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Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Meets a Multipolar Hemisphere

Michelle Ellner and Megan Russell

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.

[Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants. Megan Russell is CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies. Megan spent one year studying in Shanghai and over eight years studying Chinese Mandarin. Her research focuses on the intersection between US-China affairs, peace-building, and international development. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]

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The Emperor of the World

Frei Betto

War is like Janus: it has more than one face. In addition to military warfare, there are also diplomatic, economic, political, and cultural wars. Cultural warfare consists of imposing the dominant group’s version of reality on the dominated. This is what the entertainment industries of Disney and Hollywood have always done.

Now, Trump has declared economic war on Brazil by promising that, starting August 1, he will impose 50% tariffs on Brazilian products imported by the United States if the case against Bolsonaro, which he considers a “witch hunt,” is not immediately dismissed.

This imperialist interference in the Brazilian judiciary (eight Supreme Court judges have been banned from entering the United States) has only one serious precedent in more than 200 years of relations between the two countries: the 1964 coup that overthrew the constitutionally elected president, João Goulart, and imposed a military dictatorship that lasted 21 years.

As Lula told CNN on July 17, Trump “was not elected to be emperor of the world.” But that is how he feels when governing the greatest economic, military, and industrial power in history.

On June 25, NATO leaders, meeting in The Hague with Trump in attendance, bowed to U.S. demands that Europe increase its military spending to pay for Washington’s protective shield over the entire continent.

NATO countries, which currently invest $2.7 trillion in war, formally agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of their gross domestic product by 2035. With the increase to 5% of GDP, the value of the war cornucopia will rise to $3.8 trillion.

In 2024, total global military spending amounted to $3.7 trillion. The UN budget, including that allocated to preserving peace on the planet, is $3.72 billion, representing only 0.1% of the global budget for arms procurement.

Another target of Trump’s attack on Brazil is Pix, the world’s most advanced financial transaction system, which is free for individuals. Why is the “emperor of the world” so angry about this app?

Pix competes directly with powerful U.S. companies: large credit card firms, payment services such as PayPal, and remittance companies, which fear the eventual global integration of systems similar to Brazil’s Pix (something much more viable than the “BRICS currency”).

Pix does the same thing as these companies, only without charging individuals (it only charges legal entities, through contracts). And what Trump, lobbyist for the owners of the market, wants to do is replace the free Pix with companies “made in the USA” that will take part of Brazilians’ money through fees and annual charges. In addition to controlling our finances.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States once again embraced with heart and soul the doctrine that had always motivated its imperialist stance: “manifest destiny.”

The expression was coined by journalist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845, when he argued that the country had the right—and even the “divine duty”—to expand its territory in order to instill democracy, progress, and Christian values in other peoples.

In short, to civilize the American continent, an idea that later came to encompass all countries and today means making the planet revolve around the dictates of the White House.

Within this imperialist idea, the belief was cultivated that white Anglo-Saxons are superior and therefore have the right to dominate indigenous peoples, Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians.

One of the most iconic images of “manifest destiny” is John Gast’s 1872 painting, American Progress, on display at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

The central figure, Columbia (the female personification of the United States), carries a book and telegraph wires symbolizing knowledge and technology. On the left, darkness: indigenous people, buffalo, and wild landscapes. On the right, light: settlers, railroad tracks, ships, “progress.” It signifies the march of civilization toward the west, sweeping away everything “barbaric.”

The proof that Trump is the embodiment of Columbia (the female version of Columbus, the “discoverer” of the New World) is that in the midst of his interventionist maneuvering in the Brazilian economy and judiciary, on the 23rd, he dared to send his chargé d’affaires in Brazil, Ambassador Gabriel Escobar, to tell the authorities that the United States is interested in Brazil’s critical minerals and rare earths.

Critical minerals include niobium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper.

Rare earths are a group of 17 chemical elements on the periodic table that include 15 lanthanides, as well as scandium and yttrium. They are not actually “earths,” but complex minerals, such as bastnasite, monazite, xenotime, and yttrium-rich laterites, which are used in modern technology.

The term “rare” is used because they are difficult to separate and purify, as they often occur together in complex minerals. In short, the name “rare earths” reflects the difficulty of extracting and purifying these elements, not their scarcity.

