The Pentagon has launched a sweeping diplomatic and military campaign to rally Latin American governments behind what officials are calling the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, a modernised version of the two-century-old policy aimed at countering drug cartels, curbing Chinese influence and reasserting direct US military primacy across the Western Hemisphere.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out the strategy’s regional ambitions at what the Pentagon billed as the first “Americas Counter Cartel Conference,” held at US Southern Command headquarters in Miami and attended by defence officials from more than a dozen governments closely aligned with the Trump administration, including Argentina, Honduras and the Dominican Republic.
“For too long, leaders in Washington abandoned the simple wisdom of the Monroe Doctrine,” Hegseth told the assembled officials, framing the renewed focus on the region as a corrective to decades of what he characterised as American neglect.
The Miami gathering came as Washington seeks to translate the doctrine’s rhetorical revival into concrete military commitments, with Hegseth telling delegates that the United States was prepared to act unilaterally against cartel-related threats if regional partners did not join the effort.
Speaking in the historic Peruvian city of Cusco, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby laid out a transformed American security posture that binds domestic US political concerns directly to a proactive, interventionist military mandate stretching from the Rio Grande to the tip of South America.
Addressing the assembly at the Conference of Defence Ministers of the Americas, Colby formally weaponised a framework that regional analysts are already calling the “Donroe Doctrine,” a play on Trump’s name. In his remarks, the Pentagon’s top policy official detailed an active operational shift that has seen the United States military move past traditional advisory roles to conduct direct, unilateral operations, including striking maritime drug vessels and orchestrating the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.
“No longer do we separate America’s defence strategy from the concerns of regular Americans,” Colby declared, according to his prepared remarks. “Not from the flood of lethal drugs into their communities and the accompanying horrendous violence, or from the impact of unchecked illegal migration into our nation.”
A Formal Strategy Document Cements the Pivot
The campaign is anchored in the administration’s National Defence Strategy, released in January, which explicitly designates the Western Hemisphere as the Pentagon’s top priority, ahead of longstanding focuses on Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
According to an analysis published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the document states that the US military’s foremost obligation is defending the homeland, a mandate it extends to securing American interests throughout the Americas under the newly coined “Trump Corollary.”
That framing echoes a long lineage of American foreign policy doctrines invoking Monroe’s original 1823 declaration, which warned European powers against further colonisation in the Western Hemisphere.
Successive administrations have layered their own interpretations onto the doctrine over the past century, from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary asserting a US right to intervene in cases of “chronic wrongdoing” by Latin American states, to more recent invocations aimed at containing Soviet influence during the Cold War and, more recently, countering China’s economic footprint in the region.
Foreign policy analysts note that the doctrine has provoked persistent unease across Latin America, where it has historically been associated with US military interventions and unilateralism rather than genuine hemispheric partnership.
Even the Biden administration largely avoided invoking Monroe by name, wary of the friction the term reliably generates among regional governments.
Emphasis on Military Muscle Over Institution-Building
Central to the current strategy is an expanded reliance on the US military to confront cartels that Washington blames for driving crime, economic stagnation and migration pressures across the region. The administration has designated cartels operating out of Mexico and Venezuela as foreign terrorist organisations and has separately declared the United States to be in what it calls a state of armed conflict with those groups, a legal rationale underpinning a series of military strikes carried out under the policy.
Some regional security specialists have cautioned that leaning primarily on military force risks undercutting the institutional reforms needed for lasting results. Rebecca Bill Chavez, president of the Inter-American Dialogue and a former Pentagon official for Western Hemisphere affairs, warned that militarising the cartel fight without parallel investment in the rule of law could ultimately weaken the very governing institutions the strategy aims to strengthen.
Within the Pentagon, the hemispheric pivot has also driven organisational changes, including the merger in December of US Army Forces Command’s regional components into a single operational headquarters, and ongoing discussions about consolidating US Southern Command and US Northern Command into one unified combatant command overseeing the Americas.
A Right-Wing Realignment Unlocks the Pentagon’s Shield
The timing of Washington’s new hemispheric mandate is explicitly calculated to leverage a profound ideological transformation sweeping across Latin American capitals. The previous “pink tide” of leftist leadership has effectively collapsed, replaced by a wave of conservative, pro-Trump administrations eager for aggressive domestic security crackdowns.
