To the discomfort of many across Washington, the National Security Strategy document released last month confirmed the Trump administration’s enduring focus on the Western Hemisphere. Yet, this was not a surprise. Trump’s emphasis on managing threats in Washington’s own backyard became clear amid the deadly military campaign against suspected drug boats in the waters off Central and South America. As the death toll of alleged “narcoterrorists” continues to rise and the US pressure campaign against Venezuela culminated with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, analysts are not only questioning the legality of the executive branch’s actions but their strategic logic as well.
The latest Reimagining US Grand Strategy roundtable brought members of the foreign policy community together to consider these developments and evaluate the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s approach to the Western Hemisphere. Two guest speakers provided opening remarks on the historical precedence and impact of the United States’ growing involvement in the region. The group then discussed alternative strategies to combat drug trafficking across the Caribbean and the potential implications of Trump’s use of force on future US-Latin America relations.
Benjamin N. Gedan, Senior Fellow and Director, Latin America Program, Stimson Center
The United States is everywhere and nowhere in Latin America these days — a bull in a China shop and a great disappearing act all in one. During Trump’s first term, he showed little interest in the Americas. He traveled to the region just once, for a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, and skipped the Summit of the Americas, marking the first time a US leader had ghosted the triennial get-together.
This time around, Trump quickly developed a taste for hemispheric affairs. He appointed a Cuban American, Marco Rubio, as secretary of state and a former ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, as Rubio’s deputy. In his inaugural address, he threatened to seize the Panama Canal. His National Security Strategy pledges to “restore American preeminence” in Latin America. The region features prominently in Trump’s most prominent policies: the fights against irregular migration and illegal drugs.
In the US near abroad, Trump has been stunningly aggressive, both in symbolism and action. He issued an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Later, the White House announced a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” resurrecting President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that Washington would no longer tolerate European interventions in the Americas, with China now playing the role of Europe. He attacked Venezuela on Jan. 3 and has threatened to bomb Colombia and Mexico as well.
For mariners in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, Trump’s pivot to the region is not merely rhetorical. The United States has reopened a naval base in Puerto Rico and deployed an armada, including the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. So far, the Pentagon has targeted 35 speedboats suspected of transporting cocaine, killing at least 115 civilians.
In many ways, however, the United States has departed the field in the neighborhood. On the first day of his second term, Trump was dismissive about the strategic importance of Latin America and the Caribbean. “They need us much more than we need them,” he said. “We don’t need them.” He has since narrowed the US regional agenda, jettisoning traditional US priorities such as the fight against corruption, the fight for democracy, and economic integration.
The dismantling of USAID was a blow to northern Central America. That unstable region is also a victim of Trump’s migration policy, as US deportations threaten to increase unemployment and decrease diaspora cash transfers. Trump’s tariffs have done further damage, including in many countries — such as Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru — that had signed free trade agreements with the United States.
Not surprisingly, Latin Americans have not warmed to US “preeminence.” In a June report, Pew said its surveys showed 91% of Mexicans, 62% of Argentines, and 61% of Brazilians had no confidence in Trump’s foreign policy. The number of South American students enrolling in US universities fell by 11% this past fall.
There is plenty of time for a course correction, and the Trump administration has shown sporadic interest in a broader agenda for the hemisphere. Before his first trip to Latin America in January, Rubio published an op-ed that promised an “Americas First Foreign Policy.” The National Security Strategy seems to recognize the region’s importance for building supply chains and sourcing critical minerals.
For now, however, Trump regards the region as a playground for bravado and ideology. He awarded a $20 billion bailout to Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian Trump calls “MAGA all the way.” In El Salvador, he is renting space to detain deported migrants in a prison run by conservative strongman Nayib Bukele that is notorious for human rights abuses.
At the same time, he has feuded with the leftist leaders of the three most populous countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. That includes a gratuitous spat with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over the prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — a far-right figure known, not coincidentally, as the “Trump of the Tropics.”
