This essay is adapted from Americas First: Reorienting US Foreign Policy, a publication of the Hoover History Lab. Download the full text here or watch the author explain the importance of “America’s backyard” here.
Secretary of State George Shultz often advised, “Foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood.” The United States must prioritize diplomatic relations, economic engagement, and security cooperation in the Western Hemisphere—indeed, it is foundational to the implementation of any American grand strategy designed to achieve aims of a global nature. The United States cannot successfully confront its enemies, support its allies and partners, and maintain its leading role in the world if its geopolitical neighborhood is insecure and unstable. The pursuit of regional stability, an aim enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine, has occurred in various incarnations, and the underlying strategic principle remains vital for policy makers today.
Whatever threatens Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has an impact on American national security. “If your neighborhood is unhealthy,” Shultz warned, “you’re going to have all sorts of problems.” This dilemma of hemispheric security has vexed decision makers throughout the nation’s history. Even now, the formidable power of the United States does not confer complete protection within its own hemisphere. Such a paramount concern for security in the Western Hemisphere has underpinned an enduring bipartisan consensus on preserving regional stability. As a priority for policy makers, however, its significance rises and falls with each administration. For Shultz, and for President Ronald Reagan, effecting a neighborhood policy was the first order of business in foreign affairs.
In recent years, the United States has lost touch with its neighbors, an unfortunate and ironic geopolitical predicament. The migration crisis at the US-Mexico border has roiled American politics. Alongside immigration, preventing narcotics from entering the homeland tops the concerns of Americans. The fentanyl epidemic ravaging the country, and the drug cartels supplying it, evokes the life-and-death matters that bind the hemisphere. Ordinary Americans surely hold an abiding interest in hemispheric affairs, even if foreign policy does not always reflect it. Recognizing the problem is the first step to addressing it.
Uncle Sam’s absence in the Americas grants our rivals greater leeway to displace the United States and further their malign influence in the Western Hemisphere. Washington’s inattention to its neighborhood proves stupefyingly self-defeating amid a struggle to prevent China and its despotic partners from upending the American-led global order.
The United States must exercise common strategic sense and reorient hemispheric relations. The American government possesses the tools and resources to do so, but it requires volition. Facing a period of increasing danger and uncertainty, policy makers must follow Shultz’s guiding principle for American statecraft: the United States must prioritize the Americas.
Incoming president Donald Trump is poised to do so. With the announced appointments of Representative Mike Waltz (R-Florida) as national security adviser and Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) as secretary of state, Trump is assembling a team of serious foreign policy hands who understand the strategic importance of the LAC region and will help the president resolve hemispheric challenges.
America’s adversaries surge ahead
Prioritizing hemispheric security will not guarantee every initiative succeeds, but it places an administration in a better position to project power throughout the globe. Reagan and Shultz, for their part, aligned national power with grand strategic purpose in a bid to win the Cold War—and it started with a neighborhood policy. They notably visited several Latin American countries early in the first Reagan administration, conducting what Shultz called “gardening.” This is the consistent practice of cultivating relationships with allies, partners, and potential friends. Regular engagement, especially meeting counterparts in their home country, not only strengthens relations but also eases the hard work of diplomacy if difficult issues arise. Above all, it builds trust.
Unfortunately, policy makers have not followed Shultz’s advice. America’s neglect of its neighborhood has not gone unnoticed by its adversaries. The despotic quartet of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have advanced their malign influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. China, above all, has been bidding for regional dominance. Chinese economic, diplomatic, and military ties with LAC have grown exponentially. Trade and development have been driving forces, with the Belt and Road Initiative attracting twenty-two countries in the Western Hemisphere. Trade between LAC and China has increased from $12 billion to $315 billion during the first twenty years of this century and may double within the next decade. Chinese investment continues apace, as well. The United States may still hold the status of top trading partner for the LAC region, but China is inching toward taking that title.
As LAC countries pursue a strategy of “active nonalignment,” China’s aggressive posture reaps tangible benefits for Beijing. It establishes a bridgehead for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), especially in South America, where China has become the region’s top trading partner and ingrained itself into the region’s digital and physical infrastructure. Chinese involvement in Peruvian critical infrastructure showcases the CCP’s ambitions. In Lima, China Three Gorges Corporation and China Southern Power Grid International now control the electricity sector. In the city of Chancay, China’s COSCO Shipping has just unveiled a $3.5 billion megaport, much to the consternation of American policy makers and Pacific Island countries.
Inaction carries a steep price in a world of strategic competition. “The United States is present almost everywhere in the world with a lot of initiatives, but not so much in Latin America,” Peruvian foreign minister Javier González-Olaechea explained to Wall Street Journal reporters. “It’s like a very important friend who spends little time with us.” Washington should take note.
Despite overlooking neighborly invitations, the United States has noticed the CCP’s disconcerting security assistance and intelligence activities. China exports advanced surveillance technology to not only assist authoritarian countries like Venezuela and Cuba but also to spread its illiberal model of governance to other LAC nations looking to control their citizens. China has placed police outposts and private security companies in the hemisphere. It offers military training and professional education programs, as well as law enforcement training exchanges, notably with Cuban and Nicaraguan police forces. Chinese arms and military equipment sales remain steady, with Beijing’s autocratic regional partners making the bulk of the purchases. In Cuba, China operates electronic spy stations to collect signals intelligence on US military activities, the space industry, and shipping, even capturing electronic data from ordinary citizens. As with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the United States confronts its top geopolitical rival just off its shores.
