Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Meets a Multipolar Hemisphere
Image by Road Ahead.
A recent article published in The Hill celebrated the revival of the Monroe Doctrine under Donald Trump by suggesting that U.S. pressure is displacing China from Latin America. But this view misreads both the nature of U.S. influence and the political and economic dynamics shaping the region. What we are seeing is nothing short of coercion by an empire attempting to secure its declining grip on a hemisphere that is increasingly multipolar and pragmatic in its economic policies.
First declared in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy statement warning European powers not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere. While it was originally framed as a protective measure against colonialism, it quickly became the ideological foundation for U.S. interventionism in Latin America, justifying dozens of military invasions, covert operations, and regime changes throughout the 20th century. By the end of the century and the Cold War, there was a growing acceptance that the Monroe Doctrine had outlived its usefulness. Trump’s effort to revive this framework, positioning it as a counter to China’s growing presence, reflects not a commitment to democratic values but a strategic attempt to reassert U.S. regional dominance in an increasingly competitive and multipolar landscape.
Trump-era policy in Latin America has relied heavily on economic threats: punitive tariffs, aid suspensions, and sanctions designed to force governments to reduce engagement with China. While these tactics may have discouraged some bilateral deals, they reflect a fundamental weakness in U.S. foreign policy: Washington is no longer able to compete through constructive means, particularly on the economic front. Unlike China, which offers infrastructure projects and development financing aligned with regional priorities, the U.S. offers few viable alternatives. Instead of investing in mutually beneficial partnerships, it defaults to coercion.
Trump’s approach rests on the assumption that the U.S. can rely on its historical alliances with Latin America’s political and economic elites to counter Chinese influence. But this calculation ignores a key shift: in today’s global economy, ideology matters less than investment and trade.
The idea that Latin America will naturally align with the U.S. because of shared political values or Cold War loyalties no longer holds. Even right-wing governments, supposed allies of Washington, are maintaining and in some cases deepening their ties with Beijing when it benefits their economies.
In Argentina, President Javier Milei ran on a staunch anti-China platform, but economic realities quickly reshaped his position: in 2025, his government extended a critical $5 billion currency swap with China, reflecting how financial necessity often overrides ideological rhetoric. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, despite aligning himself with the U.S., has embraced major Chinese investment, including the construction of a new national stadium and a mega, modern library located in the capital. And in Peru, conservative President Dina Boluarte led a 2024 state visit to China to expand trade and infrastructure cooperation, while Chinese firms completed a massive deepwater port in Chancay, now set to rival Chile’s Valparaíso as a key Pacific trade hub.
None of these cases suggest ideological alignment with Beijing. What they reveal is a clear pattern: governments, regardless of political orientation, respond to who delivers material benefits. And right now, that’s not Washington.
The U.S. continues to rely on and expand its military presence in the region, through bases, training programs, and security agreements, believing this will suffice to retain influence. After all, China doesn’t project military power in the hemisphere.
But Latin America’s future is not being decided through troop movements or defense pacts; it’s being built through ports, railways, energy grids, and trade routes. You can’t contain economic transformation with military hardware.
Panama is one of the few places where Trump’s coercive approach yielded a visible outcome. But it is also a case that underscores why the strategy is hard to replicate. After falsely claiming China was “operating” the canal and threatening to “take it back”, Washington pushed Panama to scrutinize Chinese-linked port operations, culminating in their sale to a U.S.-led consortium. Yet Panama is a small, highly trade-dependent country with a long history of U.S. intervention; its strategic and economic reliance on Washington made compliance more likely. That very dependency, however, is not the norm across Latin America, where larger economies with diversified partnerships are far less susceptible to U.S. pressure.
The U.S. is working to push China out of Latin America, not only to maintain its own economic and political dominance in its so-called “backyard”, but also as part of its broader preparations for a potential war with China, seeking to cut Beijing off from key markets, resources, and diplomatic allies. More and more countries are refusing to be complicit in Washington’s war agenda, choosing instead to pursue independent foreign policies that serve their people rather than fuel U.S. militarism. This reflects the emergence of a new multipolar world order in which power is shared among many nations, creating greater opportunities for dialogue, cooperation, and peace. Additionally, diverse economic partnerships beyond traditional Western-dominated supply chains offer increasing potential to shift the global division of labor and offer new pathways to development and prosperity.
