President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio throughout a roundtable dialogue on faculty sports activities within the East Room of the White House, Friday, March 6, 2026, in Washington.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
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Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
DORAL, Fla. — President Donald Trump is ready to collect with Latin American leaders on Saturday at his Miami-area golf membership as his administration seems to show it is nonetheless dedicated to sharpening U.S. overseas coverage give attention to the Western Hemisphere even because it offers with five-alarm crises across the globe.
The gathering, dubbed the “Shield of the Americas” summit, comes simply two months after Trump ordered an audacious U.S. army operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and whisk him and his spouse to the U.S. to face drug conspiracy fees.
Looming even bigger is Trump’s choice to be a part of with Israel to launch a struggle on Iran one week in the past, a battle that is already left tons of lifeless, convulsed world markets and unsettled the broader Middle East.
Trump’s time with the Latin American leaders shall be restricted: He can also be set to fly to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, to be readily available for the dignified switch of the six U.S. troops killed in a drone strike on a command heart in Kuwait, sooner or later after the U.S. and Israel launched their army marketing campaign towards Iran.
But with the summit, Trump will look to flip attention to the Western Hemisphere, at least for a second. He’s vowed to reassert U.S. dominance within the area and push again on what he sees as years of Chinese financial encroachment in America’s yard.
“Under previous leaders, we grew obsessed with every other theater and every other border in the world except our own,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth advised regional leaders and protection ministers who gathered in Florida this week for talks on countering drug cartels. “These elites reduced our power and presence in this hemisphere, opting for a benign neglect that was anything but benign.”
Who shall be attending
The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago have confirmed they will participate within the gathering at the president’s Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort the place he is additionally set to host the Group of 20 summit later this yr.
The thought for a summit of like-minded conservatives from throughout the hemisphere emerged from the ashes of what was to be the tenth version of the Summit of the Americas, which was scrapped through the U.S. army buildup off the coast of Venezuela final yr.
Host Dominican Republic, pressured by the White House, had barred Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from attending the regional gathering. But after leftist leaders in Colombia and Mexico threatened to pull out in protest — and with no dedication from Trump to attend — the Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader determined at the final minute to postpone the occasion, citing “deep differences” within the area.
The Shield of the Americas moniker is supposed to communicate to Trump’s imaginative and prescient for a “America First” overseas coverage towards the area that leverages U.S. army and intelligence belongings unseen within the area because the finish of the Cold War.
But notably lacking would be the area’s two dominant powers — Brazil and Mexico — in addition to Colombia, lengthy the linchpin of U.S. anti-narcotics technique within the area.
Richard Feinberg, who helped plan the primary Summit of Americas in 1994 whereas working at the National Security Council within the Clinton White House, mentioned the distinction could not be starker.
“The first Summit of the Americas, with 34 nations and a carefully negotiated comprehensive agenda for regional competitiveness, projected inclusion, consensus and optimism,” mentioned Feinberg, now professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego. “The hastily convened Shield of the Americas mini-summit conjures a crouched defensiveness, with only a dozen or so attendees huddled around a single dominant figure.”
The problem from China
Since returning to the White House, Trump has made countering Chinese affect within the hemisphere a prime precedence. His nationwide safety technique touts what it dubs the “Trump Corollary” to the nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine — which had sought to ban European incursions within the Americas — by focusing on Chinese infrastructure initiatives, army cooperation and funding within the area’s useful resource industries.
The first demonstration of the extra muscular strategy was Trump’s strong-arming of Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and evaluate long-term port contracts held by a Hong Kong-based agency amid U.S. threats to retake the Panama Canal.
More lately, the U.S. seize of Maduro and Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela threatens to disrupt oil shipments to China — the most important purchaser of Venezuelan crude earlier than the raid — and produce into Washington’s orbit certainly one of Beijing’s closest allies within the area. Trump is scheduled to journey to Beijing later this month to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But even leaders intently aligned with Trump have been reluctant to sever ties with China, mentioned Evan Ellis, an skilled on Chinese engagement within the area at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For many nations, China’s trade-focused diplomacy fills a crucial monetary void in a area with main growth challenges starting from poverty discount to infrastructure bottlenecks. In distinction, Trump has been slashing overseas help to the area whereas rewarding nations lined up behind his crackdown on immigration — a coverage that is extensively unpopular throughout the hemisphere.
“The U.S. is offering the region tariffs, deportations and militarization whereas China is offering trade and investment,” mentioned Kevin Gallagher, director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, who has written extensively about China’s financial diplomacy within the Americas. “Leaders in the region would do well to remain neutral and hedge, such that they can leverage increased U.S.-China rivalry to their own benefit.”
Ahead of the summit, Trump introduced that he was naming Kristi Noem, whom he simply eliminated as Department of Homeland Security secretary, as his particular envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
Noem mentioned Trump will announce “a big agreement” at the summit centered on “how we’re going to go after cartels and drug trafficking in the entire Western Hemisphere.”