Although less ambitious than China, Russia also prioritizes a substantial presence in the Western Hemisphere. Moscow has sought to deepen its engagement with a region that attracted Russian attention long before the era of great-power competition. In that spirit, Russia keeps its closest ties with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which remain stalwart allies in Russia’s hostility against the United States. Russia also sustains a strong partnership with Brazil, a founding member of the BRICS organization and a trading partner on which Russia has become increasingly reliant for diesel fuel.
Moscow sells billions in arms to the region and seeks to enhance military cooperation with friendly countries. Russia has dispatched its best diplomats to the Western Hemisphere, where they cultivate partnerships and lobby to further Russian interests. The region’s ambivalent response to Russia’s war against Ukraine provides a case in point. Yet Russia wields more than silver-tongued diplomacy to counter the United States in its own hemisphere: Putin deploys information operations to diminish America’s regional standing, mold public opinion, and promote the image of a kinder, gentler Russia.
Like Russia, Iran preserves a host of diplomatic, economic, and security relationships in the region, particularly among the anti-American cadre of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic’s terrorist proxy, also operates in South America. In the Triple Frontier area between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, Hezbollah operatives provide services for criminals and conduct a wide range of illicit ventures: arms dealing, counterfeiting, money laundering, narcotics tracking, piracy, and an assortment of other crimes. Millions in profits from these activities flow into the Middle East to finance terrorism. And Hezbollah remains eager to continue bringing this destruction to the Americas.
In addition to state powers and their proxies, transnational criminal organizations present an acute threat to the Western Hemisphere. Of these, drug cartels pose the biggest security dilemma. Cartels engage in arms dealing, commodities theft, extortion, human smuggling, kidnapping, money laundering, murder, and sex trafficking, all the major illicit activities expected from well-funded and organized criminal outfits hellbent on profit. The cartels’ enterprises spread corruption, foment violence, ruin legitimate businesses, and destabilize Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, while adding to the humanitarian catastrophe at the US-Mexico border and contributing to more than a hundred thousand annual overdoses in America. Drugs also have emerged as a major element of the US-China strategic competition, since China has assumed a vital role in the Sinaloa and Jalisco fentanyl operations, exporting fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill-making equipment, encouraging manufacturers, and providing crucial money-laundering services.
Democratic lands push back
Some political trends do indicate a brighter future for the region. Its trajectory does not forecast another década perdida (lost decade). Despite democratic backsliding in a handful of countries, and authoritarian outliers in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, democracy has spread across the Western Hemisphere. Democratic governments rule to varying degrees of law. These governments are not perfect, and the United States may not always prefer the governing parties, but engaging with consolidated democracies in LAC will prove easier and more feasible than in the past. Favorable economic conditions abound. A promising, steady GDP growth, which the region had not experienced in years, has taken hold since the COVID pandemic decimated the region. Although this growth may be lower than in other regions—it is projected by the World Bank to reach 2.6 percent in 2025—conditions are ripe for further investment, increased competition among firms, and American engagement to spur additional growth.
The Western Hemisphere houses vast repositories of critical minerals, including copper, lithium, nickel, and graphite. LAC can fuel the energy transition and power electric vehicles, but the region possesses more than strategic commodities. Advanced pharmaceutical industries that can benefit the United States are also to be found. So too are competitive workforces for semiconductor and automotive industries in countries like Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Panama. On the demographic front, according to the International Monetary Fund, LAC may sustain a robust labor force, particularly if women continue joining at rates that close the participation gap between the sexes. With all these factors in force, the lofty goal of hemisphere-wide integrated supply chains is both within reason and within reach.
President Biden grasped the geopolitical dilemma of hemispheric security, but he has attempted to solve it with half measures. Europe and Asia have absorbed the president’s attention and packed his itinerary, but in the hierarchy of foreign policy priorities, Latin America and the Caribbean rank lower than they deserve. During the 2022 Summit of the Americas, Biden announced the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), which established a forum for “a new economic partnership” between the United States and eleven founding partner countries. However, the initiative has given way to lackluster implementation, leading so far to no binding agreements guaranteeing long-term commitments to spur transformational integration in the region.
What to do now
The Trump administration has a historic opportunity to parlay the encouraging developments under way in the Western Hemisphere into long-term prosperity and stability. President Trump must dispense with nonbinding, status quo forums dedicated to pledges and declarations under Biden’s APEP initiative. Instead, Trump must seek binding, sustainable long-term economic cooperation that leads to regional integration, joint security measures that address twenty-first-century challenges, and cultural exchanges that strengthen hemispheric relations. Trump and his team should visit our neighbors often and foster continentwide goodwill. Cultivating an integrated and secure hemisphere is a long-term objective that will span multiple administrations, but it can begin anew on January 20.
The Americas beckon Americans. In recalling George Shultz’s wise counsel, America must begin greeting the neighborhood and tending the diplomatic garden.
