Beijing in Buenos Aires

They used to say Latin America was Washington’s “back yard.” Look now, and you find the gardener inebriated, quarrelling with himself, lunging at the lobelias with a chainsaw. Meanwhile, a more constant gardener from over the Pacific is making himself at home.

Consider some of the most recent of the administration’s erratic and often violent and bombastic acts. The pas de deux between Trump and Javier Milei, in which the U.S. bailed out the Argentinian administration to the tune of $20 billion in the form of a currency swap line—and thus saved it from electoral disaster and financial chaos. The pitiless terrorist bombing raids on small boats in international waters, justified by unevidenced allegations of drug-trafficking, and celebrated with edited Pentagon footage. And then, just as this new drugs war was reaching a bloody crescendo, the pardoning of former Honduras president and convicted narco-trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández timed to help his party’s candidate, Nasry Asfura, win a presidential election already marinated in fraud (unexplained vote transfers, disabled biometric systems, withheld tally sheets). That little gift came with threats of withheld funds, and bluster about the establishment liberal candidate being a “borderline communist.”

You may notice some contradictions here but, let me assure you, with some patient untangling and reasoning and finessing, why, the contradictions multiply and proliferate to the point that only a maniac could have conceived it. Truly. We must never underestimate our enemies, or the resourcefulness of reaction, but whatever coarse instrumental cunning we might find in this administration, whatever rationality may underlie crude force, what emerges is totally and utterly incoherent.

Let’s start with Argentina. There appear to be three confluent lines of policy in bailing out Milei. First, by calming the economic crisis, to help a political ally, and lock Argentina into a hard-right regional bloc. Second, to expedite austerity and structural adjustment. As Trump put it, “Everybody knows he’s doing the right thing. But you have a radical-left sick culture that’s a very dangerous group of people, and they’re trying to make him look bad.” Third, to ensure U.S. tech corporations’ access to the energy, land, water, mineral resources which are all essential to America’s development of artificial intelligence. Yet, as Delfina Rossi argues, combined with existing IMF bailouts (total debt, a staggering $57bn), this catalyses the country’s ‘Dollar Disease’, the collapse of the central bank’s net reserves, and the likelihood that it will be unable to cover principal and interest payments, raising the prospect of yet another costly default.

Here we have a fusion of the opportunistic and the ideological, which is typical of Trump statecraft. The apparent alignment of interests (far-right consolidation, austerity, extractivism) proves to be extremely short-termist and contradictory. Repayment of debts, durable access to resources so that tech corporations can exploit sacrifice zones and poison fenceline communities, and even the implementation of some sort of brutal austerity policy, requires at least medium-term political stability, but bailing Milei out on these terms risks a conflagration that could wreck him politically—though not before much damage is inflicted. If you really wanted to bail Milei out, you would renegotiate the debt and restrain the IMF in its imposition of conditions that (by its own acknowledgment) have systematically failed in their supposed goal of halting capital flight and supporting growth.

In Honduras, it may appear at first that Trump is simply upholding traditional Washington policy without the usual garnish. The pardon of Hernández is consistent with policy going back to the Obama administration’s support for the 2009 military coup (approved by a committee of which Hernández was a member), the “technical coup” in 2012 (in which four out of five supreme court members were replaced with loyalists), the dubious 2013 election won by Hernández, and the constitutionally illegal run by Hernández in 2016 (blessed by John Kerry, and the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa), and funding and assisting his special operations unit which terrorised opposition supporters. But there is a reason Washington cut Hernández loose in 2021 and (hypocritically) allowed his prosecution on charges of running a narco-state: He was no longer viable as a client who would uphold U.S. military interests, oppose Venezuela and maintain traditional alliances with agribusiness. Trump’s pardon of Hernández and support for Asfura, like his alliance with Nayib Bukele and his lobbying for Bolsonaro, is explicitly ideological.

