In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt set out on an expedition to map an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. The journey nearly killed him. Disease, hunger, and exhaustion left the former U.S. president permanently weakened. Roosevelt returned even more convinced of something he had already grasped in office: Geography disciplines power, and nations that neglect their near abroad eventually pay a strategic price.
A decade earlier, Roosevelt had translated that insight into policy through what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. His logic was blunt. Instability in the Western Hemisphere would invite outside intervention. If the United States wished to remain secure and influential on the global stage, then it could not be a passive observer in its own neighborhood.
In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt set out on an expedition to map an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. The journey nearly killed him. Disease, hunger, and exhaustion left the former U.S. president permanently weakened. Roosevelt returned even more convinced of something he had already grasped in office: Geography disciplines power, and nations that neglect their near abroad eventually pay a strategic price.
A decade earlier, Roosevelt had translated that insight into policy through what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. His logic was blunt. Instability in the Western Hemisphere would invite outside intervention. If the United States wished to remain secure and influential on the global stage, then it could not be a passive observer in its own neighborhood.
More than a century later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio approaches Latin America and the Caribbean with a similar instinct. Strip away the partisan framing and tactical excesses, and Rubio is right about a central proposition that Washington too often forgets: The United States cannot compete globally without first anchoring stability, integration, and resilience in the Western Hemisphere.
Rubio’s diagnosis is not wrong, nor is his instinct for action. But his theory and exercise of power are flawed. He understands where U.S. influence begins but misjudges how it works and how to wield it most effectively.
After the Cold War, Washington gradually forgot a hard truth that earlier generations of policymakers understood instinctively: A secure and stable Western Hemisphere is not a preference; it is a prerequisite for sustained U.S. power projection around the world. As a result, U.S. policy has all too often treated Latin America and the Caribbean episodically, often through the narrow lenses of migration, drugs, and crisis management. But the reality is that the United States will struggle to deploy economic, military, or diplomatic power in the Indo-Pacific or Europe if its closest neighbors are unstable, fragmented, or economically hollowed out. Hemispheric shocks translate directly into constraints on U.S. action elsewhere.
Recent policy, particularly under U.S. President Joe Biden, reflected a different reading of this history. Rather than prioritizing immediate alignment, it emphasized becoming the partner of choice by supporting democratic governments across the political spectrum and investing in regional capacity. That approach accepted that disagreement and friction were sometimes unavoidable in a region with a history of deep mistrust of U.S. intentions, but it assumed that working with increasingly capable partners would produce alignment over time. The wager was that durable convergence is built, not imposed.
Rubio’s framing implicitly challenges that reductionism and rightly so. The Western Hemisphere is neither a monolith nor primarily an ideological battleground. Rather, it is the primary site of a hemispheric competition where infrastructure is the key battleground. Ports, logistics corridors, energy systems, telecommunications networks, subsea cables, and data infrastructure are no longer neutral commercial assets. They are instruments of power.
The United States cannot speak credibly about nearshoring or supply chain resilience while allowing critical infrastructure in the hemisphere to be shaped by opaque financing, weak governance, and political dependency on U.S. competitors. These conditions undermine reliable access to lithium, copper, rare earths, and other strategic inputs that are essential to advanced manufacturing and clean energy transitions.
Hemespheric compeitition does not require exclusion for its own sake. It requires presence. That means financing that moves at commercial pace, regulatory clarity, risk-sharing tools, and partnerships that survive electoral cycles. Too often, Washington has substituted warning for competition, urging governments not to engage with rivals without offering viable alternatives. A stable, well-connected Western Hemisphere should form the backbone of resilient supply chains for the technologies defining the next industrial era. If the United States cannot build these ecosystems with its closest neighbors, it will struggle to build them anywhere.
Rubio’s approach rests on an assumption that U.S. leverage, forcefully applied, still compels durable alignment. This logic is evident in a preference for maximalist pressure, public conditionality, and an assumption that alignment can be enforced rather than cultivated.
For much of the 20th century, the imbalance of power made resistance costly and hedging difficult. But the structural conditions that once made coercion effective no longer exist. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean now have options. They diversify not out of ideological rebellion but rational self-interest. Public pressure and transactional demands may still extract short-term concessions, but they do not generate trust or durable alignment. The more visibly leverage is wielded, the stronger the incentive to hedge. Even close partners hedge not against U.S. values, but against U.S. unpredictability.
The blunt truth is this: The big stick can still bruise, but it no longer disciplines. It compels compliance without consent, and compliance without consent is strategically brittle and not a strategic investment for the future.
There is a further danger in mistaking pressure for strategy in cases like Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro was an illegitimate and brutal ruler, and his removal as president of the country is something that the international community should welcome. But for a great power like the United States, the central constraint is not self-restraint born of weakness; it is constitutional restraint born of strength. Violating U.S. law, the War Powers Resolution, or the United Nations Charter for the sake of expediency does not project resolve. It corrodes the legal and institutional foundations that distinguish U.S. power from the coercive models it seeks to displace. Those abuses of power do not stop at the water’s edge: A strategy that normalizes legal shortcuts abroad inevitably weakens democratic constraints at home, which is why the debate over Venezuela has become as much about the health of U.S. democracy as it is about Venezuela’s future.
Rubio is right to place democratic values at the center of U.S. policy toward the Americas, but consistency matters. In practice, democratic norms are too often invoked rhetorically rather than treated as operational constraints. Governments that align geopolitically are granted latitude; democratic erosion is tolerated so long as cooperation continues.
That contradiction is compounded when democracy is championed abroad by an administration actively hollowing it out at home. The erosion of democratic norms within the United States weakens both moral authority and strategic credibility. It becomes harder to persuade partners that democratic governance is a source of strength when the United States appears willing to subordinate its own institutions to political expediency. While Rubio may seek to distance himself from the Trump administration’s domestic overreach, his role in articulating U.S. policy abroad inevitably ties him to its consequences.
This posture offers tactical convenience. Over time, it corrodes influence. It signals to judges, journalists, opposition leaders, and civil society actors that democratic commitments are conditional and that Washington’s support is transactional.
Democracy is not a moral luxury. It is the United States’ comparative advantage. Unlike authoritarian competitors, the United States engages societies, not just governments. In the Western Hemisphere, business leaders, unions, courts, media, and civil society shape political outcomes and institutional resilience. A strategy that privileges short-term alignment over democratic legitimacy sacrifices the very ecosystems that make influence durable. Coercion can silence governments. It cannot mobilize societies.
The challenge for future Democratic leaders in the United States will be to act forcefully to secure hemispheric alignment without relying on force alone. This means being more clear-eyed in the exercise of power without falling into the excesses of the current administration.
Becoming the partner of choice does not preclude the assertive use of national security tools. Selective tariffs, trade enforcement, and more disciplined economic statecraft could have been deployed more strategically to advance U.S. interests. The lesson is not that restraint is weakness but that ruthlessness without strategy is self-defeating. Democrats have sometimes erred on the side of patience; the Trump administration errs on the side of pressure. Neither extreme produces durable alignment.
U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere has always contained a coercive dimension. The difference now is that coercion no longer delivers strategic returns commensurate with its costs. Influence today flows less from fear than from embeddedness, from being indispensable rather than unavoidable. Roosevelt understood that power begins close to home. The challenge is not to abandon that insight but to update it: to compete seriously without mistaking intimidation for strategy or leverage for leadership.
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