Trump’s Hegemonic Anxiety and Latin America

Aram Aharonian

As he attempts to create a power imbalance with his claims over the Panama Canal, Canada and Greenland, Donald Trump seeks to bully countries for concessions. Trump’s expansionist threats anticipate a stormy relationship between the US and its allies.

The plans of the next president of the United States could mean the end of democracy in the United States, the imposition of a modernized replica of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, the boosting and financing of the ultra-right in the region, and a huge question mark over world peace, says the Observatory on Communication and Democracy.

Everything points to the fact that the shock therapy that the United States wants to carry out will be against China, but also against those Latin American countries that Washington considers to be too commercially or politically aligned with Beijing. In this sense, the Republican administration will openly and coercively threaten – with tariffs, sanctions or diplomatic pressure – these countries to force them to change their trade regulations and distance themselves from the Asian power.

Its three priority objectives are to contain China’s power, to push – even forcefully – the relocation of industry to U.S. territory, and to maintain U.S. global primacy. “You can call it like a Monroe Doctrine 2.0,” noted Mike Waltz, Trump’s hand-picked National Security Advisor, on Fox News. Once again, behind the grandstanding of the statements of the Republican administration’s most prominent figures lies something much deeper.

The United States has entered into a kind of hegemonic anxiety as a consequence of the progressive loss of its power and seeks to tie up in short all the countries it considers to be part of its “backyard”; and even threaten to control – by military means – strategic points such as the Panama Canal or Greenland.

Once a priority target of the famous Monroe Doctrine, Latin America has moved closer to China in recent years, largely because of the passive and condescending position that Washington has maintained. Trump, both in his first term and perhaps in his second, has treated the region as a mere focus of “unwanted” immigration and a scapegoat for the crime problem facing the United States, which Trumpism links to migratory flows.

Regarding Mexico, Trump assured that he would declare drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” and several members of his team advocate military intervention. Regarding Panama, he does not hide his ambition to regain control of the strategic Canal. And the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, warned that she could revoke the US military presence at the Comayagua base because of the “hostile attitude of massive deportations” of thousands of Hondurans.

Latin America has not fared any better under Democratic President Joe Biden, who had the luxury of ignoring the region to focus his efforts on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The so-called “Alliance of the Americas for Economic Prosperity”, established with great fanfare in 2022, did not bear fruit and did not achieve one of the objectives sought by Latin American countries; to address economic inequality. The US mutism is well exploited by China.

Bilateral trade between China and Latin America has escalated from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later. Within a decade, by 2035 this figure will exceed $700 billion, encouraging a strengthening of political ties.

Currently, 22 of the 26 Latin American countries are part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has numerous infrastructure projects, including dozens of ports or terminals operated or built by Chinese companies, which, in addition to raising alarm bells in the White House, should lead it to change strategies… and vocabulary.

Trump faced numerous problems in the 1990s in negotiating his huge bank debts, so much so that, as John Feffer pointed out in his article “Trump’s Dirty Money”, there was only one bank left, Deutsche Bank, then known for its highly questionable legal and ethical behavior, willing to give him credit.

His ways of making money are more than questionable, such as his fraudulent Trump University and Trump Foundation, and recently promoting and making money with trading cards, self-promotional materials, very expensive Bibles and $100,000 watches, involving himself, in addition, in cryptocurrency ventures.

More important than the ideological flexibility of capitalism is its moral flexibility: empires always presented themselves as victims or with some divine right. It is worth remembering that almost two centuries ago (1832) Andrew Jackson justified the removal of native peoples from their own lands and proclaimed: “they assaulted us without our provoking them. We had to defend ourselves.

From 1763 to the present, the tradition has been to force the natives to sign treaties that would later be violated by the cannon owners whenever the treaties limited opportunities to do good business by dispossessing “the inferior races.” More important than capitalism’s ideological flexibility is its moral flexibility (or lack thereof)….

The treaty of 1848 forced the ceding of half of Mexico to the United States for a handout and was never honored according to agreements protecting the rights of Mexicans left on the other side of the new border. Now, Donald Trump has again accused Mexico of abusing “the kindness of the US” and China of “abusing the Panama Canal.