Among those leading the new alignment are conservative President Keiko Fujimori in Peru and President Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, whose nations have joined Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama in a decisive rightward swing.
In Colombia, where the United States previously placed heavy sanctions on former leftist President Gustavo Petro for failing to suppress narcotics production, the political landscape has transformed overnight.
De la Espriella has enthusiastically pledged to enrol Bogotá into Trump’s proposed “Shield of the Americas,” promising aggressive joint anti-cartel strikes, corporate deregulation, and a swift revival of disputed oil and gas projects.
The Pentagon is aggressively utilising this political capital to build a wall against external adversaries, primarily targeting Beijing’s extensive infrastructure spending and deep economic inroads across the region.
Colby issued a stark directive to the assembled ministers to robustly defend their national assets from foreign state actors, a warning heavily punctuated by Trump’s recent public threats to seize control of the strategic Panama Canal by military force if its administration drifts too close to the Chinese sphere of influence.
Strategic Resources and Great-Power Rivalry
Beyond counter-narcotics, the strategy is also widely understood in policy circles to be motivated by competition with China for access to the region’s natural resources, including lithium reserves concentrated in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, and copper deposits in Peru and Chile, alongside broader efforts to secure strategic maritime routes and reduce Beijing’s commercial footprint in regional infrastructure projects.
The doctrine’s revival has drawn some support within conservative political circles in the United States, where prominent Republican voices have argued in recent years that a reinvigorated Monroe Doctrine is necessary to counter China’s growing presence in Latin America and to justify a more assertive U.S. posture toward criminal organisations operating in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Whether Latin American governments beyond Washington’s closest allies will embrace the more assertive framework, or resist what critics describe as a reassertion of old-style US dominance over the region, remains an open question as the Pentagon works to expand the coalition beyond the conservative-led governments that attended this year’s inaugural counter-cartel conference in Miami.
Demanding a 5% Defence Standard in a Narco-Terrorist Zone
Beyond rhetorical alignment, Washington is demanding concrete fiscal sacrifices from its regional partners, explicitly echoing the aggressive defence-spending ultimatums it recently levied against its NATO allies in Europe. The Pentagon expressed severe frustration that multiple Latin American states facing existential internal threats currently allocate less than 1% of their gross domestic product (GDP) toward their respective military establishments.
While joint counter-narcotics strike operations are already fully underway inside Ecuador, the Pentagon made it clear that continued American intelligence sharing and high-end hardware integration will be contingent on regional partners significantly increasing their baseline defence budgets.
“There is no reason why any country, particularly those facing significant narco-terrorist threats, should spend so little on defence,” Colby said.
As the Cusco summit concluded, regional diplomats were left with the sobering understanding that the Trump administration has effectively erased the line between domestic border politics and foreign military policy. By framing the entire hemisphere as a shared fortress against both cartel violence and Asian economic expansion, the “Donroe Doctrine” has set the stage for an era of unprecedented American military involvement across Latin America, leaving sovereign states to choose between active alignment or economic isolation.
Weaponising the Doctrine or Empowering the Neighbourhood?
The overt revival of a doctrine historically associated with mid-century US-backed coups, military dictatorships, and heavy-handed interventions quickly triggered an undercurrent of alarm among the region’s remaining centrist and left-leaning diplomats.
Critics and independent security scholars immediately characterised the Pentagon’s rhetoric as an explicit blueprint for modern-day American imperialism, designed to strip Latin American states of their sovereign geopolitical autonomy.
Colby forcefully rejected those comparisons, arguing that the historical anxieties surrounding the 1823 doctrine were rooted in a “distorted” reading of American intentions.
He claimed that unlike previous European colonial empires like Great Britain or Portugal, which actively stripped smaller colonies of wealth to build up foreign capitals, the United States has no economic interest in occupying or exploiting its neighbours.
“The fact is that America doesn’t need your assets or your dependency,” Colby told the delegation, asserting Washington’s baseline structural independence.
“America is an enormous country, by far the world’s most powerful state, with the world’s largest and most dynamic market, its most productive economy, its dominant currency, splendid stores of raw materials. We seek your success in securing our neighbourhood.”
