How To Drive Latin America Into the Arms of China
“It has always surprised me,” wrote the 20th-century Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, “that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain.”
That fountain is now bone dry. At this writing, the U.S. Border Patrol has exchanged fire into Mexico with cartel members from an island in the center of the Rio Grande. This was almost certainly a justified act of self-defense, a reply to cartel bullets. But it is emblematic of the direction of U.S. relations with Latin America, coming two days after President Trump mused publicly about sending U.S. special forces to battle cartels in Mexico.
The Trump 2.0 foreign policy began with rhetorical two-by-fours for Latin America, with a threat to smack Mexico (along with Canada) with a 25% tariff. The president, in a press conference, also reserved the right to use military force to retake the Panama Canal. Adding gratuitous insult to threatened injury, the president wants to rename the big body of water between Tampa and Tampico “the Gulf of America.”
What is the president doing? As a real estate developer, Donald Trump was famous for threatening lawsuits at the beginning of negotiations over a deal. It was his way of creating leverage. But national pride is not a real estate deal. Far from establishing a predicate for concessions, the president’s hot controversies are setting the stage for the loss of American influence and the sealing of China’s business dominance in Latin America and perhaps military presence.
Secretary of State Mark Rubio, exquisitely attuned to Latin American attitudes, might gently give the president some history lessons. So could I. In the 1990s, when I served in the George H.W. Bush White House, that president unleashed the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard to remove Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Given Noriega’s nullification of Panamanian democracy, his international narcotics dealing, the harassment of Americans and the murder of a U.S. Marine by his forces, it was indeed a just cause. The result was the rise of Panama as a stable democracy and friend of the United States.
But military action always inflicts unintended consequences. Count among them the more than 200 Panamanian citizens who were caught in the crossfire of that invasion. We don’t remember these innocents, but Panama does. Threatening to invade one’s country, with the consequence of killing soldiers defending their democracy and killing civilians is not anything like threatening a lawsuit at the outset of a deal. It is more like hitting the party on the other side of the table with the idea that you might come to their house and kill their children.
Nations have pride. Yes, Donald Trump successfully used the threat of tariffs to force Colombia’s far-left president Gustavo Petro to accept military flights of deportees from the United States. But Petro is an outlier in Colombian politics, in a nation more moderate than he is. Colombia is a friend and long-term collaborator with the United States. What will be the long-term effect of the public humiliation of Colombia’s president on that country’s voters? As in Panama, the president’s actions will almost certainly stiffen nationalism, harm the image of the United States and provide a wedge China can exploit.
A similar, and far more dangerous, dynamic is at play in Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is another leftist leader and also a bit of an outlier in her country. As the successor of the hard-left López Obrador, she is solidifying the legacy of the socialist Morena Party, threatening to undo the great Mexican achievement of multi-party democracy at the end of the 20th century. There is plenty of resistance in Mexico to the Morena Party’s attempt to erode checks and balances, including changes to the judiciary, elections, and neutral regulatory bodies.
Recent events may give Mexico’s leftists fresh momentum to overcome that resistance. Just as Panamanians remember the civilian casualties of Operation Just Cause, so too do Mexicans remember the U.S. Army’s sweep from Veracruz in the 19th century that ended in the martyrdom of teenage cadets in Mexico City. In the 20th century, U.S. forces killed 15 cadets in the Battle of Veracruz after President Woodrow Wilson, upset over the mistreatment of U.S. sailors in a port, had demanded Mexican forces raise the American flag in Tampico and give it a 21-gun salute.
In short, Sheinbaum and Petro have the raw emotional material to drive the creation of one-party, left-wing, anti-American regimes. A newly arrogant America could be the catalyst they need. While Washington worries about China’s attempt to own the South China Sea, Donald Trump’s fixation on picking fights with Latin America could result in a Chinese military base on the Rio Grande.