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The Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, a rather staid event held every two years, is known mostly for its boilerplate language clouded in bureaucratese. Yet, the 17th iteration of it, held in Cusco, Peru, earlier this month, strayed from the norm and gave us an extraordinary glimpse into the complexities and intricacies of inter-American relations during the second Trump administration.
Conventional wisdom asserts that, despite the many difficulties U.S. foreign policy is facing in the Middle East and in other parts of the world today, it is in Latin America where it has managed to chalk up a significant number of wins.
The Trump administration’s purported laurels include the January 3 attack on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife; the cancellation of the Panamanian ports concession of the Hong Kong-based company C.K. Hutchinson and of the China Mobile Valparaiso-Hong Kong cable project in Chile; the launch of the like-minded Shield of the Americas group in Miami on March 7; and, perhaps most importantly, the string of right-wing electoral victories in countries like Honduras, Colombia, Peru and Chile, some of them openly backed by Washington.
The shift from U.S. hegemony to outright U.S. domination in the hemisphere appears to be in full swing. After Venezuela, Cuba would be the next domino to fall, then Nicaragua, and so on.
This shift has come under the umbrella of a revived Monroe Doctrine, and its 21st century version, the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” and its associated “Trump Corollary.” The latter states that the United States will “protect our Homeland and our access to key terrain throughout the region. We will deny adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities in our Hemisphere.”
Yet, what does this mean in practice?
In a speech at the Cusco conference, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby attempted to answer this question. In remarks reaching back to the original initiative of President James Monroe in 1823 and tracing it to its present incarnation, he set forth what he considers to be the true nature of U.S. foreign policy. Washington “doesn’t need (Latin America’s) assets”; its privileged geographical position and rich natural resources mean that “it does not need imperial possessions or dependencies, even from a strictly realpolitik point of view.” In a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, Colby described the U.S. as “an empire of liberty unto ourselves.”
Washington’s concern with Latin America is thus not driven by the latter’s assets and resources, but by the region’s security and defense choices, and especially by the “negative externalities that spill from the region” into the U.S. These include the drug trade, its associated criminal activities and mass migration. Thus, Colby said, the U.S offers a helping hand “to recover control over your territory, secure your borders” and “defeat the narco-terrorists who terrorize all of our people.”
The “three asks”
In the name of what he refers to as “flexible realism,” Colby says the U.S. “will not treat the ISIS, the al-Qaeda of this Hemisphere, who menaces American lives, with kid gloves rather than the forcefulness the threat requires simply because they are in the Western Hemisphere.” The U.S. “will bring all assets of the United States to address these threats,” in part through “partner-led, joint kinetic operations” with the region’s militaries.
Colby also asked the defense ministers to protect the region’s critical assets, like mineral resources, public infrastructure and energy sources, from “extra-hemispheric powers” (read: China).
And he requested that conference participants increase defense spending. He argued that it violates common sense that some Latin American countries spend less than 1% of their GDP on their militaries, while U.S. “allies around the world, including in Europe, are now moving toward significantly higher spending — 3.5% on core military spending and an additional 1.5% on security-related expenditures.”
Stressing that this would also be possible in Latin America, Colby mentioned Peru’s recent large purchase of F-16s from the U.S. as “a model for our Hemisphere.”
A surprising pushback
The defense sector in Latin America has traditionally depended on the United States. Many high-ranking Latin American military officers have undergone advanced training there, much of its weaponry is American, and there are many treaties — starting with the Inter-America Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance Treaty (TIAR) of 1947, known as the Rio Treaty — that entangle the U.S. in the region.
If there is thus one area where one would expect acquiescence to the demands of the Trump administration, it would be in the defense sphere. Yet, that is not what happened in Cusco.
Most importantly, the use of the term “narcoterrorism” was rejected. To equate drug cartels like the Mexican ones with entities like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as Colby did, only opens the door for U.S. military attacks on targets in Latin America. This may explain why the conference’s final declaration made an explicit distinction between international organized crime and terrorism. (As it happens, Latin America has one of the lowest rates of terrorist incidents of any region, according to the Global Terrorism Index.)
The very premise of the term “narcoterrorism” is faulty. By equating the threat posed to the United States by entities like al Qaeda to that posed by cartels, policymakers are doomed to prescribe the wrong response. There is no evidence, for example, that the sinking of dozens of boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific by the U.S. Navy, and the killing of nearly 200 crew members in them, has led to any reduction in the influx of fentanyl into the United States.
Efforts to exclude China from the region’s infrastructure and critical resources did not find much purchase either. As Chile’s minister of defense, Fernando Barros, put it, “We are not part of a conflict that belongs to a different hemisphere.” And, even at a conference of military leaders who would no doubt appreciate more investment in their work, there was little interest in the proposal to increase defense spending across the board.
The region’s leaders understand that Latin America — a region that traditionally prides itself on being a zone of peace and the region of the world with the lowest number of inter-state conflicts — does not need to spend more on tanks and fighter jets. And any parallels with European defense spending, a continent with a very different geopolitical setting, are out of place.
Latin America does have an organized crime and drug cartel problem. This problem sometimes spills over into the United States, in part because American demand for drugs drives the black market on which the cartels depend. But fighting it does not require kinetic joint actions by U.S. and Latin American armed forces, as Colby contends; nor does it require NATO-like defense spending.
This is a task for the police and intelligence forces that requires cooperation, an end to extreme bank secrecy laws, and an assertion of control over the untrammeled flow of U.S. arms to the region. Colby neglected these challenges of critical importance to the region entirely.
A standard view is that the “Donroe Doctrine” is here to stay, and that Latin American governments are swallowing it hook, line and sinker. Yet, the 17th Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas and the ensuing Cusco declaration, which refused to endorse fictional concepts like “narcoterrorism,” indicate otherwise.
The imposition of U.S. military force in the region continues to elicit pushback. The Trump administration ignores this at its peril.
This story originally appeared on Responsible Statecraft
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