The National Interest - America Must Secure Its Influence in the Western Hemisphere - July 11, 2025 By: Scott Winton

 The National Interest 

America Must Secure Its Influence in the Western Hemisphere 

July 11, 2025

By: Scott Winton

A Trump-era Monroe Doctrine could secure the Western Hemisphere economically and militarily, replacing failed global commitments, countering China’s influence, and combating cartels and regional instability.

The world is experiencing a new international order, an unstable equilibrium where “core states” assert dominance within spheres of influence. In response, the United States is reclaiming its sovereignty, shedding former global commitments, and leading to a US foreign policy realignment, geographic reorientation, and reordering of allies. This realignment reflects the American people’s concerns about failed regime-change interventions and growing skepticism toward globalization, particularly among working-class Americans. 

Chinese Influence in North and South America Threatens America’s National Interests

Realigning US foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere is essential for protecting Americans from immediate threats while advancing national interests closer to home. In an evolving multipolar world, geographic proximity and regional influence play an outsized role in shaping our shared economic and security interests, deeply rooted in the hemisphere’s history. 

Merited calls to dismantle the World Trade Organization (WTO) are growing, and China is at the center of this discontent due to its long-standing trade violations, including forced technology transfers, hidden subsidies, and distortions by state-owned enterprises that have skewed global markets in its favor. The Chinese Communist Party leverages its overcapacity to eliminate competition in key sectors, fostering reliance on Chinese supply chains and components that pose direct security risks to the US defense industrial base. 

China’s global expansion poses a threat to US security in the Western Hemisphere, restricting export and investment opportunities and limiting access to critical minerals and resources. Beijing’s control over key logistical access points in the Pacific and Caribbean, along with its dominance of strategic maritime routes like the “Polar Silk Road,” undermines US influence within its sphere. Decades of US policy distracted by the Global War on Terror failed to nurture key hemispheric partners to address near-threats and expand economic partnerships. If left unchecked, China’s growing presence in the Western Hemisphere will directly jeopardize US prosperity and security. 

Meanwhile, China’s hand in America’s drug epidemic damages communities across the US, concerns over illegal migration, and the debate over foreign workers are shaping American political opinion about international affairs. The United States’ most pressing security challenge is protecting citizens from geographically proximate threats. 

In 2023, the United States had an estimated 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants. Most migrants seek economic opportunities, often enabled by US employers bypassing labor and tax laws offering below-market wages, while others flee gang violence and state-created instability. Some arrive through illegal pathways, vulnerable to smugglers and abuse, and some have criminal ties. 

Many migrants enter the country with inadequate education, malnutrition, and psychological trauma. State and local governments, including law enforcement, regional hospitals, and public education systems, are often financially unprepared to accommodate the rapid influx of foreign residents, particularly in rural areas and small towns. Pressuring municipal leaders to prioritize illegal migrants over citizens proved neither politically viable nor fiscally prudent. 

In addition, drug cartels, armed, well-financed instruments of corruption and violence, pose a severe and urgent threat. Transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) prey on vulnerable citizens and fragile countries at the national and sub-national level. These violent narco-terrorist organizations are responsible for more American deaths, over 80,000 drug overdoses per year, than any other global threat, contributing to the social ills of America’s drug epidemic. 

Creating a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Administration should pursue peace through domestic and hemispheric strength, promoting security and economic cooperation with aligned nations while upholding mutual sovereignty within the hemisphere, including America’s. The Summit of the Americas, hosted by the Dominican Republic and scheduled for December, presents an excellent opportunity for the Administration to define its Western Hemisphere policy. It is time for the United States to secure the Americas, from Greenland to Argentina. 

How Can the United States Solve the Problems Beyond Its Borders?

No country understands the cartel threat better than Mexico, making it a natural partner in dismantling these networks. Cartels’ continuum of chaos, including human smuggling, arms and drug trafficking, fraud, and black-market trade fuels violence along US borders and beyond and threatens North American sovereignty. The United States possesses cutting-edge security technology, well-trained security forces, and a robust defense industry that should be unleashed in the hemisphere. 

Building on the Western Hemisphere Partnership Act, the US should prioritize security assistance to support joint military and law enforcement operations against transnational criminal organizations. Strengthening Mexico’s security capacity must also include judicial reforms to combat corruption and uphold the rule of law, a cornerstone of democracy. 

As a goodwill gesture, the Department of Justice could invite Mexican officials to collaborate on FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). This model could then expand to other regional partners and be synchronized with the US Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force to combat transnational threats, including drug trafficking. 

Countering these challenges requires a formalized security compact. The Sheinbaum Administration should heed President Trump’s offer to leverage US special forces, advanced military technology, and capacity-building assistance to strengthen Mexican sovereignty in the face of powerful and well-financed drug cartels. In collaboration with the Mexican government, a key focus should be strengthening Mexico’s professional security forces by equipping them with US-manufactured firepower, drones, and surveillance technology to combat cartels. 

