By Gil Guera
Friday, October 30, 2026
When future historians try to pinpoint the high-water
mark of the second Trump administration’s Latin America policy, they may very
well settle on March 7, 2026, and the inaugural Shield of the Americas summit.
That Saturday, at his golf resort in Doral, Florida,
President Donald Trump addressed a dozen leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean. On hand
were old friends like Javier Milei, the Argentine firebrand whose ardent
support Trump could always count on, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, one of the
administration’s most enthusiastic partners on immigration enforcement.
Promising new allies were present too, like Bolivia’s
Rodrigo Paz and Chile’s José Antonio Kast. Even once-prickly partners like Panama’s José Raúl Mulino had
come more fully into the fold.
The heads of the assembled countries were open to
partnering with Washington, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Trump was
riding high on the spectacular success of Operation Absolute Resolve, the
January raid that had captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and wiped out 32 of
his Cuban bodyguards without losing a single American life.
True, Venezuela had not democratized overnight, and some allies were uneasy
about the new role of interim president Delcy Rodríguez. But the raid had
demonstrated that Washington was serious about prioritizing the region, a shift
that held tantalizing prospects of greater investment and security assistance.
It could pay to be America’s friend, and it could be
exceptionally painful to be its enemy. Cuba had been starved of oil for almost three months and was resorting to
putting state workers on a four-day workweek to save fuel. On the day of the summit, about two-thirds of the island was without power, and the
regime’s total collapse was treated almost as a foregone conclusion. In
Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s dictatorship had hurriedly
scrapped its visa-free policy for Cubans shortly after the Maduro raid,
in an apparent attempt to avoid drawing American ire. Nonstate actors were also
feeling the weight of the new American commitment to the region: The U.S. had
carried out 34 strikes on suspected drug boats to that point, and
showed no signs of slowing down.
Relations with Mexico had been transformed too. Under the
Biden administration, the border had served as a leverage point for Mexico. But
now Claudia Sheinbaum’s government was cooperating with the United States on
border enforcement, and border encounter numbers had plunged to record lows. American pressure also had led Sheinbaum’s
government to halt oil shipments to Cuba, and it had extradited 92 cartel figures to American custody. Perhaps wary of the
Trump administration’s undisguised appetite for unilateral military operations
on its soil, Mexico had also just worked with U.S. intelligence to carry out
its most ambitious operation against a drug
kingpin in years.
The United States seemed capable of squeezing friend and
foe alike to get what it wanted, and no one could say with certainty what it
might do next, or whether there were limits to what it could achieve. Almost
eight months later, some of those limits are beginning to crystallize. The Iran
war has become a counterexample to the decisive outcome of Operation Absolute
Resolve, Trump’s attention has been diverted by domestic political issues, and
developments in the region have taken a few surprising turns.
Right-wing momentum stalls.
A string of right-wing political victories in the region
has buoyed the Trump administration’s strategy. From January 2025 to July 2026,
conservative candidates won all seven presidential elections in Latin America. Trump ally
Flávio Bolsonaro’s lead in the first round of Brazil’s election raised hopes that South
America’s largest country would soon throw its considerable weight behind the
administration’s regional efforts.
Instead, Bolsonaro lost in a surprise upset to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva and found himself going from being the president-in-waiting to having to flee the country for the United States for fear of being
arrested by Lula’s government.
Bolsonaro’s loss is not the only complication for the
administration’s hemispheric strategy. The region’s right has seen a drop in
popularity: Seven of the 11 right-of-center presidents in Latin America have
negative approval ratings, and only Bukele and Costa Rica’s Laura
Fernández command the support of comfortable majorities.
Some are also hedging by strengthening ties with China.
Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa made his first state visit to China in August, Chile has reaffirmed the one-China policy, Kast is meeting with Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Shenzhen next month, and Peru’s Keiko
Fujimori has reportedly assured China that Peru attaches great
importance to its ties with the nation.
Progress in Venezuela, site of the administration’s
crowning foreign policy achievement, has been rocky. A devastating set of earthquakes in June set back the country’s recovery
efforts. Impatient with the private sector’s unwillingness to commit to revitalizing
Venezuela’s oil industry, the White House directly facilitated and joined
an oil deal some of its usual supporters have been critical of.
The return of María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s leading
opposition figure, also introduces an element of turbulence into the stability
the administration has thus far enjoyed in Venezuela. Calls for elections are growing in strength, and the political
situation threatens to begin taking on a life of its own.
Far from collapsing or acquiescing, Cuba and Nicaragua
have only grown more brazen in their hostility toward the United States. At the
U.N. this week, a Cuban diplomat tried to interrupt Ambassador Mike Waltz’s remarks on the embargo
and made physical contact with an American diplomat. Cuban
President Miguel Díaz-Canel later swore that Cuba “will not back down … in the face of Yankee
pressures and orders.”