“Rare earths” are essential for manufacturing the high-powered permanent magnets used in wind turbines, electric vehicles, electronic products, and military equipment. They are also used in catalysts, batteries, lamps, polishes, special glasses, fiber optics, and medical applications.

In short, Trump is running on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which means returning to the most ferocious imperialism to ensure U.S. supremacy in all areas and punish any “troublesome country” that refuses to adopt the policies of globalization, neocolonialism, and U.S. tutelage.

Just as the genocide of the Palestinians being carried out by the current Israeli government in Gaza is multiplying the rejection of Zionism around the world, the imperialist character of the Trump administration is reinforcing the critical view of the United States and capitalism. Every cloud has a silver lining.

[Frei Betto is an internationally renowned liberation theologian and Dominican friar from Brazil. Author of 60 books in various literary genres, including novels, essays, detective stories, memoirs, children’s and young adult books, and religious works. In 1985 and 2005, he was awarded the Jabuti, the country’s most important literary prize. In 1986, he was named Intellectual of the Year by the Brazilian Writers’ Union. An advisor to social movements, and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, he has been actively involved in Brazilian politics for the past 50 years. He is the author of the book Fidel and Religion. Courtesy: Resumen Latinoamericano—English, a newsletter whose focus is news and analysis coming primarily from Latin America by writers, researchers, and activists living there.]

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Trump’s Tariffs against Latin America: Part of a Global Battle

Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris

Trump’s threat of imposing a crippling 50 per cent tariff on all Brazilian imports to the United States took everyone by surprise, especially, considering the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus with the South American giant (surplus it has enjoyed since 2007). Lula made it clear that Brazil would reciprocate in kind.

Trump tariffs against Brazil are in line with his overall policy of applying tariffs on all countries in the world. Under Trump U.S. imperialism seeks to establish a global system that it suits itself such that it can impose or change any rule any time it wants and attack any country it dislikes.

As with many other global institutions, Trump, following in the footsteps of previous U.S. administrations, is prepared to run roughshod over World Trade Organisation rules that U.S. imperialism itself was central in establishing in 1995.

Thus, his attack on Mexico is not surprising either, country with which it has a substantial trade deficit caused by its southern neighbour’s incorporation into U.S. supply chain arrangements ever since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The U.S. has had a trade deficit with Mexico ever since 1995, exactly one year after NAFTA.

To Trump’s chagrin, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has vigorously defended her country’s sovereignty and has skilfully navigated U.S. provocations.

To the charge of Mexico being a drug-trafficking hub, she has pointed out to U.S. negotiators that the “the U.S. itself harbours cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money-laundering banks.” She has also resolutely refused the deployment of U.S. troops on Mexican soil.

Back in January 2025, Trump threatened Colombia with sanctions and 25 per cent tariffs on all its exports to the U.S. When Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro did not allow U.S. planes carrying deported Colombians in, refusing to receive them in military aircraft and handcuffed, Trump threatened to make the tariffs “extendable to 50 per cent [plus] exhaustive inspections of Colombian citizens and merchandise, and visa sanctions for Colombian officials” plus “sanctions on banking and other areas.”

In response, Petro announced he would impose 50 per cent tariffs on U.S. products entering the Colombian market. Furthermore, Petro, condemning the war on Gaza, argued that Colombia should break from Nato to avoid alliances involving militaries that “drop bombs on children.”

By the end of July Trump announced 50 per cent tariffs on imports of copper but when he realised it would substantially increase costs for U.S. manufacturers–making its price nose-dive by 22 points with U.S. traders facing heavy losses–he was forced to abandon it. He amended the tariff to apply only on semi-manufactured products such as wire and tube, excluding refined copper (until January 2027). In 2024, Chile, Canada and Peru accounted for more than 90 per cent of U.S. refined copper imports.

On July 7, in a tweet Trump declared that Jair Bolsonaro was being witch-hunted by the Brazilian authorities. Bolsonaro is being tried for insurrection, coup plotting and his involvement in staging a January 6 Capitol assault-style riot against parliament and the judiciary buildings in Brasilia. Trump claimed Bolsonaro “is not guilty of anything, except having fought for the people.” Trump’s message sought to depict Bolsonaro as a political leader being politically persecuted, but nothing could, of course, be further from the truth.