Daniel DePetris, Fellow, Defense Priorities
In the early morning on Jan. 3, US special operations forces executed a daring raid against Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s location at a heavily guarded military base in Caracas. The operation went flawlessly; after simultaneous airstrikes to degrade the Maduro regime’s air defense systems, US forces in low-flying helicopters assaulted the base, killed Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards, and whisked him and his wife, Cilia Flores, to the USS Iwo Jima. At the time of writing, Maduro is sitting in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York after being arraigned on multiple charges of drug trafficking, the consequence of an indictment originally filed in 2020 by the US Southern District of New York. Since then, Trump has claimed that the United States will run Venezuela’s internal affairs until an orderly political transition process takes place. Of course, how the Trump administration plans to implement such a weighty objective remains to be seen; while Maduro may now be a criminal defendant, his regime is still in place.
Trump clearly viewed Maduro with the utmost hostility, a rollover from his first term, when the administration enacted a series of increasingly harsh economic sanctions against Venezuela’s energy industry and recognized Juan Guaidó, the leader of the anti-Maduro opposition movement, as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The gambit ultimately failed to produce the regime change Trump and his advisers were aiming for. This time, Trump added a military dimension to his previous maximum pressure strategy, striking more than 30 boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, ordering periodic military exercises near Venezuela’s coast in preparation for the operation against Maduro and deploying the largest US military presence in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
While nobody will shed a tear for Maduro’s ouster, the Trump administration’s shifting rationale for why a US military operation in Venezuela was necessary was suspect. For instance, the claim that Maduro’s regime was orchestrating a grand conspiracy to weaken the United States by weaponizing the drug trade is at best inaccurate, if not sensationalist. Such an accusation gave Maduro too much credit, dumbed down the perennial drug trafficking problem that has been an albatross around Washington’s neck for decades and implied that removing the former bus driver turned political boss would magically eliminate the drug trade. The reality is the drugs will continue flowing to the United States regardless of who rules Venezuela.
None of this is to suggest Maduro and his senior officials are angels. Many, including Maduro’s top enforcer, Diasdado Cabello, who remains in his post, have been implicated in the cocaine business by the US Justice Department. Corrupt Venezuelan military officers coordinate with cartels and rebel groups like the National Liberation Army to move cocaine through Venezuela in exchange for a cut of the proceeds, an arrangement that has been taking place even before Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chavez, ascended to the Miraflores presidential palace in the late 1990s. Maduro’s nephews , were sentenced in 2017 to 18 years in prison for conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States (they were later released during the Biden administration in exchange for five American prisoners). Hugo Carvajal, Chavez’s former intelligence chief, pled guilty to narcotics charges in June.
Even so, when it comes to illegal narcotics, Venezuela is a small fish in a big pond. The country produces very little cocaine, isn’t a source of the fentanyl that has killed tens of thousands of Americans a year and is generally used as a transit point by the producers in next-door Colombia who wish to ship their products to customers in the United States and Europe. And to the extent Venezuela is a transit country, it’s a relatively minor one; the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that only 8% of the cocaine departing South America transited the Caribbean Corridor, where Venezuela’s coastline is located. . The 2025 DEA National Drug Threat Assessment didn’t even bother to mention Venezuela in the context of the drug trade, a curious omission for an administration who used counter-narcotics as a central argument for deposing Maduro. In other words, if the Trump administration is worried about curbing drugs, it’s presently focusing on the wrong country.
Regardless of who is most at fault, what can be said with relative confidence is that further militarizing the so-called “war on drugs” is highly unlikely to severely curb illegal drugs from making their way to US shores. Nor is declaring full-blown combat against cartels a solution either. If anything, as recent history shows, the cartel landscape is more likely to fracture even further, complicating the work for regional governments that are already struggling to contain the problem. Mexico has discovered this the hard way; nearly two decades after declaring war on cartels, the homicide rate has nearly tripled as the cartels fought back with increasingly aggressive tactics against civilians and the state. The overall balance of power between and within criminal groups inside Mexico is scrambled. Ecuador is now experiencing the same phenomenon.
No amount of arrests, bombs, or troops are going to nip drug trafficking in the bud. The tens of billions of dollars in profit are just too tempting to leave on the table — and even if one drug trafficking organization does decide to put itself out of business, another one will inevitably fill the void. Toppling Nicolás Maduro, therefore, is likely to produce the same result as killing Pablo Escobar did 33 years earlier: good headlines in the short-term but little noticeable dip in drug trafficking over the long-term.
