Op-ed: Trump's 'Donroe Doctrine' and China are headed for Latin American clash

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Op-ed: Trump's 'Donroe Doctrine' and China are headed for Latin American clash

Published Sun, Jan 11 2026

9:16 AM EST

Key Points

• Trump's so-called "Donroe Doctrine" framing of Western Hemispheric dominance has led to concerns that China will move on Taiwan to flex its own regional muscle.
• It is the wrong question to be asking given what has taken place in Venezuela, writes international policy expert Dewardric McNeal.
• China sees itself as a global power with global interests, ambitions, investments, and supply-chain demands — with the agency to defend and extend those interests in America's so-called backyard.

US President Donald Trump shows a lapel pin as he speaks during a meeting with US oil companies executives in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 9, 2026.

Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

The conversation in Washington right now is abuzz with talk of Trump's new National Security Strategy and its so-called "Donroe Doctrine" framing of Western Hemispheric dominance — a modern corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. That debate had already been simmering in policy circles before the end of last year, but it was turbocharged by the recent U.S. operation in Venezuela. Almost immediately, the familiar question resurfaced: What will China do now?

Much of that speculation has fixated on Taiwan. Would Beijing use U.S. kinetic action in Venezuela as justification — or precedent — for moving against the island? That question may be understandable and its implications concerning. However, many believe that it is also the wrong question to be asking.

China will not use Venezuela as a pretext to invade Taiwan. That is neither how Beijing thinks nor how it operates. Serious analysis demands setting the distraction of seeing China as a reactive power aside, and dealing with a more consequential — and far more uncomfortable — question. It requires that we read and debate China's own strategic documents about our region with the same rigor now being applied to the U.S. National Security Strategy, and take them seriously on their own terms.

China's newly issued third Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean is not a press release or a reactive and reflexive impulse triggered by Washington. It is a longstanding, well thought out, forward-looking, and deliberately structured approach to achieving China's long-term goals. It includes the range of tools of statecraft that it intends to use, and the pathways through which it plans to sustain its influence. It is an institutional blueprint — dense with political mechanisms, financing pathways, commercial incentives, and a theory of the case for the legitimacy of its engagement and presence in the region rooted in Global South solidarity rather than overt claims of regional hegemony or 18th-century cosplay.

The NSS is explicit about intent. It commits the United States to keeping the hemisphere free of "hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets," ensuring access to "key strategic locations," and denying non-hemispheric competitors' control over "strategically vital assets." Venezuela, in that telling, becomes a proof point: evidence that Washington is prepared to act kinetically to alter political realities when it believes access, stability, or strategic positioning are at risk.

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But the Trump NSS also reveals a central analytical vulnerability. It implicitly assumes the United States can grant spheres of influence — cede a region here, consolidate one there — and that so-called "regional powers" will accept the arrangement. China does not see itself as a regional power. It sees itself as a global power with global interests, ambitions, investments, and supply-chain demands — and with the agency to defend and extend those interests in America's so-called backyard. The NSS can declare a corollary; it cannot declare away another major power's presence or objectives, particularly one as deeply embedded in the hemisphere as China already is. China's Latin America strategy is engineered to be resilient against exactly this kind of episodic shock.

Start with the political architecture. Beijing does not limit its engagement to trade or hydrocarbons, though both matter a great deal to Beijing. Instead, it pursues head-of-state diplomacy, exchanges between intergovernmental committees, legislature-to-legislature exchanges, political-party engagement, and deep institutional embedding through CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a 33-country regional political bloc coordinating cooperation across trade, finance, infrastructure, technology, and people-to-people ties. The objective is explicit: institutionalize influence across "multi-level, multi-channel" pathways with a structure that dilutes any single pressure point campaign by the United States. It is far harder to "flip" a region when influence runs so deeply through presidents, parties, parliaments, technocrats, students, consumers, and subnational actors simultaneously.

The economics reinforce that architecture. China frames its engagement — accurately or not — as co-production and co-dependence rather than exploitation or charity. The strategy emphasizes infrastructure connectivity, logistics management, digital infrastructure, smart cities, industrial parks, manufacturing cooperation, and export support. These projects create domestic constituencies: jobs, contracts, port throughput, wages, and broad political winners in the region. Financial cooperation sweetens the model further through local-currency settlement, RMB clearing arrangements, credit and debt swap lines, and even Panda bonds on offer. The aim is straightforward: reduce exposure to U.S. financial leverage, political pressure points, and sanctions risk over time.