Lula’s immediate response was that the U.S. president’s statements were an interference in Brazil’s internal affairs and demanded respect for Brazilian sovereignty: “The defence of democracy in Brazil is a matter for Brazilians.” And in a sharp barb, Lula added: “We do not accept interference or tutelage from anyone. We have solid and independent institutions. No-one is above the law. Especially those who attack freedom and the rule of law.”

Trump’s attacks against Latin America are part and parcel of U.S. imperialism’s efforts to destabilise governments it doesn’t like.

Adding to the comprehensively tight sanctions regime being applied to Cuba and Venezuela and to a lesser extent to Nicaragua, Trump is now targeting Cuban and especially Venezuelan migrants, falsely presenting them as members of criminal organisations.

And, in a human-trafficking operation run with far-right El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Trump is sending hundreds of them to CECOT, El Salvador’s concentration camp.

Reversing decades of U.S. encouragement of migration aimed at weakening their governments, Trump has terminated the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Cubans and Venezuelans, a key component of the ICE campaign of terror against Latinos.

The Trump administration, following from his Democrat and Republican predecessors, is seeking to expand its military presence in Latin America as much and as quickly as possible. It has deployed troops on Mexico’s southern border; Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has succeeded in getting the constitution amended to allow the U.S. to have military bases on the Galapagos islands; the U.S. holds regular and massive joint military manoeuvres in Guyana (where it has at least one military base); and the U.S. also has a number of military bases in Central America, Colombia, the Caribbean, Peru, and a new military base in Argentina.

Though Trump’s tariffs on Latin America are chaotic and simplistic, they have a strategic objective: to slow down, reduce and if possible, eliminate altogether the drive to a multipolar world.

In short, to stop China’s drive to foster a new geopolitics not determined by the weaponisation of the dollar, economic sanctions or military aggression. One in which relations are not dictated by coercive zero-sum games but by voluntary collaboration in mutually beneficial economic relationships.

U.S. imperialism (and the Trump government) find the ever-closer relationship and collaboration between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and China simply intolerable. U.S. officials repeatedly argue that China’s trade relations and co-operation with Latin America represent an existential threat to the U.S.

Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have forged strong links with China and so has Brazil. Lula was presiding over the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro when Trump launched the dig about fascist Bolsonaro.

Claudia Sheinbaum attended as an observer and Mexico is rapidly developing links with China. In Peru China has built the port of Chancay (a Belt and Road initiative)–the largest deepwater port on the western coast of South America.

Honduras has cut ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China and Colombia has joined the BRICS.

Furthermore, China is the main trading partner of South America and the second-largest trading partner of Central America. Trump has threatened all BRICS countries with 100 per cent tariffs.

The U.S. Southern Command recognises that China’s trade with Latin America has gone “beyond raw materials and commodities to include traditional infrastructure (road, bridges, ports) and ‘new infrastructure’: electric vehicles, telecommunication, and renewable energy.”

Benefits never offered by the U.S. to countries in its “backyard.” This ever-closer relationship explains Trump’s aggression towards the countries mentioned, to browbeat them economically and politically into drawing away from China.

A U.S. success story is Panama, where President Jose Mulino’s capitulation to Trump’s threats to retake the Panama Canal by military means led him to accept Washington’s pressure to exit China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.”

These contradictions are as a matter of course presented as the outcome of U.S.-China rivalry, inevitable between these superpowers.

However, such a framework is deceptive since the nature of the contradictions stems from two conceptions of how to organise the global economy.

The U.S. considers itself the “indispensable nation” which has always engaged in zero-sum games whose outcome produces winners (the U.S. and its economically developed accomplices) and losers (the vast majority of humanity who reside in the global South).

Trump’s tariffs intend to keep it that way, while Latin America’s orientation towards Asia, China and the BRICS is correctly pushing in the opposite direction: to a fairer, multipolar world.

[Francisco Dominguez is the national secretary of the UK-based Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Roger D. Harris is with the Task Force on the Americas, the US Peace Council, and the Venezuela Solidarity Network, based in North America. Courtesy: Morning Star, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.]