For decades, experts have accused American presidents of neglecting the Western Hemisphere in favor of faraway conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Both Republicans and Democrats have carried out a policy of either “benign” or “malign” neglect, allowing threats to grow and missing valuable opportunities.

No one can accuse the new Trump administration of neglecting the United States’s backyard. Instead, it’s seen a flurry of regional activity fairly unprecedented in modern times.

Trump devoted a significant part of his inaugural address to demanding that Panama return control of the Panama Canal. It’s not quite clear if he’s joking by repeatedly suggesting that Canada should become the 51st state, but he has made it quite clear he’s serious about taking control of Greenland — considered geologically, if not politically, part of North America — from Denmark. One of his first executive orders renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

Less than a week into his presidency, he threatened punitive tariffs and visa restrictions on Colombia — a longtime close US ally — after that country’s president, Gustavo Petro, blocked military aircraft from returning migrants deported from the United States. The standoff ended in an agreement, and Trump appears to have won the dispute, though the specifics are still a little unclear.

The Colombia fracas was just a preview of this week’s brinksmanship, in which Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then postponed the tariffs for 30 days in exchange for agreements by those governments to beef up border security. Meanwhile, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, went to Central America, where he pressured the government of Panama to reduce the Chinese presence around the canal. He also stopped in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele made the unprecedented and probably illegal offer to put US deportees of any nationality — including Americans — in his country’s notorious prisons.

On top of all that, Trump’s “envoy for special missions” Richard Grenell traveled to Venezuela, where he met with the country’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro — who is not recognized as the country’s legitimate leader by the US government — and secured the release of six detained Americans and claimed to have reached an agreement for the return of Venezuelan deportees, including gang members.

Rubio’s trip ended up being somewhat overshadowed by Trump’s meeting at the White House with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and proposal for the US to take an........

© Vox