On March 5, 2026, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller explained the Trump administration’s strategy for the Western Hemisphere during a conference at the U.S. Southern Command’s headquarters in Doral, Florida. Drug cartels, he declared to Latin American military leaders, are “the ISIS and the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere and should be treated just as brutally and just as ruthlessly.” Miller explained that the U.S. government invited military leaders — and not lawyers — to the conference because “these organizations can only be defeated with military power.” 

Miller’s remarks came at the inaugural Americas Counter Cartel Conference, a prelude to the “Shield of the Americas” Summit that President Donald Trump hosted at his Doral golf resort two days later, on March 7. The summit was part of the administration’s effort to build a hemispheric security architecture organized around military force, ideological alignment, and the explicit exclusion of governments that do not fall in line. The administration’s policy is a sharp break with the recent past and risks further undermining the cause of democracy throughout the hemisphere. 

Implementing the “Trump Corollary” 

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) declared a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, elevating migration and cartel violence to the top of the national security hierarchy and committing the United States to preventing “non-Hemispheric competitors” from acquiring strategic assets in the Americas. The NSS’s authors also stated that Washington “will not insist on shared values as a precondition for partnership.” As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Will Freeman observed, the NSS’s goal is a “reasonably stable and well-governed” hemisphere — not a democratic one.

The Shield of the Americas translates the NSS’s doctrine into structure. The initiative, formally announced on March 5, when Trump reassigned outgoing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to serve as its special envoy, creates a coalition of aligned governments organized around three priorities: dismantling cartel networks, countering Chinese influence, and stopping migration. Noem will coordinate with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. A White House spokesperson described Noem’s new role as ensuring “American preeminence in the entire Western Hemisphere.”

That language tracks directly with the NSS’s “enlist and expand” framework, which calls for recruiting ideologically sympathetic governments into a U.S.-backed bloc and pressuring others to join. The guest list for the conference confirms it. Thirteen heads of state from right-leaning Latin American governments were invited. The attendees included leaders who have signaled their willingness to align their nations’ security postures with Washington’s, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei, Chile’s president-elect José Antonio Kast, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Honduras’s Nasry Asfura, and Panama’s José Raúl Mulino. Tellingly, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico did not send delegations. The latter three countries represent the region’s largest economies and pose the most complex security challenges. But they have not fallen in line with the administration’s agenda. 

A Militarized Policy

The operational logic behind the Shield is already visible. On March 3, SOUTHCOM announced that U.S. and Ecuadorian forces had launched joint operations inside Ecuador against cartels designated as terrorist organizations by the administration, the first U.S. land-based military operation against cartels in the region. U.S. special forces served as advisers, providing intelligence and planning support, while Ecuadorian troops executed the raids. Previously, the administration struck dozens of suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and, in January, carried out a military operation to seize Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

After the operation in Ecuador, Hegseth told the assembled defense leaders that “America is prepared to take on these threats and go on the offense alone if necessary.”

Miller went further. He told regional leaders that “not a single one of your nations should tolerate the existence of a single square mile of territory that is under the control of any entity other than the sovereign governments of your country.” He then added, in comments that drew wide attention, that Latin American officials had his “permission not to listen to” their own lawyers.

That line deserves to be taken seriously. The administration is telling the region’s military leaders, in plain language, that legal constraints are obstacles to the security outcomes Washington wants. The NSS says the same thing in policy language. Miller just said it out loud. And leaders who were already tempted to govern by decree heard him clearly.

A Misdiagnosis of the Cartel Threat

The Shield of the Americas rests on a core premise: that cartels are military problems requiring military solutions. This is a misdiagnosis. Cartels are criminal enterprises embedded in weak governance, fueled by corruption, and capitalize on a demand-side drug economy driven primarily by U.S. consumers. Treating them as the hemispheric equivalent of ISIS makes for effective political theater, but it distorts the nature of the threat and leads to strategies that have failed repeatedly.

Latin America has decades of experience with militarized anti-crime campaigns. The early mano dura (meaning “hard hand” or “iron fist”) policies in Central America produced mass arrests, prison overcrowding, and gang professionalization without sustained reductions in violence. 

A 2025 study found that monthly homicides in El Salvador were 54 percent higher during those mano dura periods than during gang truce periods. Bukele’s reign has been an exception, producing a dramatic drop in homicides, from 53.1 per 100,000 in 2018 to 1.9 in 2024, according to Salvadoran police data. But the full picture is more complicated than the data allows. 