This approach enhances Mexico’s security and sovereignty while redirecting US defense manufacturing from overseas entanglements to immediate regional threats, aligning with broader domestic reindustrialization efforts. 

The Trump Administration’s first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy has a unique opportunity to integrate cutting-edge US security technology into the fight against drug cartels, while also investing in American manufacturing. 

Few symbols of justice are as powerful as a Rust Belt-manufactured drone, equipped with Texas-designed software and operated by a US pilot based in the Midwest, taking down a fentanyl plant in Mexico, delivering a decisive response for the victims of the drug epidemic. 

Why Should America Work Alongside North and South American Governments?

Operating with impunity, transnational criminal organizations ignore borders, laws, and maritime boundaries to expand their power. The growing convergence between these groups and state actors underscores the urgent need for US leadership and regional collaboration. 

Hemispheric governments that blur the line between state authority and transnational crime must face diplomatic and economic isolation. This includes containing hostile narco-states like Venezuela, which threatens regional stability and has openly sought to annex half of Guyana. Maduro’s incompetence and state-sponsored violence have driven nearly 8 million Venezuelans to flee, deepening instability in the Western Hemisphere, a geographical proximate threat to US national interests. 

The United States, with the help of hemispheric partners, must take decisive action to isolate such regimes, cutting them off from access to US markets and the international financial systems and using American-made security technology to disrupt Maduro’s government. The goal is maximum pressure, making Maduro’s governance (and daily life) increasingly difficult and forcing negotiations with the opposition. 

Until a behavior change is achieved, Maduro must feel unsafe in his own country. And any negotiated exit must ensure broad support while avoiding costly and bloody US military interventions that weaken long-term US strength and prosperity. 

A similar approach should be applied to other uncooperative governments, including those collaborating with US foreign and hemispheric adversaries; Nicaragua and Honduras should take note. When countries are willing to align shared interests, diplomatic solutions, such as reproachment, should be encouraged. 

What Should America’s New Trade Policy Be with North and South America?

Proper security for the American people begins with economic security. That means reinvesting in forgotten communities and creating meaningful, dignified, family-supporting jobs, not only in major metropolitan areas but also in small cities and towns across the country. President Trump’s America First Investment Policy is a critical step in this direction. 

However, for US advanced manufacturing and American workers to truly thrive, we must also develop hemispheric supply chains, ensure access to key raw materials, and secure near markets for US-made goods. 

To achieve this, the United States should execute an affirmative and reciprocal economic agenda for the Western Hemisphere. Private sector investment, underpinned by development finance, will be essential. The bipartisan Partnership for Central America provides a strong foundation for deepening collaboration with regional industry leaders and integrating supply chains that are critical to US manufacturing. Priority should be placed on channeling private capital into resilient logistical networks, critical mineral and manufacturing trade, and reciprocal market access. 

To further advance this vision, hemispheric multinational corporations should be incentivized to invest in US rural and urban areas that are reeling from the consequences of unfettered globalization and unfair trade policies, thereby inviting the hemisphere to participate in America’s renewal. These reciprocal flows of capital will help realize the President’s vision of a manufacturing renaissance, strengthen strategic allies across the region, and reassert American leadership in our sphere of influence. 

This strategy builds upon the US’s six existing hemispheric free trade agreements. It serves as a practical counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, particularly in the infrastructure-deprived regions of the Caribbean and Central America. 

At the core of this agenda must be a Western Hemisphere industrial policy that enhances reciprocal trade within this sphere of influence, enforces fair labor and worker safety standards, and creates two-way investment opportunities. 

Abroad, trade agreements should reflect the robust worker protections established in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and the Department of State should entice foreign direct investments that re-skill and build the capacity of the American workforce. 

At home, the federal government must continue to enforce national origin protections and penalize firms that seek to undercut American workers. To create meaningful US export opportunities, the United States must offer an affirmative vision with reliable allies committed to fair trade, something the WTO can no longer guarantee but US leadership can ensure within our hemisphere. 

Pro-US leaders, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Paraguay’s Santiago Peña Palacios, present a strategic opportunity to expand trade through reciprocal agreements that benefit US industries, ranchers, and farmers, while promoting a level playing field for American workers. 

A secure and prosperous future for the United States depends on a strong, empowered workforce, and a strategic economic alliance with our neighbors. By meaningfully engaging with this often-overlooked region, the United States counters China’s influence and bolsters regional stability. It advances economic and national security for industry and workers within our sphere of influence. 

About the Author: Scott Winton

Scott Winton is a senior labor advisor at the US Department of State. Winton is a first-generation college graduate from Branson, Missouri, joining the US Foreign Service in 2009 through the Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Missouri–Columbia and a master’s. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. The opinions and information presented are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect or characterize US government policy. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/United States Senate-Office of Dan Sullivan.