The Americas’ common agenda has a clear voice: Marco Rubio

It is no accident that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among the first to embrace a hemispheric variation on the most famous slogan in American politics: “Make the Americas Great Again.”

What reads at first as wordplay in fact carries considerable weight, because it names something that has rarely been harder to deny. The agendas of the U.S. and much of Latin America are advancing, increasingly and perhaps inevitably, in the same direction, closing gaps that have often widened in the past. 

But this kind of alignment, however, does not happen on its own. It requires an articulator: someone with the political skill to translate shared interests into working policy. It would be simplistic to credit any single author for the alignment now taking shape across the hemisphere. But it is, in my view, unmistakable that Rubio has been central to it. 

In recent history, hardly anyone else at the highest administration level has a better knowledge and understanding of the Western Hemisphere. The son of Cuban immigrants and the first Latino to lead the State Department, he has given the Western Hemisphere the place in American strategic thinking that durable partnership requires: not an afterthought, not a problem file, but a political vision where the United States stands to benefit as much as its continental allies.  

That strategic realignment, led by Rubio, is visible in three developments that deserve close attention.

The first is the........

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