🇺🇲 Challenges to U.S. Hemispheric Hegemony: Will the Third Time Be the Charm?
Fabián Calle, Senior Fellow, MSI²
From the Stealthy Rise to the Dragon’s Roar
A little over four years ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping appeared at the summit of turbo-capitalism embodied by Davos, presenting himself as the caretaker and guarantor of the liberal capitalist order established by American power after World War II. President Trump’s decision not to attend that hyper-financial capitalism gathering led some of the most influential international media outlets to praise the Chinese premier’s words and firmness in valuing and seeking to preserve that liberal order, which since 1979 has allowed China to increase its per capita GDP from $100 to just over $10,000 and lift at least 500 million people out of poverty.
Some minority sectors within academia and international journalism questioned how an autocratic regime, with growing degrees of personality cult, could become the new steward of the liberal world that Washington designed almost eighty years ago. This was a paradoxical convergence between the most orthodox Western neoliberals—who for decades have tended to have a purely economic view of what is understood by “liberalism”—and those who support the economic model applied by the Chinese Communist Party for four decades as a supposed necessary and temporary evil to achieve global primacy and consolidate the authoritarian political model both inside and outside China.
That Davos meeting seemed to mark the highest point of Chinese soft power, or the attraction-and-consensus component of a forming hegemony. However, a series of events soon transformed the scenario. Domestically, Xi Jinping moved at full speed to end the eight-year term limit for national leaders adopted after Mao’s death. At the same time, he increasingly emphasized the personality cult and concentration of power in a single individual, controlling the country, the party, and the armed forces.
This was compounded by the emergence of COVID-19, which began to spread sometime between November and December in Chinese cities. The opacity observed by several countries in Beijing’s handling of the outbreak generated waves of criticism and doubt. China’s government responded by rejecting any questioning and intensifying pressures against states that dared point fingers—Australia being one of the most paradigmatic cases. All of this was accompanied by a harsher diplomacy with stern warnings, effectively reinforced by public opinion campaigns featuring highly nationalistic and martial films, promoting the idea of expanding power. The COVID-19 pandemic, originating in China, only accelerated this trend that had been emerging over recent years.
The sharp political divide in the U.S. after Trump’s 2016 victory, and his pursuit of reelection in 2020, led the Democratic Party to focus all blame on the Republican president rather than China. It was not until Biden’s victory in November 2020 that the strategy shifted to targeting Beijing even more aggressively than Trump had. Various countries in the Indo-Pacific, Oceania, and Europe began speaking of increasing Chinese diplomatic bullying. This prompted closer strategic-military cooperation between the U.S. and India, substantial increases in Japan’s and Australia’s military budgets, and the formalization of a strategic coordination framework among the four countries. Even Russia, often seen as China’s ally, accelerated and expanded the delivery of sophisticated long-range anti-air missiles, nuclear-powered submarines, and state-of-the-art fighter jets to India—a country historically in conflict with China. Moscow also reinforced its tactical nuclear missile capacity along the Chinese border.
The reborn British naval-air force, with two large carriers in service, has demonstrated growing interest in joint military exercises with the U.S., Australia, Japan, and India. Even in the postmodern and post-heroic European Union, criticisms of Chinese diplomatic harshness are increasingly audible. This has facilitated Washington’s interest in incorporating flags and certain military capabilities—especially naval—from countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France into transient deployments and maneuvers in the Pacific.
In Latin America, this process is not yet as visible. Many countries, as suppliers of raw materials to China, are marginal players in the global geopolitical landscape, and led by political elites not known for transparency or efficiency, often adopt rhetorical or personal alignments with Beijing, driven by supposed ideological sympathies or attraction to Chinese economic power.
Challenging the Monroe Doctrine
In 1996, during the U.S. unipolar moment, Peter Smith—one of the leading scholars on U.S.-Latin America relations—stated in Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations that a constant in this relationship was Washington’s perception of the region as a secure, non-threatening zone, where the United States could preserve its vital interests through more or less coordinated bureaucratic policies. Smith noted a pendulum logic in U.S. attention: moments when the region commanded significant interest and effort versus long periods of lesser concern. This “normalcy” was interrupted by external factors that required more active, coordinated, long-term strategies—or grand strategies—usually reserved for the hottest strategic zones like Europe and Asia during the 20th century.
What events disrupted this bureaucratic complacency? Essentially, instances where an extra-continental strategic-military power played an active and threatening role in the region.
