Making Real The New Pivot Toward The Western Hemisphere

Suppose you announced you were pivoting toward a different direction, stopped in mid pivot and wound up right back where you were in the first place? That is what happened with the Obama Administration's much-heralded Pivot to Asia 15 years ago. This meant East Asia and the Pacific (Hillary Clinton wrote about America's coming "Pacific Century") but the Obama people spent a lot of time right back where they started – focused on the Middle East and Europe. Those were the years of the failed nuclear deal with Iran, of the rise of the Islamic State and of #UnitedforUkraine.

Today the incoming second Trump Administration talks much of a pivot to the Americas, from Greenland to Argentina. This is a refreshing and much needed refocus and was reinforced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's first foreign trip, which was to Central America and the Caribbean.[1] President Trump has publicly engaged, at least rhetorically, in the early days of the Administration, on Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. In 2001, Colin Powell's and George W. Bush's first foreign junket was to Mexico but that Administration wound up spending most of its time focused on the Middle East and the Global War on Terrorism. Latin America was forgotten.

In the early days of this administration, Trump and Rubio find themselves in a familiar place, spending a lot of time and energy on Europe and the Middle East as they try to stamp out interminable wars begun under the previous Democratic government. Can they really pivot – to the Americas and to Asia – as they want and what could they hope to accomplish?

The first thing that must be said is that a true pivot away from the old and to new horizons will require ruthless, iron discipline. The American "Empire" is constantly tempted to do too much, to be dragged into fixing whatever becomes the trendy cause, usually far from our shores.

Secondly, that discipline will not only require focusing away from regional distractions but focusing toward actual concrete goals that can be launched or achieved in the short to mid-term. Is the policy to be to build a smaller Fortress America (the USA alone) or a bigger Fortress Western Hemisphere, or both? Can a focus be maintained on achieving certainly tangible outcomes rather than talking or wishing them to happen? For example, how can the United States acquire Greenland, what are the practical steps to do so – rather than talking about acquiring Greenland?[2]

Some changes can be reversed but take time. Building trust takes time and real diplomacy, restoring commercial ties takes nurturing mutually beneficial relationships. China, for example, has steadily increased its trade and economic investment in Latin America over the past 25 years. While the United States is still the main trading partner of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean Basin, it has lost ground to China in South America. Chinese trade in goods and services (from only $12 billion in 2000 to $450 billion in 2023) and foreign investment in the hemisphere have soared over the past quarter century. China replaced the United States as Brazil's main trading partner in 2009. Chinese savvy has been matched by declines in American manufacturing and investment over those same years. To increase trade, you have to have something to trade with. Reviving American manufacturing and our industrial base, as the Trump Administration wants to do, is a sure way to strengthen economic ties with our neighbors.[3]

As far as politics in the hemisphere is concerned, the United States has a golden opportunity to forge constructive ties with regional right-of-center parties. In 1990, left-wing parties in the Americas (the U.S. Democratic Socialists of America became associate members in 2023) organized themselves under the so-called São Paulo Forum (FSP).[4] FSP members range from left-wing democratic parties to the ruling dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In 2020, the right-wing Spanish Vox party launched the Madrid Charter (or Madrid Forum) as an effort to begin to try to counter the influence of the left in the hemisphere.[5] Cooperation with or parallel efforts complimentary to the Madrid Charter makes sense for U.S. foreign policy.

And while both Mexico and Brazil currently have left-wing more-or-less democratic governments, the United States faces the challenge of virulently anti-U.S. leftist dictatorial regimes in Havana, Managua, and Caracas – all three allies of Russia, China, and Iran. But they are not the same. The Cuban Communist regime has never been as weak as it is today. If it survives intact for the next four years, that will have been a failure of U.S. foreign policy. While Venezuela is an economic and political basket case and a threat to the U.S. ruled by narco-leftists, it is a relatively large country, a tougher nut to crack. A U.S. effort to radically change the trajectory of the smaller, weaker regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua is overdue. They are the low-hanging fruit of the left in the Americas and ripe for the plucking.

If commerce and politics are two key areas in a pivot to the Americas, counter-terrorism should be a third. For too long, Iran and its catspaw Lebanese Hezbollah have had too much room to maneuver in Latin America.[6] U.S. policy should move aggressively to weaken Iran's subversive efforts and to make sure that Hezbollah is uniformly treated in the hemisphere, not just as criminals, but as the terrorist group that it is.[7]

Something which should have been logical and relatively easy – a close relationship with those countries and regions closest to us – was made difficult because we weakened ourselves, diluted our internal strength and focused too much and too long on distant foreign misadventures of marginal benefit to us. Time to change, to make the Americas great again.

*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI. He also served as a U.S. diplomat in Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.