noted that the two dominant powers of the region, Brazil and Mexico, were absent from the event, as well as Colombia, for a long time the axis of the United States’ anti-narcotics strategy in the region.

Richard Feinberg, who helped plan the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 while working on the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, said the contrast could not be starker.

“The first Summit of the Americas, with 34 nations and a carefully negotiated comprehensive agenda for regional competitiveness, projects inclusion, consensus and optimism,” said Feinberg, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. “The hastily convened Shield of the Americas mini-summit evokes a defensive attitude, with only a dozen attendees crowded around a single dominant figure.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has made countering Chinese influence in the hemisphere a top priority. His national security strategy promotes the “Trump Corollary” of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which had sought to prohibit European incursions into the Americas, targeting infrastructure projects, military cooperation and Chinese investments in the region’s resource industries.

The first demonstration of a more forceful approach was Trump’s pressure on Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and review long-term port contracts held by a Hong Kong-based company amid US threats to retake the Panama Canal.

More recently, the US capture of Maduro and Trump’s promise to “govern” Venezuela threaten to disrupt oil shipments to China – the largest buyer of Venezuelan crude before the attack – and bring one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region into Washington’s orbit. Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing later this month to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But even leaders closely aligned with Trump have been reluctant to sever ties with China, said Evan Ellis, an expert on Chinese involvement in the region at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

For many countries, Chinese trade-focused diplomacy fills a critical financial gap in a region with major development challenges ranging from poverty reduction to infrastructure bottlenecks. In contrast, Trump has been cutting foreign assistance to the region while rewarding countries that lined up behind his crackdown on immigration, a policy widely unpopular across the hemisphere.

“The United States is offering the region tariffs, deportations and militarization, while China offers trade and investment,” said Kevin Gallagher, director of the Center for Global Development Policy at Boston University, who has written extensively on China’s economic diplomacy in the Americas. “The region’s leaders would do well to remain neutral and protect themselves, so that they can exploit the growing rivalry between the United States and China for their own benefit.”