Trump's push for U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela offered a series of security guarantees but surfaced a familiar constraint: executives emphasized that investment also hinges on long-term financing, risk-sharing, and enforceable contracts — support China routinely provides its firms through policy banks and export credits — while Washington has yet to signal a clear willingness to deploy comparable tools via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation(DFC), Ex-Im Bank, or multilateral finance.

And those financial support and assistance tools should not be pursued in a vacuum; when done well, they are designed to anchor influence in physical strategic assets — natural resources, ports, logistics hubs, energy infrastructure, and transit corridors — where economics and geopolitics inevitably intersect.

$500 billion in trade, Panama Canal confrontation

Scale matters. China-Latin America trade exceeded $500 billion in 2024, and the region represents more than 670 million consumers, many of whom are drawn to Chinese products on price, availability, and increasingly quality. These are not marginal markets. They are structural to China's global growth model and export strategy.

Beijing is also candid — if selectively so — about its interest in strategic resources. Energy and critical minerals feature prominently, alongside language about long-term supply arrangements and local-currency pricing. Access spans the value chain from extraction to utilization. For U.S. policymakers, investors, and CEOs, this is the commercial backbone the NSS must contend with. This is not about nostalgia for the Monroe Doctrine; it is a 21st-century strategy designed to achieve many of the same outcomes through more modern means and more seductive rhetoric.

The Panama Canal brings these strategies into direct collision. China's policy paper treats ports, logistics, and maritime cooperation as first-order instruments of development and influence — and, in a crisis, as latent strategic assets to be exploited during a military confrontation with the regional hegemon (the U.S.). The NSS, meanwhile, explicitly flags "key strategic locations" and acknowledges how commercial infrastructure can be repurposed for military use. Panama — more than Venezuela — is where these approaches collide most sharply. Ongoing debates over port concessions and terminal control underscore that both Washington and Beijing view the canal itself and canal-adjacent assets as strategic, not merely commercial in nature.

Crew members of Chinese Cosco Shipping Rose container ship wave Chinese and Panamenian flag before China's President Xi Jinping and Panama's Juan Carlso Varela, arrive at the Cocoli locks in the expanded Panama Canal, in Panama City, Panama on December 3, 2018.

Luis Acosta | Afp | Getty Images

So, does U.S. action in Venezuela change the calculus? In the long run, no.

It will raise risk premiums for many — for Chinese firms, regional leaders, and global companies caught between compliance regimes, complicate logistics and supply chains, and further the weaponization of market access. It will push some governments to hedge more carefully, demand higher "insurance" from Beijing, or seek stronger economic and security assurances from Washington. But it does not erase the fundamentals of what China has spent two decades building: trade corridors, lending relationships, political networks, and now an explicit push into high-tech cooperation — from EVs, AI, and satellites to aerospace and digital trade, and aligning closely with where many Latin American economies want to go.

Zoom out one level further and the logic extends north. Greenland and the Arctic are not separate conversations; they are the same set of arguments, just on ice. Washington frames Greenland through minerals, shipping lanes, and military access. Beijing frames the Arctic as an international space with global stakes, governed by international law, where non-Arctic states have legitimate interests. If the U.S. believes spheres can be secured through doctrine plus decisive action, China's operating assumption is the opposite. It believes in focusing its pushback on arguments that the U.S. has used for decades to justify their presence in the Asia-Pacific region — that states have a right to the global commons, that big states have global interests that must be protected, and that a long-term and well establish persistent presence in a region must be respected. China takes these same positions with respect to Latin America and Greenland.

The action in Venezuela does show that the Trump administration is more serious than its predecessors about reasserting hemispheric dominance — and that the NSS is not merely rhetorical. But China will not be rushing for the exits in the Western Hemisphere. It is deeply entrenched. Smaller powers have agency too. They will not be dictated to without far richer incentives, protections, or more sustained pressure than a single special forces operation can provide.

If Washington wants a hemisphere that chooses the United States rather than submits to it, it must compete with China's full-stack approach: finance, infrastructure, technology, people-to-people exchange, affordable products, political access, and a compelling narrative of partnership. A declaration in an NSS and one dramatic operation are short-term events. China's engagement in Latin America is a long game, and the competition it sets in motion will be neither quick nor simple.

—By Dewardric McNeal, Managing Director and Senior Policy Analyst at Longview Global, and a CNBC Contributor

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