Abuse refers to doing too much business with the West and, worse, with Latin America, which Trump still considers the US backyard, the banana republics. Trump’s threats to take over Canada, Greenland and Panama are in response to the “Arctic meltdown” that would give more independence to China and Russia.

Everything points to the fact that the shock therapy that Trump wants to carry out will be against China, but also against those Latin American countries that Washington considers to be too commercially or politically aligned with Beijing, which he threatens with tariff wars and sanctions. He has already proposed applying tariffs of 60% to “any product that passes through [a] Chinese-owned or controlled port in the region” and that has the United States as its final destination.

A few days ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to Lima to attend the inauguration ceremony of the Chancay deepwater port, a $3.5 billion infrastructure built and partially operated by state-owned COSCO Shipping Ports.

According to the Trumpist perspective, any goods departing from this point in the Pacific to the US, regardless of the country of origin, should be taxed. This measure would also apply to other ports of a similar nature in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Balboa in Panama or Paranaguá in Brazil.

Theodore Roosevelt stole Panama from Colombia with a revolution financed by Washington. The canal, started by the French and finished by Washington was, in fact, built with the blood of hundreds of Panamanians that historical racism forgot, as it forgot the construction of railroads by Chinese immigrants on the West Coast or Irish on the East Coast, groups that suffered persecution and death for belonging to “inferior races”.

If the US were to pay Latin American countries a minimum compensation for all its invasions and destroyed democracies, for all the bloody dictatorships imposed by force of cannon, for the “dollar policy” or for the CIA sabotage since the Cold War, the gold reserves of the US Treasury would not be enough to cover even a minimum percentage.

The slave system that took Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and California from Mexico did not disappear with the Civil War. It simply changed its name. To this must be added the imperial crimes, sometimes in collaboration with empires in Asia and Africa that not only assassinated their independence leaders like Patrice Lumumba but left seas of death and destruction, all in the name of a democracy and freedom that never came and never mattered to them.

We are in the same situation as in the 19th century: geopolitical expansion and racial arrogance, says Jorge Majfud. The difference is that, back then, the United States was an empire on the rise and today it is on the decline. As European examples from the Spanish, British or French empires show, in the long run, and despite all the death and plunder of others, empires have always been very expensive for their citizens, since they do not exist without permanent wars.

In their heyday they always left economic gains for those at the top. The problem is when it is an empire in decline, arrogance is a natural reaction, but it is very expensive and can only accelerate its decline, misery and conflicts, both within and outside its borders, he adds.

One can skip three thousand interventions by Washington in 50 years, but according to capitalist logic, the Panama Canal never belonged to the United States just as the Hudson Yards in Manhattan does not belong to Qatar, nor does the One World Trade Center or the new Waldorf Astoria in New York or the mega-urbanizations of Chicago and Los Angeles belong to China, to name just a few recent examples. No: the world is not the same as it was during his first presidency.

The (in)elusive destiny

They try from the North to impose the imaginary that the inescapable destiny of Latin America and the Caribbean is to be the ally of the United States, by natural and institutional obligation, aligned with the world order that Western Europe has defended until now, based on their interests, the nature of the institutions, the “democratic” values that they sell but do not consume.

It should not be forgotten that Latin America is the largest supplier of oil to the United States and its fastest growing trading partner, as well as the largest source of cocaine and immigrants, both documented and undocumented, underscoring the constantly evolving relationship between the two. But individual U.S. pressure is not enough; it appeals to that of its partners in the NATO war alliance.

US influence was based on the protection of US corporate and geopolitical interests and military interventionism. Ideologically it was based on the idea of Manifest Destiny, characterized by the idea that the colonization and possession of Latin America belonged to the United States.

The US excuse has always been to impose on other countries its own laws and readings of what freedom and democracy mean to the “wasps” (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). It is an internal and free interpretation of the Monroe doctrine of America for the (North) Americans, simplifying it into America for the wasps, points out Alvaro Verzi Rangel. The enemy is totalitarian; the friend is democrat.

The power of definition is centrally punitive and is imposed as a disciplinary discourse. Those who do not follow it are authoritarians, fascists, enemies of freedom. Those who doubt, question, criticize, denounce are the worst of the worst: fifth column, useful fools, agents, says Manolo Monereo.

*Uruguayan journalist and teacher, founder of Telesur, director of the Observatory on Communication and Democracy, president of the Foundation for Latin American Integration.