Trump looks to turn attention to Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment, at Americas summit

DORAL, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump is set to gather with Latin American leaders on Saturday at his Miami-area golf club as his administration looks to demonstrate it’s still committed to sharpening U.S. foreign policy focus on the Western Hemisphere even as it deals with five-alarm crises around the globe.

The gathering, dubbed the “Shield of the Americas” summit, comes just two months after Trump ordered an audacious U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and whisk him and his wife to the U.S. 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’s already left hundreds dead, convulsed global markets and unsettled the broader Middle East.

Trump’s time with the Latin American leaders will be limited: He is also set to fly to 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 will look to turn attention to the Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment. He’s vowed 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.

“Under previous leaders, we grew obsessed with every other theater and every other border in the world except our own,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told regional leaders and defense ministers who gathered in Florida this week for talks on countering drug cartels. “These elites reduced our power and presence in this hemisphere, opting for a benign neglect that was anything but benign.”

Who will be attending

The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago have confirmed they’ll take part in the gathering at the president’s Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort where he’s 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 is 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 in the region since the end of the Cold War.

But notably missing will be 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 couldn’t 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.”

The challenge from China

Since returning to the White House, Trump has made countering Chinese influence in the hemisphere a top priority. His national security strategy touts what it dubs 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 firm 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 with major development challenges ranging 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 that’s 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.”

Ahead of the summit, Trump announced that he was naming Kristi Noem, whom he just removed as 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.”