You will object that Washington has a long history of supporting rightist, anticommunist murderers far worse than this lot in its back yard. True. However, that was part of a genuinely hegemonic global strategy linked to an imperial teleology (modernisation theory) in which the whole world was destined to become America. Trump doesn’t think like that. He approaches the region principally through an opportune mix of coercion, incentives and bilateral arrangements, but also as an extension of U.S. culture wars. According to Raymond Craib, there may also be a specific Silicon Valley interest in securing rightist accession in Honduras, since they want the return of the Special Employment and Economic Zones created under Hernandez’s National Party, deemed illegal by the supreme court, so as to enable them to build private cities in parts of the country. Again, a short-termist confluence of opportunism and ideology which draws on the archives of traditional Washington imperialism for narrower purposes. And again, brazenly contradictory insofar as it clashes with the so-called “war on drugs”: though it must be admitted that the emptiness of the administration’s formal justifications, like its doctrinal opportunism, is a feature not a bug.

Now cast your eye over those sinister bloodlettings in the Caribbean. It would be monstrous, even were the slightest scrap of evidence in its favor to have been produced, to entertain the administration’s line that it is “only” killing drug traffickers so it has no case to answer. Greg Grandin gives us the only plausible reading of the bombings: They are sabre-rattling against Venezuela, inanely accused of being a narco-state. This reflects the agitation of the faction he elsewhere calls the “war party” who want to overthrow Maduro: “Rubio at State, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Terrance Cole at the DEA, and JD Vance in the vice presidency.” There is a schism in the administration between the war party and the America First, profit-first milieu around Trump who have business interests in Venezuela (Richard Grenell, Harry Sargeant III). The latter have been able, with Trump’s blessing, to negotiate sanctions relief and oil exports with the Maduro administration. Trump mediates between the factions, talking tough while dangling incentives. This schism seems to map onto contradictions between competing factions of fossil capital who are fighting for access to oil off the Guyana coast: Chevron will deal with Maduro, Exxon refuses.

The momentum currently favors the war party, who want an ideological crusade to depose leftist regimes in Latin America, which would be a useful displacement activity in the context of looming stagflation and imbue the administration with vigor and direction. The administration’s hemispheric allies, however, aren’t particularly enthusiastic about this. Finally, there is the logic of the war on drugs, which has ever been a racialised counterrevolutionary war at home and abroad. Though de-escalating in recent years, the administration has picked it up and infused it with the “logic of Gaza” wherein the use of overwhelming force on flimsy but intensely moralised pretexts is normalised, and the perpetrators are exceedingly cavalier about juridical norms—Vance, recall, doesn’t “give a shit” if the terror bombings are illegal. In this case, there is not an alignment of opportunism and ideology but a downright contradiction. Opportunism means cutting deals, but the ideology of the Miami Right (so to speak) demands ideological crusades.

There is but one other thing to consider, and the aforementioned contradictions become even more glaring: China. If you’re as enthralled by Pete Hegseth’s performance art as I am, you’ll remember his remarks in Singapore back in May. This was in the context of reorienting U.S. commitments in the Indo-Pacific to deter China. He warned against “any unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the South China Sea,” and said an invasion of Taiwan would provoke a U.S. military response. The U.S. stood ready to “fight and win.” That, however, was before Trump was floored by China’s response to the tariffs war and compelled to negotiate a one-year trade truce. Now that Trump seeks a big beautiful trade deal with Xi, he’s reverted to strategic ambiguity about Taiwan, refusing to back up Japan’s threat that a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would be an “existential threat” justifying the use of Japan’s military. In fact, Washington gently urged the Japanese Prime Minister to put a lid on it. However, Hegseth also mentioned “malign Chinese influence” in the “Western hemisphere” as a focus of policy.

China is becoming important in Latin America in a way that would once have been inconceivable. In fact, when Alfred W McCoy was documenting U.S. imperial decline and China’s rise a decade ago, I don’t remember him even mentioning China’s penetration of central and southern America, perhaps because it was far less extensive then. China had expanded in so many other spaces: the transcontinental “world island” identified by Halford Mackinder was criss-crossed with Chinese high-speed, high-volume railways and pipelines, the Asian Infrastructure Development bank was funding development plans across southern and central Asia, China had built up a vast air and naval force outweighing U.S. commitments in South and East Asia and was becoming more assertive in the South China Sea (a vital source of protein for an expanding population), and using giant cash reserves ($3.3 trillion as of 2025) to reshape the fundamentals of global power. It was expanding into space with the now live BeiDou global satellite system and cyberspace with the Digital Silk Road, fostering of tech giants, Great Firewall and commanding political control over one billion internet users (all of which is far more important than TikTok).