As El Faro has documented and the U.S. Treasury confirmed, the Salvadoran president has secretly negotiated with MS-13 and Barrio 18, both of which operate transnational criminal networks, since at least 2019, trading prison benefits and political concessions for reduced killings. Bukele ushered in a “state of exception,” with its widespread detentions, when those negotiations collapsed in March 2022 and gangs killed 87 people in a single weekend. The homicide reduction was therefore a product of both the prior covert truce and the mass crackdown during the state of exception, not the latter “iron fist” period alone. Yet the Shield of Americas, and Miller’s swipe at lawyers, could be viewed as an endorsement of Bukele’s heavy-handed rule, including his indefinite suspension of habeas corpus, which has resulted in over 88,000 people being detained, and more than 400 deaths in custody, as well as a gutted judiciary.

The deeper problem is what militarization does to the region’s civil-military balance. For three decades, Latin American democracies worked to move their armed forces out of internal security roles to civilian control. That project was never complete, and progress has been fragile. The Shield of the Americas pushes in the opposite direction. It asks regional militaries to take the lead against cartels, rewards governments that deploy soldiers domestically, and elevates defense ministries above civilian law enforcement. Expanding military roles into policing functions weakens democratic oversight and creates institutional incentives that are difficult to reverse. Post-conflict transitions across Central America have repeatedly shown.

Sovereignty and the Limits of Coercion

The absence of three leading nations demonstrates the limits of Washington’s coercion. Colombia has the longest experience fighting narcotics, yet it was not represented. Brazil, the region’s largest economy, was also absent. Mexico sent no delegation to the summit despite being, according to Trump, the “epicenter of cartel violence.” Indeed, these are the countries whose cooperation matters most for any serious anti-cartel strategy, yet they have not joined the administration’s new security architecture.

Their absence reflects a political reality the administration prefers to ignore. Governments facing domestic publics with deep historical memory of U.S. military intervention cannot sign on to an initiative built around the Monroe Doctrine’s language of American preeminence. Invoking the doctrine drives Latin American audiences away from Washington rather than toward it. Brazil categorically rejected the Maduro seizure as an affront to sovereignty. And President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has consistently rejected U.S. military strikes against cartels inside her country. Outside of Latin America, the administration’s heavy-handed policies have also backfired. Canadians elected Mark Carney, one of Trump’s most vocal critics, in direct response to Trump’s agenda. The lesson is simple: coercive alignment has generated compliance from the willing but also resistance from those countries whose cooperation matters most.

The NSS’s own counter-China agenda is undermined by this posture. The administration wants to box Beijing out of the hemisphere, but coercive pressure gives governments reasons to keep their options open. Colombia joined the Belt and Road Initiative in May 2025, in part as a hedge after months of U.S. sanctions and threats against President Gustavo Petro. The relationship has since stabilized, with Petro visiting the White House in February 2026, but the pattern holds: when Washington squeezes, governments diversify. For instance, Brazilian exporters are accelerating partnerships in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. 

As a result, Beijing, which recently released a third policy paper on Latin America, is positioned to exploit every opening Washington’s pressure creates.

What the Shield Reveals

The Shield of the Americas is the institutional face of the NSS’s Trump Corollary. With Noem installed as envoy, SOUTHCOM running joint operations, and the Doral summit providing a multilateral stage, the doctrine now has personnel, operational reach, and political cover. The administration is attempting to build a new political alignment across the hemisphere, one organized around coercive capacity and ideological alignment.

However, a hemispheric security architecture built around a handpicked coalition of sympathetic governments is not a strategy. It is a faction. It excludes the countries most important to achieving lasting results, rewards governments that substitute emergency powers for institutional reform, and treats democratic governance as irrelevant to regional stability. Meanwhile, the cooperating governments gain leverage. Bukele has already demonstrated with the CECOT arrangement that a partner who controls the detention infrastructure can convert U.S. dependence into domestic political capital. The Shield will multiply that dynamic across the hemisphere.

Miller told Latin American military leaders to stop listening to their lawyers. That line will travel. It will reach defense ministers, police commanders, and executive offices across the region. In countries already governing under states of exception, it amounts to an endorsement. In countries still weighing how far to push, it amounts to an invitation.

The United States can project military power across the Western Hemisphere. That was never in question. But will a hemisphere organized around that power, rather than the democratic institutions that make power legitimate, be stable? Latin America’s history offers a clear answer. It will not.

FEATURED IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump greets Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, as he hosts ​”The Shield of the Americas Summit​,” a gathering with heads of state and government officials from 12 countries in the Americas at the Trump National Doral Golf Club on March 7, 2026 in Doral, Florida. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)