At the G-7 summit in June, the global media eagerly gathered to hear U.S. President Donald Trump provide details about his administration’s latest agreement with Iran. But Trump insisted on returning to one of his favorite subjects: the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuela’s then leader, Nicolás Maduro, in early January. “We have the most powerful military in the world. You saw that with Venezuela, which was . . . 48 minutes, and now our relationship with Venezuela is great,” Trump enthused. “We paid for the cost of the war 40 times, taking millions of barrels [of oil] out. Venezuela’s benefiting, we’re benefiting.”

Trump’s desire to turn his gaze south, rather than east, west, or north, is understandable. At a time when the president’s war on Iran looks like a miscalculation of historic proportions, and when his rhetoric, tariffs, and other actions have alienated traditional U.S. allies in many parts of the world, Latin America stands out as the foreign policy sphere in which Trump has enjoyed the most success in advancing his agenda.

Indeed, this White House has focused more attention and resources on Latin America than any U.S. administration in at least 40 years, including Trump’s own first term. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, I argued in Foreign Affairs that this was likely to occur, not because the region fit a grand foreign policy theory but because it is instrumental to some of Trump’s most important domestic priorities: halting unauthorized immigration, reducing drug overdose deaths, and guaranteeing the United States’ long-term security in energy and critical mineral supplies. The administration has also sought to roll back China’s rising influence in Latin America, which both Republican and Democratic leaders have increasingly seen as a threat to U.S. national security.

Perhaps the most striking element of Trump’s Latin America policy is not the renewed focus on the hemisphere per se, but the extent to which it so unabashedly echoes U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy and other episodes from the past two centuries of U.S. interventionism in the region. The administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy promised that “after years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” referencing the 203-year-old idea, introduced by U.S. President James Monroe, that outside powers should not meddle in the Western Hemisphere. Whereas previous post–Cold War U.S. administrations had mostly emphasized values such as sovereignty and mutual respect in their dealings with Latin America, Trump has threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal and conduct unilateral strikes on cartels in Mexico; publicly endorsed candidates who share his conservative, tough-on-crime views; and, in the case of Venezuela, used U.S. military might to topple a leader he did not like, as numerous presidents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did.

To the surprise of some, this heavy-handed, frequently coercive approach has produced some results for Trump, at least in the short term, as governments across the hemisphere offer greater cooperation, especially on migration and security. This alignment has been aided by the recent election victories by Trump allies in countries including Chile, Colombia, and Peru as part of a right-wing wave that has swept much of the region in the past year. Yet some Latin American policymakers, even as they acknowledge Trump’s victories, warn of a backlash in the long run. In the twentieth century, mounting resentment over U.S. occupations and other interventions eventually gave rise to anti-American leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba and Juan Perón in Argentina. With major decisions still to come for U.S. policy on Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, the return of interventionism in the twenty-first century may ultimately have the opposite effect that Trump wants: driving the region away from the United States and into the arms of China.

The Trump administration’s military intervention in Venezuela, and the incipient, still highly uncertain effort to transform that country into a stable, business-friendly ally, is the most visible result of Washington’s focus on Latin America. But it is not necessarily the most important. In particular, Trump’s dealings with Mexico’s leftist president, Claudia Sheinbaum, have been unexpectedly productive. He has leveraged the threat of higher tariffs and military strikes, and a cordial relationship with Sheinbaum, to secure a degree of coordination on security that officials in both countries describe as unprecedented. Over the past year, the United States and Mexico have expanded their intelligence sharing, and Mexico has extradited or handed over dozens of cartel leaders, some of whom previous U.S. administrations sought custody of for years. Mexican security forces have deployed extra personnel to stop migrants from third countries from reaching the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border, helping Trump deliver one of the main promises of his 2024 campaign: to dramatically reduce unauthorized crossings there.

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