Trump is using Latin America as target practice. This is no way to conduct foreign policy.

Greg Grandin, Trump Picked the Right Stage to Act Out His Imperial Ambitions, NYTimes, Jan 19, 2026.

The article opens:

President Trump has become increasingly entangled in Latin American politics. Less than a year into his second term, he has seized the president of Venezuela, imposed sanctions on Cuba and Nicaragua and threatened Mexico with airstrikes and Colombia with a coup. He has imposed crushing tariffs on Brazilian exports, sent deportees to El Salvador’s infamous supermax prison, pressured Panama to limit China’s influence and meddled in the internal politics of Honduras and Guatemala.

Mr. Trump’s turn toward Latin America isn’t surprising, for often during times of global turbulence, like the moment we now find ourselves in, presidents seek safe harbor there. Latin America was where U.S. leaders have projected power beyond their borders not only with brute force, including all those coups Washington orchestrated, but with moral suasion as well.

For presidents of both parties, Latin America has served as a wellspring of perpetual reinvention and the source of much of their ideological creativity. This is especially true for what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls “reconstructive” presidents, leaders who work to build new political orders and restore political legitimacy after periods of acute crisis.

Grandin then goes on to discuss Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as reconstructive presidents. Then...

Here we are again: a nation turning away from the rest of the world toward Latin America.

Mr. Trump, too, has a story to tell about Latin America, and it isn’t pretty. He likes to play the role of the business cutthroat — a corporate pirate devoid of any ideology, save greed. “We are going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said shortly after U.S. troops captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Such unadorned venality and disdain for diplomatic politesse cramp Trumpism, preventing it from forming the basis of a majoritarian coalition. Roosevelt and Reagan differed sharply in politics, yet both grasped how depicting Latin America as aligned with the United States could convert partisan alliances into durable governing majorities. Turning foreign policy into a mirror of national identity, they renovated Americanism as humane and universal.

Mr. Trump, in contrast, seems unconcerned with transforming dominance into hegemony or with broadening his base. He seeks only raw power in which the United States dominates the hemisphere because it can dominate the hemisphere — where it kills speedboat captains because it can kill speedboat captains. He is using the region to send a message to the nations of the world: Don’t “cross us,” as JD Vance recently said, referring to the Venezuela strike. [...]

Whereas Roosevelt held up the Western Hemisphere as a model of international cooperation for the world to emulate, the Trump administration uses Latin America as target practice. Whereas Reagan’s sunny capitalist Pan-Americanism silenced anti-migrant extremists in his coalition, Mr. Trump’s tribalism stokes them, with a growing number of young self-identified conservatives openly embracing white supremacy, antisemitism and Nazism.

Mr. Trump’s hemispheric turn leads not out of the crisis but deeper into it.