The fundamental flaw in Trump’s Monroe Doctrine revival is its failure to recognize the nature of the current world order. Latin America is no longer a passive periphery. It is a region navigating a complex, multipolar landscape, balancing between the U.S., China, the EU, and growing South-South cooperation through blocs like CELAC and BRICS+. China’s growing presence is the logical result of uneven global development, capital flows, and a U.S. foreign policy that has prioritized militarization over long-term partnership. If the U.S. has lost ground, it is because it failed to compete in the arenas that matter most: infrastructure, credit, trade, and investment.
One of the most cited academic justifications for reviving the Monroe Doctrine comes from realist theory, particularly the work of political scientist John Mearsheimer, who argues that great powers are forced to dominate their regional spheres of influence. According to this logic, it is imperative for the United States to seek uncontested control over Latin America. But the contradiction is clear: if that logic holds, then China would be equally entitled to its own sphere in East Asia, including Taiwan, South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, the Philippines, and Japan, all areas where the U.S. maintains a heavy military and political presence.
This doctrinal double standard exposes the selective morality of U.S. grand strategy: what’s framed as defensive when done by the U.S. is deemed belligerent when pursued by others. Unlike the U.S., however, China has not fought a war since 1979 and has invested in development financing and infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative, not military alliances or proxy wars. While the U.S. revives 19th-century frameworks of control, China promotes a multipolar order based on mutual benefit.
Political leaders, including Colombian President Gustavo Petro, have repeatedly called for relationships built on mutual benefit rather than the subordinate ties long imposed by the U.S. Petro urged that Latin American and the Caribbean be seen as the “center of the world” rather than its periphery, and emphasized the importance of working with other nations to confront the climate crisis. China has emerged as the foremost country advancing large-scale solutions to climate change, providing opportunities for green technology that Latin America and the Global South urgently need, given that they are among the regions most vulnerable to its impacts. About 90% of all wind and solar technologies in the region were produced by Chinese companies, and many large cities now rely on electric transportation sourced from China. In Chile, clean energy projects backed by China have pushed the country far past its 2025 renewable energy goal. Now, about 30% of the country is powered by clean energy. These partnerships illustrate why many governments view China as a practical partner in building infrastructure and meeting urgent development goals, something Washington’s Monroe Doctrine revival cannot match.
The Monroe Doctrine functioned in a world where Washington faced no serious competition. That world no longer exists. Latin America today is navigating a more complex international system, with the capacity to choose, and the memory of past interventions to guide those choices.
Because this shift isn’t just about China stepping in where the U.S. has fallen short, it reflects a deeper structural pattern. For much of their history, Latin American nations have been trapped in the disadvantageous role of exporters of raw materials and importers of finished goods, with little room to shape their own economic trajectories. Under U.S. dominance, this relationship meant debt, austerity, and dependency. China’s rise doesn’t reverse this system, but it changes the balance of power within it.
As Marxist economist Samir Amin argued in Accumulation on a World Scale (1970), the global capitalist system draws peripheral economies into roles that serve the needs of the dominant powers, keeping them dependent and underdeveloped. Their resources and labor are extracted to fuel economic growth in the core countries, not their own. By offering infrastructure, credit, and trade without the same political strings attached, China gives governments in the region more bargaining power, more room to negotiate, to diversify, and to assert economic autonomy. That shift in bargaining power is what Washington’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine is designed to contain.
Trump’s approach to Latin America is not reshaping the region; it is exposing how little room remains for unilateral control. The attempt to push China out will not succeed through tariffs and threats. This type of bullying will only further alienate regional partners and reveal the hollowness of U.S. rhetoric about democracy, prosperity, and freedom.
If Washington wants to be a serious player in the region, it must abandon the logic of the Monroe Doctrine and embrace a genuine Good Neighbor Policy, one that reinvests in its own economic capacity and engages Latin America on equal footing, not as a sphere to control, but as a community of sovereign nations choosing their own path.
The Monroe Doctrine may be making headlines again. But for many in the region, it’s a timeworn history.
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