President Trump has tightened the U.S. grip on the Americas by rewarding allies and punishing rivals. That has upended the region’s politics.
President Trump opened the year with pledges to seize the Panama Canal, take control of Greenland and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
He is ending it by bombing boats from South America, stationing the world’s largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and exploring military options against Venezuela’s autocratic leader.
In a sharp shift of decades of U.S. foreign policy, the Western Hemisphere has become the United States’ central theater abroad. In addition to military threats and action, the White House this year has carried out punishing tariffs, severe sanctions, pressure campaigns and economic bailouts across the Americas.
Mr. Trump has said he is seeking to stop drugs and migrants from entering the United States. But, in other moments, top administration officials have been explicit that their overarching goal is to assert American dominance over its half of the planet.
“He believes this is the neighborhood we live in,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Latin America until June, who continues to advise the White House. “And you can’t be the pre-eminent global power if you’re not the pre-eminent regional power.”
The United States has long tried to tip the scales around Latin America, where it has supported military coups, conducted covert operations and invaded Panama.
That U.S. foreign policy was often tied to ideology. During the Cold War, there was the effort to champion capitalism — even if it meant backing dictators. In recent decades, as attention drifted to wars and competition in the other hemisphere, the focus was on democracy and free trade in Latin America.
Mr. Trump’s approach appears purely pragmatic: What is in it for the United States?
Stronger control of the hemisphere, and particularly Latin America, promises major benefits. Ample natural resources, strategic security positions and lucrative markets are all in play.
Backed by a team of hawks with a long history in Latin America, most prominently Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump is overhauling U.S. policy in the region to try to extract those prizes.
The effect has been a reordering of politics up and down the Americas. Many leaders have twisted themselves to align with Mr. Trump — often wining major benefits in return — or bet their governments on defying him.
Many observers have begun calling the new U.S. approach “the Donroe Doctrine” — a term that appeared on a January cover of The New York Post — a Trumpian twist on a 19th-century idea.
In 1823, President James Monroe aspired to stop European powers from meddling in the hemisphere.
In 2025, the competing power is China, which has built up enormous political and economic power in Latin America over the past several decades.
Some foreign policy analysts believe that Mr. Trump would like to divide the world with China and Russia into spheres of influence. In recent months, top U.S. officials have explained their strategy in those terms.
“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote Thursday, in the latest example.
To a president who grew up in New York — where businessmen, politicians and mob bosses battle for turf — controlling a neighborhood is common sense, former officials and analysts say.
“He translates that very parochial New York view to a global view,” said John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama. “And if you put it in the current context, the Americas are his sphere of influence.”
So how to secure the block?
The White House has killed many of the aid programs devised to foster influence and good will across Latin America. Instead, Mr. Trump appears focused on assembling a roster of allies in the region, or at least acquiescent governments.
