Why Trump's Defeat Won't Change Latin America's Politics

The Democrats' landslide victory in the midterm elections changed the political map of the United States. With a Republican Party in shock, forced to start thinking about succession in 2028, Trump is left in the awkward position of being a "lame duck," that is, a president without the possibility of reelection who will have to govern his last two years without control of either chamber. How much will this scenario affect Trump's international room for maneuver? On trade matters, the new House will be able to subject tariff policy to scrutiny, for example, by intervening in the review of the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada (USMCA), which Trump refuses to renew. But the most significant change will likely occur in the Middle East. According to exit polls, three out of four voters cited the war with Iran as an important factor in their vote, and 62% considered it a mistake. In September, an attempt to end the military offensive had failed in the Senate by just two votes, a margin that the new majority in that chamber is in a position to reverse. Another consequence of the defeat is that it may reconfigure the contest between the factions vying for control of Trumpism's foreign policy. On one side is the group of "primacists," who hold that the United States must exercise global leadership and act as the gendarme of the international order, with a military presence on all fronts and firm alliances, including that with Israel. Marco Rubio, Senator Tom Cotton (the youngest congressman in the country), and the journalist and writer Mark Levin are among its leading figures. The second group, known as the restrainers, is at the hardcore core of the MAGA movement and counts among its figures Vice President JD Vance, alt-right guru Steve Bannon, and commentator Tucker Carlson. This faction holds that the United States must end the distant wars waged for ideological or civilizational reasons and concentrate resources on the rivalry with China. Over the past year, the war with Iran became the axis of discord, because for the restrainers it contradicts the "America First" promise of not dragging the country into new wars. In this dispute, Tuesday's election result seems to give the restrainers a boost. The day after the election, Vance wrote on X that the reason for the defeat was "obvious to almost everyone" and cited a poll that ranked ending the war as the top condition for winning back lost voters. Rubio, who went so far as to define the war as a "favor" to the United States and the world, comes out battered instead, even in Florida, where his former Senate seat was retained by less than three points in a state that Trump had won by about 13 points in 2024. Now, the fact that a pivot on the Middle East is to be expected does not mean the same will happen in Latin America. There are at least four reasons that go beyond the election result and suggest that the Donroe Doctrine (the reissue of the Monroe Principle asserting total US primacy in the region against powers such as China) will remain in place and could even deepen over the next two years. They function as concentric circles, moving from the individual to the partisan, the institutional, and finally the strategic — the broadest and the hardest to reverse. First, Trump retains both room and motives to act in the region. Without the pressure of reelection and with a hostile Congress, presidents feel less constrained by the domestic agenda and, at the same time, have no room to advance it. As Philip Potter, director of the Center for National Security Policy at the University of Virginia, has shown, this combination pushes "lame ducks" outward, toward more presidential diplomacy, more executive agreements, and more use of force. For instance, George W. Bush responded to the 2006 legislative defeat by sending more troops to Iraq, and Barack Obama announced the thaw with Cuba six weeks after losing the Senate in 2014. Moreover, Trump retains tools of coercion and blackmail that require no legislative approval. One is tariffs, which have already been imposed on nearly 20 countries in the region. The other is visa revocations, which targeted then-Colombian President Gustavo Petro, former Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, and justices of the Brazilian Supreme Court. To this must be added Trump's personality, having built his public persona on grandeur and the constant measuring of his place in history. The Republican leader, who keeps a portrait of Monroe next to his desk in the Oval Office, may seek in the region the legacy that the Middle East denies him. Unlike Iran, Europe, or Asia, actions in the region are "cheaper." In this context, Cuba appears as the obvious candidate. After the capture of Maduro, the president anticipated that the island "is next," and the fall of the communist regime would allow him to claim an achievement none of his predecessors managed, and, in passing, bury Obama's legacy. The second reason is partisan. The Republican factions, which disagree on issues such as the war in Ukraine or the Middle East, coincide in their view of Latin America. While the restrainers question distant and ideological wars, they are far from rejecting interventionist policy in the region. Steve Bannon, for instance, demanded after Lula's reelection that Washington break off diplomatic relations and cut all trade with what he called a "Marxist" regime. For this current, the Hemisphere is its own security perimeter and central terrain of the dispute with China. Hence Rubio (who pushed for the capture of Maduro, the pressure for regime change in Cuba, and the sanctions against Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes) may be weakened in the Republican internal dispute without that affecting an interventionist agenda that is also shared by the opposing camp. Third, the doctrine rests on the institutional inertia of state agencies removed from the spotlight of partisan politics. Much of the US strategy toward the region is designed and executed from Southern Command, which over the past year converted the fight against drug trafficking into a war on "narcoterrorism," and where the construction of China as a threat advanced independently of the governing party. In the annual reports of its commanders to Congress, China appeared only four times in 2015. In 2021, with Biden in the White House, it was already the most frequently named threat, and in 2024 it totaled 78 mentions, nearly double that of Russia, the second. Added to this is an architecture that densified this year, from the Shield of the Americas, which already brings together more than a dozen countries, to the autonomous warfare command created in April by Southern Command and the Army's new Western Hemisphere Command. Finally, and above all, the reissue of the Monroe Doctrine transcends Trump, the MAGA movement, and the Republicans. Its core is restricting the Chinese presence in strategic sectors such as ports, artificial intelligence, critical infrastructure, energy, and minerals. And the characterization of China as the main threat is one of the few consensuses that survive American political polarization. Indeed, the Biden administration consolidated much of the shift initiated by Trump, starting with the tariffs against Beijing. Congress, moreover, abounds with bipartisan initiatives such as the resolution by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Ted Budd to counter Chinese influence in Latin America. Thus, a Democratic Congress may question the strikes against boats in the Caribbean, but will hardly dispute the goal of limiting the Chinese presence in the region. That is why it is the weightiest factor. Whoever wins in 2028, the competition with China will continue to shape policy toward the region, albeit with different intensity and different methods. None of this implies the scenario is closed. The defense budget gives the House of Representatives a concrete lever, and the cost of living can make any new military adventure unpopular. But those brakes weigh less in a region where coercion is exercised mainly through tariffs, sanctions, and visas. The most likely outcome, then, is that a president stalled on Iran and without a domestic agenda will find more incentives than before to tighten pressure on the region, starting with Cuba. In short, the electoral thrashing may cut into Trump's room for maneuver in the Middle East or on trade. In Latin America, by contrast, individual, partisan, institutional, and strategic incentives are at work pointing toward the continuity of the Donroe Doctrine and, possibly, its deepening. For Latin American governments, the prudent course would be to plan for the next two years without expecting a US withdrawal from the region. Everything suggests, rather, the opposite. *The author is a professor of International Relations at the National University of San Martín and a researcher at CONICET. By Alejandro Frenkel