In the current environment, simply providing additional resources, or incrementally adjusting and improving DoD performance of its traditional missions in Latin America and the Caribbean (or elsewhere) is insufficient to meaningfully impact the advance of ESAs in the region. government efforts to respond to extra-hemispheric rival actors (external state actors or ESAs) in the region, it is not clear whether it currently has the resources, capabilities, or focus to do so effectively. Department of Defense (DoD) has given increasing attention to supporting U.S. agenda and strategic position in the region. geopolitical rival, and its impact as an alternative development model and source of resources, has arguably undercut the U.S. rivals included Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Peru, with troubling prospects for additional turns to the left for Honduras, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil.Įven in countries not governed by authoritarian populist governments, commercial engagement by the PRC as the principal U.S. rivals.Īs 2021 drew to a close, leftist populist regimes leveraging or deepening relationships with extra-hemispheric U.S. regimes lock in their power, decreasing security and other cooperation with the U.S., and fomenting leftist populist political change in other parts of the hemisphere, while deepening their engagement with and dependence on extra-hemispheric U.S. That support to the authoritarian populists includes not only commerce, investments, and loans, but also information and surveillance architectures, military, and other forms of security engagement that helps the anti-U.S. Those impacts build upon enabling conditions such as endemic corruption and poor performance by the region’s government, opening spaces for crises that bring leftist populist governments to power through initially democratic elections, then hijack those institutions, in the face of tepid popular commitments to procedural democracy to consolidate power, creating both needs and opportunities for the new authoritarian populists to expand engagement with China, Russia, Iran, and other U.S. military, in protecting its partnerships and access to the region in the complex and interdependent regional environment, comes not from insurgencies, but from the political influence and transformation of the socioeconomic fabric of the region that is fueled by that Chinese engagement. and the West, means that the greatest threat to the U.S. The centrality of economic activities as the key focus of engagement by the PRC, as the extra-hemispheric actor that presents the far most significant strategic challenge to the U.S. That engagement sometimes integrates but is not always coordinated among those three and other extra-hemispheric rivals. extra-hemispheric rivals in Latin America have different goals, resources, motivations, and associated sensitivities as each engages in the region. Moreover, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, and Iran, as the principal three U.S.

The character of that challenge, however, is substantially different than the efforts by the Soviet Union and its proxies to destabilize and overthrow pro-U.S. and the region that requires a whole-of-government response, including a supporting role by the U.S. The engagement of extra-hemispheric state rivals to the United States in Latin America is an increasingly acknowledged strategic challenge to the U.S.

Hemispheric defense zone date