Benign Neglect vs Aggressive Monroe Doctrine

We don't know which one Trump will choose. And the results may be similar either way.

There was a moment in late 2000 and early 2001 when the pundits were convinced that the new George W. Bush administration signaled a new level of increased attention to Latin America. Coming to the presidency from his role as a border governor, President Bush had an excellent rapport with Mexican President Fox. In his opening months, Bush met with numerous Latin American presidents and attended the Summit of the Americas.

Needless to say, the Bush administration is not remembered for its focus on Latin America. I’m not here to debate Bush’s legacy on Latin America but rather to highlight how wrong early predictions of a Latin American focus can be.

Imagine three extremes of US policies:

Benign Neglect - The stereotypical (often overstated) US policy towards Latin America since the Cold War ended.

Aggressive Monroe Doctrine - Deportations, tariff wars, militaristic security policies, demands of fealty towards the US, and a rejection of China

Enlightened Involvement - The sort of policies dreamt of by naively idealistic pundits who don’t have to do any of the hard implementation

The incoming Trump administration’s messages are along the lines of the Aggressive Monroe Doctrine. The next president is threatening to shut down the border, deport migrants, engage in a trade war and bomb cartel labs. He is naming ambassadors to countries throughout the Western Hemisphere at a relatively fast clip in the lead up to the transition (see yesterday’s newsletter). Trump’s upcoming State Department leadership seems to have a Latin American focus.

The three-way split above isn’t the only way to view the issue. There is an old leftist trope that Latin America would be better off if the US simply left the region alone. Instead of my division of policy into three groups above, that variation views all US involvement as an extension of a malign Monroe Doctrine and sees Trump’s policies as a slightly worse/exaggerated version than typically bad interventionist US policies.

On the other side, Trump’s team views their approach as a positive agenda. While I write the words “Aggressive Monroe Doctine” in a negative way, there are plenty of people within Trump circles who would embrace and adopt that language as the vision they want to implement. And there are some in Latin America - Bukele, Milei, and Bolsonaro leading the charge - who will see US involvement under Trump as a positive for their countries and the region. My take that this approach will be negative for US relations with Latin America is the other assumption within the analysis that could be wrong and deserves some scrutiny.

Foreign Affairs published an article last week by Brian Winter making the case that Trump may be the first president to focus on Latin America in the modern era and that maybe all those pundits hoping the US would focus on Latin America will now regret the attention the region receives. That matches some of what I’ve written in recent weeks about Trump’s and Rubio’s upcoming policies. The fear that an aggressive US policy hits the region is likely what drove Mercosur and the European Union to finalize their trade deal. It’s forcing many countries to rethink their geopolitical position prior to Trump taking office.

But what if we’re still in the Benign Neglect scenario instead? It’s possible and perhaps even likely that Latin America is largely ignored over the next four years, getting no more attention than it was given under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden or in Trump’s first term. The base rate on presidents giving Latin America a high priority is essentially zero in the modern era. As a general rule, predicting that this time will be different is the more unlikely bet than believing that this time will be the same as it always has been.

So even as some analysts plan for the Aggressive Monroe Doctrine as the base case scenario for the next administration, we should also be mapping out what the Benign Neglect scenario looks like under Trump. It doesn’t mean the US completely ignores the region. There will be meetings, exchanges, ambassadors, and the occasional crisis that drives the region briefly into the news before the next less important but higher-profile crisis out of the Middle East, Europe or Asia distracts us once again. Trump’s first term focused far more on domestic issues and controversies than on foreign policy and if the second term does the same, not much will move in US-LatAm policy.

The Benign Neglect scenario means that challenges in Latin America are not proactively faced, much less resolved. While the US will wring its hands about China, without greater attention and an actual strategy, Beijing’s influence will grow and the US’s leverage will shrink. Criminal organizations will adapt, grow, and corrupt or otherwise threaten governments and the US will simply seize cocaine while failing to push back against those criminals. Economic linkages that should be growing will instead shrink. While the migration issue will be used for domestic political gain, nothing will be done to address the root causes or prevent new surges of migration in the future.

One challenge in measuring this is that it’s not clear whether an Aggressive Monroe Doctrine leads to different policy outcomes than Benign Neglect. China’s influence may still gain amid aggressive US diplomacy. Tariffs won’t improve US relations with the region or economic conditions in Latin America. Bombing cartel hotspots is unlikely to improve citizen security. Building a wall won’t stop migration.

Latin American governments and companies operating in Latin America should be planning for both scenarios. The details of operating in the region will be different under the two scenarios. But at the strategic level, the end results may not be. We’ll know which scenario we’re in when we see it, but we may not be able to measure it based on the outcomes delivered. That’s a damning indictment of US influence as we end 2024.