President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a roundtable discussion on college sports in the East Room of the White House, Friday, March 6, 2026, in Washington.
Julia DeMarie Nikhinson/AP
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Julia DeMarie Nikhinson/AP
Doral, Fla. – President Donald Trump will gather with Latin American leaders at his Miami-area golf club on Saturday as his administration looks to demonstrate that it is still committed to sharpening the focus of US foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere even as it faces five alarming crises around the world.
The meeting, dubbed the “Shield of the Americas” summit, comes two months after Trump ordered a bold U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and take him and his wife to the U.S. to face drug conspiracy charges.
Even bigger was Trump’s decision a week ago to join Israel in launching a war on Iran that has already killed hundreds of people, shocked global markets and destabilized the wider Middle East.
Trump’s time with Latin American leaders will be limited: A day after the US and Israel launched their military operations against Iran, he is set to fly to Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of six US troops killed in a drone attack on a command center in Kuwait.
But with the summit, Trump will look to turn his attention to the Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment. He has vowed to restore US 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 became obsessed with every theater in the world and every other border besides our own,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told regional leaders and defense ministers in Florida this week for talks on countering drug cartels. “These elites minimized our power and presence in this hemisphere, choosing benign neglect.”
Who will attend?
The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago have confirmed they will attend the gathering at President Trump National Doral in Miami.
The idea for a summit of like-minded conservatives from across the hemisphere emerged from the ashes of the 10th edition of the Summit of the Americas, which was canceled last year during a US military build-up off the coast of Venezuela.
Bowing to pressure from the White House, the hosts, the Dominican Republic, barred Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from attending the regional gathering. But after left-wing leaders in Colombia and Mexico threatened to pull out of the protests — and with no commitment from Trump to attend — Dominican Republic President Luis Abinador decided at the last minute to postpone the event, citing “deep differences” in the region.
The Shield of the Americas moniker is intended to speak to Trump’s vision for an “America First” foreign policy toward the region that controls US military and intelligence assets not seen in the region since the end of the Cold War.
But notably missing are two of the region’s dominant powers — Brazil and Mexico — as well as Colombia, the linchpin of US anti-narcotics strategy in the region.
Richard Feinberg, who helped plan the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 while working on the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, said the opposite could not be more true.
“America’s first summit with 34 nations and a carefully negotiated comprehensive agenda for regional competitiveness, planned inclusion, consensus and optimism,” said Feinberg, now professor emeritus at the University of California-San Diego. “The hastily organized mini-summit of the Americas suggests a bent defensiveness, with only a dozen or so participants huddled around a single dominant figure.”
Challenge from China
Since returning to the White House, Trump has made countering Chinese influence in the hemisphere a top priority. Trump says his national security strategy is a “corollary” to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which sought to ban European incursions into the Americas — by targeting Chinese infrastructure projects, military cooperation and investment in the region’s resource industries.
Trump’s strong-arming of Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and review long-standing port deals held by the Hong Kong-based firm amid US threats to withdraw the Panama Canal is the first show of a more muscular approach.
More recently, Maduro’s capture and Trump’s vow to “run” Venezuela threaten to disrupt oil shipments to China — the largest buyer of Venezuelan crude before the attack — and bring one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region into Washington’s orbit. Trump will travel to Beijing later this month to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But even leaders closely aligned with Trump have been reluctant to cut ties with China, said Evan Ellis, an expert on China’s engagement in the region at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For many countries, China’s trade-focused diplomacy fills a critical economic void in a region with major development challenges ranging from poverty reduction to infrastructure bottlenecks. By contrast, Trump is cutting foreign aid to the region while rewarding countries that have lined up behind his crackdown on immigration — a move that is widely unpopular across the hemisphere.
“The US is offering tariffs, deportations and militarization to the region while China is offering trade and investment,” said Kevin Gallagher, director of Boston University’s Center for Global Development Policy, who has written extensively on China’s economic diplomacy in America. “Leaders in the region would do well to remain neutral and hedge, as they can leverage increased US-China rivalry to their own advantage.”
Ahead of the summit, Trump announced that he would remove Kristy Noem as Homeland Security Secretary and name her his special representative for America’s shield.
Trump will announce a “big deal” at the summit focused on how we’re going to go after cartels and drug trafficking in the entire Western Hemisphere, Nome said.
