Donald Trump’s ‘Big Stick’ Foreign Policy Could Backfire

Donald Trump is displaying a fondness for old-style, unapologetic U.S. imperialism with respect to policy in the Western Hemisphere. Even before entering the Oval Office for his second term, he set off alarm bells among neighboring countries. As president-elect, he said he intended to pressure Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. He also demanded that the Panamanian government return full control of the Panama Canal to Washington. 

Such brusque, uncompromising rhetoric escalated once Trump took office, and it was soon accompanied by decisive action. When Colombian officials objected to Washington sending planeloads of deported illegal migrants back to their country, the Trump administration retaliated by imposing harsh tariffs on Bogota’s exports. That response dispelled any notion that Trump’s threats of coercion were merely a bluff.

The prompt capitulation by Colombia’s government likely will encourage the White House to use such brass knuckles tactics regarding disputes with other nations in the hemisphere. Trump’s revival of his earlier threats to employ military force against Mexico’s drug cartels, for example, should make President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government more than a little nervous.

A History of the Big Stick 

Beginning in the late 19th century, the United States had acquired enough economic and military power to achieve hegemony throughout the Western Hemisphere. U.S. leaders did not hesitate to enforce that status. Washington even routinely ousted regimes deemed insufficiently cooperative. Recent U.S. administrations have preferred to rely on more subtle measures, but President Trump shows clear signs of wanting to return to using the ” big stick” to impose Washington’s will.

Despite Colombia’s immediate capitulation with respect to the refugee deportation issue, Trump administration officials are likely to discover that it is much more difficult to sustain U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere than they anticipate.  Indeed, cracks in that dominance have been developing for some time. 

Washington’s inability to oust Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba was the first significant indicator.  After the 1961 failure at the Bay of Pigs (using armed Cuban exiles as U.S. proxies) to overthrow Castro, a series of U.S. administrations have been unwilling to pay the probable price in treasure and blood needed to achieve forcible regime change. 

More recently, U.S. officials appear to have reached the same conclusion, however reluctantly, concerning the radical left-wing governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Their threats of action are mostly hot air.

Even Donald Trump and his ultra-hawkish Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, are unlikely to abandon such policy restraint.  Most governments in the hemisphere would balk at enlisting in an armed U.S. crusade to oust its adversaries in Cuba and Venezuela. The days when members of the Organization of American States would simple rubber stamp decisions made in Washington are long gone.

Indeed, resistance among Washington’s neighbors to U.S. complaints about the nature of the relations they have established with major powers outside the hemisphere is getting noticeably stronger. U.S. policymakers routinely express their irritation at the growing economic and diplomatic ties that countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico have forged with Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The usual responses to Washington’s objections, though, increasingly consist of polite but firm dismissals.  For example, trade between Brazil and the PRC reached 181.53 billion in 2023 and was on pace to exceed that total in 2024.  

The limits of Washington’s coercive diplomacy throughout the international system became graphically apparent when Joe Biden’s administration tried to enlist a global coalition to impose sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Except for NATO and long-standing U.S. security clients in East Asia, the campaign flopped. Nowhere was that failure more evident than in Latin America.  Except for British Guyana, none of the countries in that region imposed sanctions on Moscow, much less responded favorably to Washington’s call for economic or military aid to Kyiv. 

Such behavior underscores that the world is now indisputably multipolar, politically and diplomatically and economically. Even military capabilities are becoming more dispersed, thereby beginning to erode Washington’s dominance in that field as well. 

Donald Trump Should Be Careful 

Multi-polarity is a crucial development within the hemisphere as well as globally. Countries such as Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and even Argentina are significant diplomatic and economic players. Measured by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) Brazil’s economy is the 9th largest in the world, Canada’s, 10th, Mexico’s 12th, and Argentina’s, 23rd. The willingness of those countries to follow Washington’s lead on policy can no longer be taken for granted, and that development may prove to be a rude awakening for Donald Trump and his associates.  

About the Ted Galen Carpenter 

Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a columnist for 19FortyFive and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute.  He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).