The first case was Nazi Germany (and to a lesser extent, Fascist Italy) in the 1930s, particularly in prosperous Argentina and separatist southern Brazil. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s strategic response was the “Good Neighbor Policy,” aimed at strengthening political, diplomatic, military, trade, and economic ties with Latin American countries. Roosevelt’s 1936 official visit to Buenos Aires and his efforts in 1942 to find the best doctor to help Argentine President Roberto Marcelino Ortiz avoid blindness reflect the priority given to nurturing the U.S.-Argentina relationship. Historians have documented numerous friendly letters between the two leaders.
World War II’s end and the defeat of Nazi-Fascism shifted U.S. priorities to reconstructing and stabilizing Western Europe and Japan to contain the Soviet Union’s communist influence. Historian George Kennan warned that the greatest U.S. security risk was not open Soviet military aggression but political, electoral, social, and intelligence penetration into war-torn European and Asian societies. Brazil, a U.S. ally between 1940 and 45, was largely sidelined in this new global strategy, while Argentina “missed the train” of post-1945 American hegemony due to its inertia toward Britain, lack of agricultural complementarity with the U.S., and the rise of Peronism.
A second instance where Latin America regained U.S. attention was the unexpected rise of Fidel Castro, aligned with Soviet communism, in Cuba in the early 1960s. Against all odds, the “apocalyptic cliff” was just a few hundred kilometers from Miami. President Kennedy and his team implemented the “Alliance for Progress,” a mix of “carrots and sticks” to promote moderate democratic governments, agrarian reforms, trade, and investment, alongside counterinsurgency strategies based on U.S. Marines’ early 20th-century campaigns in the Philippines and Central America, as well as French experiences in Vietnam and Algeria. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 led to decades favoring “sticks” over “carrots,” though Washington’s push for democracy in Latin America persisted in the early 1980s post-Falklands War.
The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989, its disintegration in 1991, and China’s diplomatic rapprochement with the U.S. since 1972 (thanks to Nixon and Kissinger) and pro-capitalist shift from 1978, led to the scenario Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history” and Kenneth Waltz described as a U.S. “unipolar moment” lasting two decades or more.
A Dragon Loose in the Backyard
This article highlights the clear and growing third “external intrusion” of a superpower in the region, which will once again trigger Washington’s grand strategy machinery, combining federal agency actions with the role of American companies operating in the region.
China’s rise has sparked analyses of a new bipolarism between the U.S. and the Asian power. For years, Beijing has been the primary or secondary trading partner for most countries in the American Hemisphere. In Argentina, since 2014, it has controlled a satellite base in Neuquén Province and serves as a symbolic and material ally of political sectors with anti-American rhetoric. These factors differentiate China from previous extra-hemispheric threats such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, neither of which approached the U.S. GDP at their peak, unlike China today.
China’s strategic challenge to the United States is evident, even as U.S. policy continues to focus on Russia and Putin. Regional leaders must exercise caution and establish regional and subregional coordination mechanisms to navigate this titanic struggle. As an African proverb says, when two elephants fight, the grass suffers.
Back in 2016, in a memorable conference shortly before the US presidential elections, Henry Kissinger emphatically recommended developing a fluid and constructive relationship with Moscow to try to reduce China's room for maneuver on the international stage. Both the United States' bogging down in long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the failed attempts to bring democratic forms of government to the Middle East during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have, in the past, yielded significant benefits to Beijing. Add to this the prioritization of domestic issues that lead to an overemphasis on Russia, and the benefits for foreign and defense policymakers in China could not be greater. The acute diplomatic and military tensions between the US and Russia, which have existed since mid-2021, but which already date back to 2014, only serve to reinforce the previously announced inertia that is so beneficial to China. It will depend on the luck and virtue of Washington's decision-makers to avoid getting caught up in the dynamic of prioritizing the fight with a spoiler like Russia, rather than with China as a strategic rival of a magnitude and scope never before seen by the American superpower. Last but not least, the eventual next American grand strategy versus China on a global scale must give Latin America greater relative importance. If the US had the capacity to project forces toward Europe and Asia in 1917, 1941, and during the Cold War, it was due to its unipolarity and hegemony in the hemisphere. A substantial deterioration of that geopolitical advantage would have serious consequences for Washington.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Miami Strategic Intelligence Institute (MSI²).