The US Can’t Kick China Out of Latin America Anymore
Why Trump’s New Monroe Doctrine Is Already Too Late
When Trump talks about “taking back” Latin America, about restoring the Monroe Doctrine, around dragging Venezuela, Panama, Brazil, and the rest of the continent back under Washington’s exclusive jurisdiction, many people still interpret this as strength.
It isn’t.
It is exposure.
Only someone who has run out of cards flips the table.
Only a gambler close to bankruptcy reaches for robbery.
If U.S. sanctions still worked, if dollar hegemony were still intact, if political pressure, financial warfare, and diplomatic isolation still delivered results, Washington would not need to personally step into the mud — threatening kidnappings, floating regime-change fantasies, or openly talking about seizing resources as collateral.
This is not muscle-flexing.
This is imperial afterglow.
And the key misunderstanding in Washington is this: the outcome of this struggle does not hinge on whether Maduro survives, or whether a government falls. It hinges on something much more banal, much more material.
When the U.S. looks down at what it still calls its “backyard,” it no longer sees American soil.
It sees Chinese soybeans growing in the fields.
Chinese cranes loading containers in the ports.
Chinese power grids, telecom systems, roads, and railways quietly humming underneath daily life.
This is more powerful than ideology.
That is infrastructure, the backbone of economy.
And infrastructure does not disappear on command. Removing China from Latin America is removing the infrastructure and collapsing the fragile economies.
The Real Endgame: Resources, Collateral, and a Dollar Under Pressure
Trump’s Venezuela obsession is not about democracy, human rights, or even oil in the traditional sense. It is about collateral.
The United States is cornered by its own balance sheet.
In the coming year alone, Washington needs to roll over and issue roughly five trillion dollars in new Treasury debt just to service maturing obligations. But fewer and fewer countries are willing to absorb U.S. debt at scale. Commodity trade is slowly de-dollarizing. If the U.S. is forced to monetize its own debt by printing money to buy Treasuries, inflation becomes uncontrollable.
That path cannot be allowed.
So the theory emerging in Washington is simple: secure massive pools of real assets — oil, gas, rare earths, minerals — re-peg them to the dollar, and restore confidence through material backing.
Venezuela.
Greenland.
Latin America.
On paper, Venezuelan oil reserves are worth tens of trillions. In reality, Venezuelan oil can’t be monetized so easily.
Venezuela’s Oil Trap: Why China Cannot Be Replaced
Venezuelan crude is among the most difficult on Earth to monetize. It is extra-heavy, buried deep, and requires extremely sophisticated extraction, upgrading, and transport infrastructure.
Only two countries on Earth have the technical and industrial depth to build and operate such systems at scale: China and the United States.
China already did it.
China buys roughly 70% of Venezuela’s oil. China financed, built, and operates much of the infrastructure that makes that oil usable and exportable.
If China is pushed out, who replaces it?
American oil majors — Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips (COP) — have no incentive to sink one hundred billion dollars over five years into facilities that could be expropriated the moment political winds shift again. The risk profile is suicidal.
And even if U.S. companies did step in, who would they sell to?
China is the only buyer large enough, patient enough, and technically compatible with this type of crude. If China is expropriated and sanctioned out of Venezuela, retaliation is inevitable. Supply chains will be disrupted. Markets will close. Sanctions will travel both ways.
Washington’s Venezuela fantasy collapses under its own economic logic.1. https://x.com/i/status/2010373816438899091
2. https://x.com/i/status/2010374512890548413
II/
Ports, Infrastructure, and the Chancay Pivot
Zoom out, and the problem becomes systemic.
China has not merely traded with Latin America.
It has rewired it.
Ports, roads, railways, power grids, telecom networks — many of these systems are smart, automated, and remotely managed.
The Chancay Port in Peru is the clearest illustration of this shift. Once operational, it shortened South America–Asia shipping routes by weeks and bypassed U.S.-controlled chokepoints. Copper, lithium, agricultural products, and minerals can now flow east faster, cheaper, and with far greater autonomy.
These are not docks that can simply be seized and reassigned.
They are deeply integrated Chinese-built ecosystems. Remove China, and the system does not change owners — it stops functioning.
This is the core problem Washington refuses to confront.
It is not trying to block trade.
It is trying to uninstall an operating system.
Doing so would paralyze Latin American economies. Ports would fall silent, power grids would falter, telecommunications would degrade, and without functioning infrastructure, Latin American resources would cease to be monetizable.
Twenty Years Too Late
Twenty years ago, China’s presence in Latin America was close to zero.
Walk into a supermarket in Santiago or São Paulo in the early 2000s and you saw American brands stacked wall to wall. Back then, if Washington sneezed, Latin America caught a cold.
Today, the data tells a different story.
China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru, and several other countries. Bilateral trade has surged into the hundreds of billions.
This shift did not happen overnight.
It happened container by container.
Railway by railway.
Port by port.
Chile’s cherries, Brazil’s soybeans, Ecuador’s shrimp are staples on Chinese dinner tables.
This is demand gravity.
Lithium, Energy, and Strategic Chokepoints
If agriculture is flesh, energy and minerals are bone and blood.
The Lithium Triangle — Chile, Bolivia, Argentina — controls more than half of the world’s known lithium reserves. But reserves alone are meaningless.
What matters is refining.
China dominates lithium processing.
The United States talks about electric vehicles, green transitions, and technological leadership, yet the refining capacity and supply chains that make these ambitions possible remain firmly in Chinese hands.
This is the structural asymmetry Washington cannot escape.
If China ever tightens refining exports, Western EV and battery supply chains face immediate disruption. This is not just a trade dispute. It is leverage over future industrial standards.
A Buyer’s World
We now live in a buyer’s market.
Whoever controls the largest consumer base controls pricing power.
Latin American farmers, miners, and exporters understand this perfectly. Anger Washington, and life may become uncomfortable. Anger China, and the market itself disappears.
That is survival.
China’s presence in Latin America looks like commerce. In reality, it functions as armor. When interests are bound tightly enough, any attempt to tear them apart becomes self-destructive.
The Monroe Doctrine was written for a world of gunboats.
This is a world of supply chains.
And in that world, China is already embedded — too deeply to remove without tearing the system apart.
