The US May Conquer the Americas But Lose the World

US presidents have long pledged to prioritize the Western Hemisphere — to put the Americas First, so to speak. Donald Trump is doing it today. The world waits to see if Trump will strike Venezuela, as the Pentagon masses planes and warships in the Caribbean. But coercing Nicolás Maduro’s autocratic, anti-US regime is merely part of a larger campaign to reassert America’s hemispheric hegemony. That campaign is rooted in history and sound strategic logic. It is also fraught with unanswered questions and serious risks.

“The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Secretary of State John Kerry announced in 2013. Not so fast, Trump has long rejoined. During Trump’s first term, his administration promised to resurrect that two-century old doctrine. It sought, unsuccessfully, to rid the region of Maduro. Trump launched his second term with an inaugural address that seemed like it was stolen from the 19th century. He has pushed a forceful agenda of hemispheric primacy ever since.

The administration pressured Panama to quit China’s Belt and Road Initiative and limit Beijing’s sway over ports along the Panama Canal. Trump extended an economic lifeline to Argentina, aiming to strengthen its pro-US, pro-market government and distance Buenos Aires from Beijing.

The White House forged a deportation alliance with El Salvador. It used threats of military intervention to prod Mexico to get tougher on drug trafficking and illegal migration. Trump threatened governments, in Brazil and Venezuela, that defied US power; he used punitive tariffs as cudgels against Mexico and Canada. He even renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, a symbolic assertion of US dominance in the region to its south.

The centerpiece of this offensive is the showdown with Venezuela. Trump has ramped up lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers. But the armada he has assembled — soon to be augmented by an aircraft carrier — is vastly more than anything needed for a counternarcotics campaign.

Trump is building to a coercive crescendo meant to send Maduro fleeing, or perhaps an air campaign meant to forcibly fracture his regime. The hope seems to be that taking down the Venezuelan government will set the hemispheric dominoes toppling: It will increase pressure on Cuba and Nicaragua, two other autocracies backed by Russia and China, and motivate other countries to get tough on narco-traffickers, fast.

The policy is thoroughly Trumpy: Admirers tout his 21st-century “Don-roe Doctrine.” But it is firmly anchored in the US strategic tradition.

For 200 years, Washington has cultivated a security buffer in the Americas. It typically strengthens its grip when a rivalrous world turns nasty, as prior presidents did in the world wars and the Cold War; it has often relied on the coercive arm-twisting Trump is employing today. And let there be no doubt about it: Trump’s policies are targeting real threats.

Narco-trafficking kills Americans and destabilizes countries from Ecuador to Mexico. Russia meddles in Latin America by supporting anti-American dictators; China’s economic presence is now complemented by an intelligence and security footprint from Cuba to Argentina.

Trump’s policies are an answer to those who charge that the US has neglected its home hemisphere. Those policies also raise four sharp complications.

First, Trump’s bright ideas are interlaced with bad ones. Shoring up US influence is a worthy endeavor; doing so by blatantly meddling, on behalf of the disgraced ex-president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s judicial process is not. It’s undeniably important to shield Greenland and the Panama Canal from great-power rivals, and needlessly provocative to do so by threatening simply to take the land.

Securing the border and striking drug traffickers are defensible policies. But the legalities of shipping deportees to El Salvador or blowing boats out of the water are murky at best. A zone of US influence is desirable; a zone of executive lawlessness is not.

Second, an Americas First policy could exacerbate global strategic dilemmas. Perhaps the US military should be engaged with combating tangible, nearby threats to American sovereignty, rather than simply patrolling faraway Eurasian frontiers. US hemispheric dominance has long served as a platform for projecting global power.

But right now, an overstretched military can only ramp up its Caribbean presence by stripping resources from Europe and the Middle East. It’s a challenge to strengthen America’s position near home without weakening it overseas.

Third, Trump should be careful what he asks for. Maybe the US can engineer Maduro’s removal and a smooth transition to democracy. Or maybe we’ll get chaos, even civil war, that destabilizes a crucial region. Trump likes to make big moves and then declare knotty problems solved, as with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program. Yet regime change would be the beginning of a long transition to a new Venezuela, not the end.

Fourth, Trump will have to build as well as break. Trump has energetically used military power, covert meddling and economic pressure. He hasn’t done enough to forge the positive-sum relationships — new trade deals, supply-chain partnerships, diplomatic and security arrangements — that will augment the strategic cohesion of the region. Coercive tactics may get the headlines. But stronger bonds of cooperation are vital to making Trump’s Americas First policy a reality — and making the Western Hemisphere a redoubt in a fragmenting world.

Source: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-us-may-conquer-the-americas-but-lose-the-world/