John H. Austin, Jr., President and Managing Director, iMask Intelligence
A war metaphor promises victory, but modern drug markets demand risk governance, smarter intelligence, and a strategy that addresses both supply and demand. Recent US military strikes on boats reportedly carrying drugs and departing Venezuela and across the Pacific maritime corridor have reinserted drug trafficking into national security conversations after years in which terrorism consumed most of the public’s attention. The images are unmistakable: vessels destroyed at sea, shattered hulls drifting in open water, and in one exceptional case, two survivors pulled from the debris. No other crew members were apprehended. These operations are ongoing, tactically impressive, and visually compelling — but they also highlight how little the public understands about what such actions can and cannot achieve.
For more than 50 years, the United States has framed drug trafficking and drug abuse through the metaphor of a “War on Drugs.” The metaphor is familiar, politically resilient, and emotionally potent, but strategically misleading. Wars imply beginnings, turning points, and decisive ends. Drug abuse, like crime itself, is interwoven into the fabric of society. It can be mitigated, managed, and constrained — but not eradicated.
If we applied the same war metaphor to crime or poverty, we would never declare victory, because those problems are not eradicated; they are managed over time. Drug markets operate under the same structural logic. Having spent more than two decades as a federal agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, I have seen how the war metaphor distorts expectations. It pushes policymakers toward highly visible actions — maritime interdictions, high-profile seizures, “kingpin” arrests — that feel decisive but rarely shift the underlying system. Research reinforces this. RAND’s extensive analysis of drug interdiction finds that seizures, even exceptionally large ones, generate only brief disruptions that traffickers quickly absorb or route around. The enormous financial incentives ensure rapid adaptation.
And that is the underlying reality: blowing up boats or making ever-larger seizures will not solve a deeply embedded social and economic problem. Nor can you arrest your way out of it. Traffickers innovate routes, logistics, and tactics because profits demand constant adjustment. The market recalibrates faster than enforcement can pressure it. Enforcement is essential, but it must be embedded within a broader strategic framework, not substituted for one.
Modern drug markets behave like complex adaptive systems, not traditional nation-state militaries. Yes, drug-trafficking organizations often engage in violent competition, including territorial battles, assassinations, and armed confrontations that resemble warfare at the tactical level. As someone who has seen these conflicts up close, I understand how deadly and destabilizing they can be.
But these groups are not armies in the strategic, state-on-state sense that the war metaphor implies. Their violence is fragmented, localized, and driven by market incentives rather than ideological or political goals. Treating them as battlefield opponents encourages policymakers to expect decisive victories, the kind that are simply not achievable in a market that continually regenerates supply, adapts to pressure, and recruits new participants. The war framework therefore obscures more than it clarifies. A more realistic approach is risk governance, a model widely used in the private sector, public health, and financial regulation. Corporations understand they cannot eliminate cyber intrusions, fraud attempts, or supply-chain contamination. Instead, they build systems that prioritize mitigation, resilience, continuous monitoring, and rapid adaptation. These principles don’t eliminate risk, but they keep institutions functional amid persistent pressure.
A national drug strategy can draw from this approach. Policymakers can implement strategies that reduce vulnerability, disrupt chokepoints, strengthen institutions, and maintain sustained pressure on the most dangerous elements of the market. It is not the only possible strategy, but it aligns with how complex problems are realistically managed across sectors. A policy framework that acknowledges persistence rather than promising victory also better reflects the lived reality in communities. Families struggling with addiction, neighborhoods affected by violence, and overstretched health systems all experience drug markets as ongoing pressures, not finite battles. A more grounded strategy is one that recognizes their need for stability, not slogans.
Today’s narcotics landscape — especially the synthetic drug market — is more intricate, globalized, and technologically enabled than any previous era. Precursor chemicals originate across continents. Communications run through encrypted platforms. Revenues move through layered networks of remitters, shell companies, and digital assets. Interdiction at sea remains necessary, but it does not fundamentally alter this ecosystem. You cannot arrest your way out of a system that continuously regenerates supply, diversifies logistics, and adapts faster than enforcement cycles. Intelligence — open-source, technical, and clandestine — is essential for identifying vulnerabilities, but intelligence alone cannot counteract a market driven by extraordinary profitability and persistent demand.