The Nicaraguan regime has gone even further, shamelessly
consolidating its grip on power through an announcement that the country would
cease to hold elections, a declaration later converted to a formal constitutional reform process that would see Ortega and
Murillo functionally installed as dictators for life.
Out of focus.
What happened? Rightly or wrongly, many actors in the
region have determined that the American approach to the region is not going to
be the one Washington seemed to be taking in March, for three broad reasons.
First, in his own rhetoric, Trump has repeatedly stated that the U.S. will deal with Cuba after
it finishes with Iran. This may be honest and even prudent, but the lessons the
Cubans (and the Nicaraguans, who are sometimes mentioned as being next on the administration’s to-do list after Cuba)
have taken from it are that they are safe as long as the U.S. remains mired in
war with Iran. They have evidently decided that they can hold out
until the midterm elections, when they expect Republican losses will weaken the
president and potentially restrain his Western Hemisphere policy further.
Second, the administration’s priorities have sometimes
come across as inconsistent. The crux of current American regional strategy, as
outlined at the Doral summit, is that the U.S. will not “allow hostile foreign
influence to gain a foothold in this hemisphere.” This was clearly aimed at
China and Russia, but since then, Trump has made a state visit to China, hosted Xi Jinping at the White House,
and generally taken a more conciliatory approach to U.S.-China relations than
expected.
A military pact with Nicaragua that Russia ratified in April
was not met with a dramatic response, and Trump has recently sought to bargain with Russia as well. These developments have made
it more difficult for Latin American leaders to discern exactly where the
administration’s lines are when it comes to engaging with China and Russia.
Third, the United States has not always treated its
friends in a friendly manner. Nine of the 12 governments in the Shield of the
Americas coalition in March were hit by the forced-labor tariffs that Washington announced in July.
These tariffs were particularly harsh for Chile, whose strategic importance and
friendly president couldn’t save it from being placed in the highest tariff
tier of 12.5 percent. The message actions such as these have
conveyed is that spending political capital to align with Washington doesn’t
necessarily buy protection or preferential treatment.
None of this means that Washington has walked away from
the region, that it has neglected its partners, or that it has given up on Cuba
and Nicaragua. The U.S. has announced plans for $1 billion in security assistance to Colombia, continues to signal forthcoming action in Cuba, and is increasing its scrutiny of the Ortega-Murillo regime.
But compared with how things stood in March, the regional
order that Operation Absolute Resolve seemed to be ushering in now appears far
less certain.
Running out the clock.
Next week’s midterms
could further complicate the administration’s hemispheric strategy. If
Democrats win the Senate and the House, they will likely use their subpoena
power to investigate a number of the administration’s actions in the region,
from the drug-boat strikes to the terms of the Venezuelan oil deal
to the State Department’s role in the Brazilian election. They could also use spending
bills to limit the tools at the White House’s disposal. This could include
barring funds for unauthorized military actions against Cuba or restricting the
Pentagon office that holds Washington’s stake in the
Venezuelan oil deal.
However, it seems unlikely that Democrats will gain the supermajorities necessary to override a White House veto,
and paradoxically a political environment that limits Trump’s ability to pass
his agenda in Congress could lead him to focus more on foreign policy, where
the executive branch enjoys its broadest remit.
Regardless of the midterms’ outcome, the administration
will have its hands full in the region. Bolsonaro’s flight to the U.S. will create another recurring issue in
relations with Brazil, and consequential trade talks with Mexico are ongoing.
A military operation in Cuba could also be in the cards.
Despite Trump’s professed confidence that a deal with the island’s communist leaders
will come together, diplomacy appears to have stalled. While tensions with the Cuban government have been
simmering for months, given Trump’s particular loathing for being defied or
insulted publicly, Cuban behavior at the U.N. this week could prove to be a tipping point.
While Cuba has rightly become a core issue in the
administration’s regional strategy, the U.S. might have an easier time
reestablishing deterrence and credibility in the region by mounting a swift
response to the growing problems in Nicaragua. The region is united in its view that Nicaragua has become a
destabilizing presence, and the Nicaraguan regime has never faced the kind of
pressure campaign the United States could bring to bear upon it. Taking decisive action against the
Nicaraguan dictatorship would send a message to both the Cuban regime and
remaining Chavista figures in Venezuela that Operation Absolute Resolve was not
a one-off but rather the opening move toward establishing a safer, more
prosperous democratic order.
The stability of that order will require the U.S. to
demonstrate a willingness to make trade-offs that benefit its friends, such as
conditional tariff relief for countries that continue to align with Washington.
Perhaps most important, it will also require the U.S. to see the return of
democracy to Venezuela through to the end. If the U.S. can prove that it is
capable not only of destroying things that are evil but also of building things
that are good, American power will seem like something to follow rather than to
fear.
No comments:
Post a Comment