As of now, China is Latin America’s top trading partner, is a major source of foreign direct investment and energy and infrastructure lending through the Belt and Roads Initiative (BRI), has Free Trade Agreements with Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru, is either a member or observer of nine regional organizations including the Inter-American Development Bank, Caribbean Development Bank, Andean Community, Pacific Alliance, and Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura, and is looking to expand sales of electric vehicles and AI products through these alliances. It has become a supplier of military equipment to Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador. And if those tech bros want to monopolise those Latin America’s mineral resources, too bad: China has already moved in on the lithium and raw materials.

China proves to be highly pragmatic about its partnerships. As Eric Toussaint points out, China has played a non-negligible role in bailing out Milei. Milei had got elected saying he would have nothing to do with the “decadent communists” in Beijing. But as of 2025, it is the country’s second largest trading partner, and a major supplier of industrial equipment, vehicles and electronic products. Chinese investment in Argentina exceeded £23 billion this year. And, in April 2025, on the eve of an IMF loan to Argentina of $20 billion (fully backed by the BRICS+), China renewed a credit line for the equivalent of $5 billion to Milei’s Argentina. Milei has duly reconsidered, finding China to be a “fabulous partner,” and insisting that “we must separate the geopolitical question from our commercial question.” It’s not just Milei—even Bukele, a simulacral Salvadoran caudillo, has been trying to get a free trade deal with China for years.

If you think about it, it’s not surprising. The U.S. has nothing to match the BRI’s swift, large-scale financing of infrastructure, and certainly can’t offer the kind of export market that China does. The supposed alternative to BRI, the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) launched under Biden, offers incentives for private sector investment which does not and cannot satisfy the continent’s investment needs. China has been flexible, pragmatic, seductive, the U.S. has been reactive, vacillating and at times bellicose. The creative resources of China’s bourgeoisie are not exhausted; those of the American ruling-class patently are. Now add to this the Trump administration’s ideological bullying, opportunism, threats to cut funds (begging for China to fill the gap), and now the bloody Southern Spear-shaking of the war party, and you begin to see why Beijing’s power only increases. The administration wishes to curb Chinese influence, but everything it does seems to be grift to China’s mill, and nothing it does is remotely adequate as a systematic alternative to what China offers.

In the light of a more remote retrospection, it may be more obvious than it is now that Trump’s blundering pseudo-aggression in the tariffs war was the pivotal moment here. A blunder, a misfire that only proved Beijing’s global importance and gave it a diplomatic edge it didn’t have before and accelerated rather than retarding imperial decline. And if they blunder into Venezuela, I have no doubt they could take down Maduro and momentarily impose a new right-wing figurehead without breaking a sweat. They have the air power, just as the British once had the naval power. But the net result would be yet further decline, driving Latin America further into the friendly, understanding, business-like embrace of Beijing.

One sometimes hears the Monroe Doctrine invoked in regard to Trump’s hemispheric policies, but this is really not your grandfather’s Monroe Doctrine. It isn’t the Monroe Doctrine in any guise whatever. It isn’t any recognisable version of imperialism past—Manifest Destiny, the Open Door, the Free World, the Washington Consensus—though it contains aspects of all of them. It is a factionally-riven, post-hegemonic imperialism whose projection of power is as much about theatrical sovereignty and domestic political battles as about coherent realpolitik interests. It is all tactics and no strategy, an incontinent blend of ideological militancy and opportunism, recklessness (not just with the lives of others) and complicit bargaining, whim and automatism, insurgency (against traditional Washington) and deference (to the methods of traditional Washington). It is a contradictory mess, inadequate to its own concept, incapable of achieving actuality, and thus destined to flounder and lash out and make things worse before it is eclipsed.