The United States cannot expect foreign governments to reduce northbound drug flows while overlooking the southbound flow of weapons that enable cartel violence and territorial control. According to the US Government Accountability Office, approximately 70% of firearms recovered in Mexico and traced between 2014 and 2018 originated in the United States. These weapons are not peripheral; they are core tools that sustain the operational capacity of trafficking networks.
A credible long-term strategy must therefore include firearms-interdiction efforts at US sources, investigations targeting gun-trafficking intermediaries, and recognition that firearms and narcotics are interconnected markets.
Demand is the other structural driver. As long as the United States remains the world’s most profitable narcotics market, enforcement alone cannot outweigh financial incentives. Demand reduction is central to any durable solution, not a peripheral supplement.
Retiring the “War on Drugs” metaphor is not about weakening enforcement or avoiding decisive action. It is about aligning policy with reality. Societies do not win wars against human behavior. But resilient societies manage, limit, and contain the pressures those behaviors create.
Drug markets are shaped by global supply chains, economic incentives, governance gaps, and persistent demand. They require continuous governance, not episodic combat. A risk-governance model — one that integrates smarter enforcement, firearms interdiction, demand reduction, and institutional resilience — gives policymakers a more realistic vocabulary and a more effective strategy. It replaces the illusion of victory with the discipline of control. And it measures progress not by how many boats are destroyed, but by whether society becomes safer, more stable, and more capable of containing the problem over time.
Ferial Saeed, Nonresident Fellow, Reimagining US Grand Strategy, Strategic Foresight Hub, Stimson Center
Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy looks incoherent to most observers. But the strategy is clear: restore “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” by aggressively using executive power to force rapid alignment with the United States. This approach could backfire on Washington and destabilize the region. Its goals, however, are more bipartisan than meets the eye, and its tactics will shape US foreign policy — even if they fail.
The strategy, best described as “primacy on steroids,” is appropriately named the “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” in the administration’s National Security Strategy. It has three identifiable pillars. Coercive trade deals seek to dislodge China’s foothold and bring supply chains closer to home. Extraordinary political support aims to protect ideologically aligned leaders or political actors. Thirdly, military pressure is validated as a tool to evict hostile leaders, particularly those with ties to US adversaries. Collectively, these steps aim to rid the hemisphere of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian influence, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio describes them, echoing an important Biden-era objective pursued through diplomacy.
Whether Trump’s explicit quid pro quos can achieve these outcomes is the question.
The administration repurposed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to negotiate trade deals with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It used this sanctions statute to extract enforceable commitments serving US economic, national security, and foreign policy interests. The resulting executive agreements address bipartisan concerns regarding China, supply chain security, and labor, among other US priorities. Potentially, these deals accomplish in Latin America what Biden tried to do in Asia with the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Significant challenges loom, however, starting with a Supreme Court case disputing this use of IEEPA. A reversal would collapse the strategy. The administration also sidelined Congress’s central role in trade policy. Lawmakers may try to claw back their authority. Furthermore, partners may eventually chafe at having to continuously earn tariff relief — and seek alternatives. Whether the strategy survives these challenges or not, it sets a precedent for unilateral, executive-driven trade policy that circumvents congressional gridlock.
The administration’s political support for ideologically aligned leaders similarly stretches executive power. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repurposed the agency’s Exchange Stabilization Fund for political ends. He pledged $20 billion to bail out Argentina before decisive midterms. This fund is rarely used for foreign bailouts absent systemic risk. That condition was not met. While Bessent said securing Javier Milei’s economic reforms was vital, Trump was explicit that the bailout was contingent on voters supporting Milei.
The third pillar — military pressure to remove hostile leaders — also relies on executive overreach. In January 2026, US forces captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for “narco-terrorism.” For months prior to his arrest, senior administration officials labeled Maduro a drug kingpin and threat to national security. They also equated drug traffickers with al-Qaeda. Calling counter-narcotics actions “counter-narco-terrorism” operations reframed these actions as defensive rather than discretionary. This helped justify permissive rules of engagement and secrecy, notably regarding lethal US strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Indeed, public demands for evidence that the strikes were targeting drug traffickers went unanswered. Experts warned the strikes might violate international law. John Bellinger, former Legal Advisor to the State Department and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, offered this blunt assessment: “I have not seen a single international lawyer who thinks that it’s permissible for a country to blow up the civilians of another country on the high seas unless they were actually posing an imminent attack.”
