The following article is based on a presentation given by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez at the Latin America Adelante Conference in London on 7 February 2026. The presentation was part of a session on ‘Latin America, the New Cold War and the Rising Global South’, which was also addressed by Sophie Bold (CND General Secretary), Roger McKenzie (Morning Star International Editor) and Fiona Sim (Co-founder, Black Liberation Alliance). The session was chaired by Carole Regan of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.
Carlos’s presentation focused on the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and its implications for Latin America, as well as its connection to the US’s longstanding global strategy of encirclement and containment against China. Carlos concludes:
The ruling class is pushing an agenda that is increasingly unpopular and untenable — an agenda of permanent war, economic decline and ecological destruction. We need to push our own agenda: one of peace, multilateralism, solidarity, and the broadest possible global cooperation to confront the existential threats facing humanity.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released in late November 2025, has been the subject of widespread comment and a diverse array of interpretations. For those of us concerned with questions of peace, sovereignty and international justice, its most striking feature is its explicit reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the focus of US military strategy towards “defending our hemisphere”, with more troops, bases and military operations in the Americas.
US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere is of course nothing new. Since the Monroe Doctrine was first promulgated in 1823, the United States has treated Latin America and the Caribbean as its backyard, overthrowing governments, installing dictatorships, funding death squads and imposing economic subjugation as a matter of routine. But, at least in the post-WW2 era, previous administrations have at least maintained some pretence of respect for international law and the sovereignty of other nations. The NSS does away with any such niceties, declaring that “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
This is not mere rhetoric. We are already witnessing a dramatic intensification of US aggression across the region.
In Venezuela, the US has moved from its longstanding policy of economic suffocation and destabilisation to undisguised gangsterism: the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores; Trump’s declaration that the US is “taking control” of Venezuela’s oil; and the use of gunboat diplomacy to force concessions from a sovereign nation.
Cuba, already the target of the longest and most comprehensive economic blockade in history, faces a drastic escalation. The tightening of sanctions, the attempts to impose a full energy blockade, the continued presence of Cuba on the US ‘state sponsors of terrorism’ list, and the ever-present threat of regime change are all designed to strangle the Cuban Revolution at a time when the island is enduring severe economic hardship — hardship which is itself a consequence of US policy.
In Honduras, Washington has interfered in recent elections and secured the release of former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted in the United States of facilitating a decades-long cocaine-smuggling operation involving more than 500 tons of drugs. And yet it’s President Maduro that now languishes in a New York prison on trumped-up drugs charges!
Mexico, meanwhile, has been subjected to open threats, with Trump treating the country’s sovereignty as an inconvenience to be brushed aside in the name of immigration enforcement and drug policy.
Not an acceptance of multipolarity
Some commentators have interpreted the NSS’s hemispheric focus as a grudging acceptance of multipolar reality: the idea that Washington is conceding ‘spheres of influence’ to China and Russia while reserving the right to dominate the Americas.
This interpretation is mistaken. What the NSS describes is not a retreat from global ambitions, but a consolidation of the Americas as a stronghold of US imperialism, from which to better pursue what the Project for a New American Century envisages: the projection of US dominance from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
The document’s own language makes this abundantly clear. Its stated objective is “to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.” This is not the language of accommodation. It is the language of empire.
This strategy is directed at China, to a considerable degree. One of the central purposes of the US’s intensified onslaught on Latin America is to roll back China’s growing influence in the region — influence that has been built not through coercion but through mutually beneficial trade, investment, cooperation and friendship.
The rise of China-Latin America relations
China-Latin America relations have been expanding at a remarkable pace. Trade and investment between the two sides have increased by a factor of twenty since the year 2000. China has overtaken the United States as the top trading partner for most Latin American countries, including Brazil, Chile and Peru.
China and Venezuela have a comprehensive strategic partnership, which has been very important in keeping the Bolivarian project on the road, providing investment and financing on fair, mutually-agreed and mutually-beneficial terms that the Chávez and Maduro governments have used to transform the lives of the poor.
China also has a close partnership with Cuba, including the construction of over 100 solar parks, contributing to Cuba’s drive for energy sovereignty. The construction of these solar parks has been accelerated in recent months, and several are already in operation, providing electricity to Cuban industry.
Two-thirds of Latin American and Caribbean countries have signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative.
In November 2024, Presidents Xi Jinping and Dina Boluarte inaugurated the Chancay Port in Peru — the largest port in Latin America. A deep-water, AI-driven facility built as part of the BRI, it will serve as a crucial gateway linking Latin America and Asia, reducing average transportation time from South America to Asian markets from 35 to 25 days. The port is expected to generate billions in revenue, create thousands of jobs, and serve as the starting point for a land-sea corridor between China and Latin America as a whole.
This is the kind of practical, development-oriented cooperation that the US has never offered and never will. And it is precisely because China is offering a genuine alternative — one based on sovereign equality, mutual benefit and non-interference — that Washington is so determined to disrupt it.
The Pivot to Asia continues
The intensification of the Monroe Doctrine runs parallel to the continuation of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’, which everyone understands to mean the military encirclement of China. The NSS calls on Japan, South Korea and Australia to increase their military spending in order to help the US “deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain”, while the US will “harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific” and “build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain”.
Japan is undergoing a major reorientation of its foreign policy and military strategy in line with US objectives, with increasingly loud voices calling for nuclear weapons development. Senior Japanese politicians, including the ultra-hawkish Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, are treating China as a military threat and adopting ever more provocative positions on Taiwan.
Meanwhile, US arms sales to Taiwan have reached record levels, and the process of undermining the One China Principle — the bedrock of US-China diplomatic relations — has escalated under both Biden and Trump. Trump’s designs on Greenland are also connected to the New Cold War and acquiring the means of encircling and blockading Russia and China.
What to do here in Britain
These geopolitical dynamics need to inform our anti-war and anti-imperialist activity here in Britain. There is a fundamental contradiction shaping the world today. On one side, a rising multipolar trajectory, in which all countries have a say in global affairs, international law is respected, and the principles of the UN Charter – sovereign equality, peaceful cooperation and non-interference — serve as the basis for a new and more just international order. On the other, a US-led imperialist system that is hitting out in all directions with coups, kidnappings, wars, proxy wars, propaganda wars, genocide, illegal sanctions, tariffs and every form of economic coercion.
Our task is to expose the latter while advocating for the former. The ruling class is pushing an agenda that is increasingly unpopular and untenable — an agenda of permanent war, economic decline and ecological destruction. We need to push our own agenda: one of peace, multilateralism, solidarity, and the broadest possible global cooperation to confront the existential threats facing humanity.
