Trump urges Latin American leaders to use military to help the U.S. fight cartels

President Donald Trump said Saturday that the United States and Latin American countries are banding together to combat violent cartels as his administration looks to demonstrate it remains committed to sharpening U.S. foreign policy focus on the Western Hemisphere even while dealing with five-alarm crises around the globe.

Trump encouraged regional leaders gathered at his Miami-area golf club to take military action against drug trafficking cartels and transnational gangs that he says pose an “unacceptable threat” to the hemisphere’s national security.

“The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” Trump said. “We have to use our military. You have to use your military.” Citing the U.S.-led coalition that confronted the Islamic State group in the Middle East, the Republican president said that “we must now do the same thing to eradicate the cartels at home.”

The gathering, which the White House called the “Shield of the Americas” summit, came just two months after Trump ordered an audacious U.S. military operation to capture Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro, and whisk him and his wife to the United States to face drug conspiracy charges.

Looming even larger is Trump’s decision to join with Israel to launch a war on Iran one week ago, a conflict that has left hundreds dead, convulsed global markets and unsettled the broader Middle East.

Trump’s time with the Latin American leaders was limited: After, he was setting out for Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, to be on hand for the dignified transfer of the six U.S. troops killed in a drone strike on a command center in Kuwait, one day after the U.S. and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran.

But with the summit, Trump aimed to turn attention to the Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment. He has pledged to reassert U.S. dominance in the region and push back on what he sees as years of Chinese economic encroachment in America’s backyard.

Trump also said the U.S. will turn its attention to Cuba after the war with Iran and suggested his administration would cut a deal with Havana, underscoring Washington’s increasingly aggressive stance against the island’s communist leadership. “Great change will soon be coming to Cuba,” he said, adding that “they’re very much at the end of the line.”

The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago joined the Republican president at Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort where he is also set to host the Group of 20 summit later this year.

The idea for a summit of like-minded conservatives from across the hemisphere emerged from the ashes of what was to be the 10th edition of the Summit of the Americas, which was scrapped during the U.S. military buildup off the coast of Venezuela last year.

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 commitment from Trump to attend — the Dominican Republic’s president, Luis Abinader, decided at the last minute to postpone the event, citing “deep differences” in the region.

The Shield of the Americas moniker was meant to speak to Trump’s vision for a “America First” foreign policy toward the region that leverages U.S. military and intelligence assets unseen across the area since the end of the Cold War.

Notably missing at the event were the region’s two dominant powers — Brazil and Mexico — as well as Colombia, long the linchpin of U.S. anti-narcotics strategy in the region.

Richard Feinberg, who helped plan the first Summit of Americas in 1994 while working at the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, said the contrast 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,” said 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.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has made countering Chinese influence in the hemisphere a top priority. His national security strategy promotes the “Trump Corollary” to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which had sought to ban European incursions in the Americas, by targeting Chinese infrastructure projects, military cooperation, and investment in the region’s resource industries.

The first demonstration of the more muscular approach was Trump’s strong-arming of Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and review long-term port contracts held by a Hong Kong-based company amid U.S. threats to retake the Panama Canal.

More recently, the U.S. capture of Maduro and Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela threatens to disrupt oil shipments to China — the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude before the raid — and bring into Washington’s orbit one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region. Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing later this month to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But even leaders closely aligned with Trump have been reluctant to sever ties with China, said Evan Ellis, an expert on Chinese engagement in the region at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

For many countries, China’s trade-focused diplomacy fills a critical financial void in a region facing major development challenges, from poverty reduction to infrastructure bottlenecks. In contrast, Trump has been slashing foreign assistance to the region while rewarding countries lined up behind his crackdown on immigration — a policy widely unpopular across the hemisphere.

“The U.S. is offering the region tariffs, deportations and militarization whereas China is offering trade and investment,” said Kevin Gallagher, director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, who has written extensively about China’s economic diplomacy in 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.”

Before the summit, Trump named Kristi Noem, whom he just removed as his Department of Homeland Security secretary, as his special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

Noem said 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.”