Nonetheless, the strikes set the stage for ousting Maduro. So did past decisions by the administration’s democratic predecessors, however. In 2015, then-President Obama declared the situation in Venezuela a threat to US national security and foreign policy, while Biden raised the bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest in January 2025. These decisions — across administrations — reduced political and legal friction against what came next. Maduro’s capture has been compared to the 1989 forced rendition of Panama’s Manuel Noriega. But there is one big difference: Trump is signaling that so long as Venezuela’s Vice-President plays ball with Washington, the regime — minus Maduro — can remain in power. Despite the global implications of these tactics, international criticism, with few exceptions, has been muted.
Even if primacy on steroids fails, it sets a powerful institutional precedent. The prioritization of executive agility alongside openly coercive tactics changes the rules of engagement in US foreign policy. Future presidents, facing political polarization at home and great power competition abroad, will be tempted to reach for this toolkit. The costs are deferred, not avoided. An unpredictable superpower that relies on coercion to secure compliance may succeed in the term of a single administration. In the longer arc of time, however, hedging — not alignment — may become the hemisphere’s default response. That would be the antithesis of American preeminence in the region.
Marcus Stanley, Director of Studies, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Much of the discussion at our November round table focused on the contradictions in the Trump administration’s policies toward the Western Hemisphere. The core contradiction is between a declared desire to increase US influence in the region and a simultaneous pattern of engaging in bluster, threat, and outright violence that seems certain to reduce US soft power and turn other Western Hemisphere nations against us politically. (This is most glaring in the case of Latin America, but is evident in Canada policy as well).
Events subsequent to the November round table, including the release of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, have heightened these contradictions. In a daring and in many ways unprecedented operation, the US seized Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and brought him to the US for trial on charges of drug trafficking. While much of the Chavista regime remains in place, the US appears to be signaling a kind of neo-colonial future for Venezuela, as Trump claims “we will run” the country. Further US threats of violence are also being made against Colombia, Cuba, and even Mexico. The administration is also continuing a pattern of overt interference in Latin American internal political affairs, most recently by alleging fraud in the Honduran Presidential election and threatening “hell to pay” if the results were not aligned with US preferences. Ironically, part of the US political strategy in Honduras involved pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez for well substantiated charges of drug trafficking that had led to a 45-year sentence, an act that makes the charges against Maduro appear even more pretextual.
One can try to look to the administration’s NSS for the theory behind these actions. The NSS signals a major shift in US geopolitical focus to the Americas, stating that “[a]fter years of neglect, the United States will…restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” It also claims that the US will try to “enlist and expand” by building more effective partnerships with Latin American governments, simultaneously “applying pressure and offering incentives.” The main goal of this effort is cast as driving out “adversarial outside influence” that could threaten US dominance of the hemisphere.
The fundamentally erratic, violent, and coercive quality of this administration’s policy in Latin America so far, though, doesn’t appear well calculated to build partnerships. It certainly shows a willingness to apply pressure. But a quest to subjugate Latin America — 30 countries with a combined population of well over 600 million — through the application of military force and coercive intervention will almost certainly incur costs, both economic and political, far in excess of any gains to be had. This is particularly true since the posited threats to US prosperity from “outside influence” in Latin America are at best extremely vague and undefined, and other issues such as drug trafficking are not soluble through military force.
An irony in all this is that American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere hardly needs to be “restored” as the Trump administration claims. US GDP is almost 80% of the total economic product of the hemisphere. US economic and security dominance over its near abroad is unmatched and near — total by the standards of any other major power.
Dominance is not the issue, but how it is used. Given its outsize power, the US is more free to engage in misguided policies in the Western Hemisphere than in any other region. Indeed, despite actions and threats seemingly well-calculated to alienate many of the largest and most important Latin American nations, the Trump administration has managed to conclude multiple trade agreements and political alliances in the region. Perhaps they believe that, as Machiavelli claimed, it is better to be feared than loved. But Machiavelli also warned that it was unwise to press a power advantage to the point where it arouses hatred.
“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
