The Cracks in Washington’s Backyard: Latin America Turns Away from the Monroe Doctrine

Two centuries after James Monroe warned outsiders to keep their hands off the Americas, Russian bombers are landing in Caracas, Chinese 5G networks are wiring Brazilian cities, and Iranian oil tankers dock in Venezuelan ports. The Monroe Doctrine is no longer an article of faith. It is a relic.

Washington still talks as if the hemisphere is its own preserve. Yet Latin America is no longer a passive estate. Countries that once bent to U.S. gravity are turning outward — to Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran — and doing so with open defiance. The shift is not sudden, but cumulative: decades of resentment over interventions, sanctions, and conditional loans have pushed the region to build alternatives.

Venezuela: The Vanguard of Resistance

In Caracas, lawmakers recently ratified a sweeping treaty with Russia covering defense, energy, and technology. It cements a partnership that has already seen joint air exercises with Sukhoi jets and promises local arms production. Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers — the same aircraft that once triggered Cold War panic — now arrive with barely a ripple from Washington.

U.S. sanctions, in force since 2017 and renewed under Trump, were supposed to isolate Nicolás Maduro. Instead, they hardened Venezuela’s alliances. Oil that once flowed north now sails east, backed by nearly $60 billion in Chinese loans for energy infrastructure. The 20-year cooperation pact signed with Iran in 2022 has kept refineries alive and gasoline flowing. The intended collapse never came. Sanctions shrank revenues but created workarounds: barter deals, yuan-denominated trades, and Iranian shipments. Opposition movements fractured. In effect, U.S. coercion entrenched the very regime it sought to topple.

Strategic Reinvention and the Global South

The emergence of the Global South as a collective force has created opportunities that simply did not exist 20 years ago. Chinese trade with Latin America has surged from virtually nothing in the 1990s to more than $400 billion annually today. Arms sales from non-Western powers have multiplied. Middle Eastern states are establishing embassies, investment funds, and energy deals throughout South America.

No country has leveraged this shift more skillfully than Venezuela. Each Western closure became an opening elsewhere. When U.S. and European banks slammed their doors, Caracas turned to Beijing and Moscow. When traditional shipping routes faltered, Asian and Middle Eastern corridors picked up the slack. When dollar transactions became impossible, Venezuela embraced alternatives: yuan swaps with China, barter agreements, and special economic zones tailored for Russian and Iranian firms. New ports and airports were developed to handle this traffic.

This is not mere survival. It is strategic reinvention. Venezuela has rebuilt its economic architecture to operate independently of Western control, embedding its economy inside a multipolar network designed to be sanction-proof.

Oil as a Weapon, Not a Vulnerability

The energy dimension reveals the true scale. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves — over 300 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Canada. For decades, this bounty was a trap as much as a prize: it brought wealth but left the country dependent on U.S. expertise and markets. The Orinoco Belt, an oil basin the size of Florida, contains vast heavy crude deposits once thought too costly to exploit.

For years, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others built the refineries and technology to handle Venezuela’s heavy crude, assuming Caracas would never escape American leverage. That assumption has collapsed. Chinese state-owned firms now step in with technology and capital. Russian and Iranian refiners provide new outlets. Oil that was once a vulnerability — hostage to Western demand and pricing power — has become a weapon in Venezuela’s strategic arsenal.

By shifting flows eastward and embedding its energy sector in a Global South supply chain, Venezuela has undermined one of Washington’s last coercive levers. In the process, it is reshaping global energy markets and eroding the foundations of U.S. economic dominance.

Brazil: China’s Economic Outpost

Brazil illustrates the broader realignment. For over a decade, China has been its largest trading partner. In 2024, Chinese investment doubled to $4.2 billion; in the first half of 2025 alone, mergers and acquisitions hit an eight-year high of $1.7 billion. These are not marginal sums — they anchor Brazil’s industrial and agricultural base.

President Lula da Silva wraps this in multipolar rhetoric, but the numbers speak louder. Since 2005, Beijing has extended almost $30 billion in credit lines. A new $1 billion joint investment fund now targets everything from logistics to electric vehicles. Huawei’s 5G pilots in Curitiba and São Paulo go ahead despite U.S. warnings, embedding Chinese technology in the very arteries of Brazil’s economy.

Meanwhile, Washington offers little beyond tariffs and threats. Trump’s flirtation with punitive duties only accelerated diversification eastward. The U.S. once held leverage; now, it cannot even match the cheque book.

Mexico: Proximity Without Compliance

Even within NAFTA’s successor framework, Mexico has drifted. President Claudia Sheinbaum has refused to join Western sanctions on Russia, insisting on non-intervention. On migration and security, she cooperates with the U.S., but on her own terms: cartel crackdowns are driven by domestic need, not Washington’s agenda.

Economic interdependence remains vast — $800 billion in annual trade — but the political leash is looser. Mexico courts Asia for diversification while absorbing the shocks of Trump’s wall revivals and deportation rhetoric. The message is unmistakable: geography ties Mexico to the U.S., but sovereignty is not for sale.

CELAC and the Quiet Reversal of the Doctrine

The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which excludes the U.S. and Canada, embodies the new direction. Its summits with China yield credit lines — $9 billion in 2025 alone — for infrastructure and security projects. Unlike U.S. programs, these come without lectures or conditionalities.

“Active non-alignment” has become the region’s doctrine of choice. From Mexico to Argentina, governments balance U.S. and Chinese suitors to maximize autonomy. The effect is cumulative: a mesh of trade flows, investment pacts, and security ties that collectively sideline Washington.

Washington’s Dilemma

The U.S. toolkit is worn out. Sanctions failed to collapse Venezuela. Tariffs on Brazil backfired. Naval patrols in the Caribbean — presented as counternarcotics operations — are widely seen as sovereignty violations. Meanwhile, China builds universities, scholarships, and technology hubs that nurture goodwill. The U.S. clings to the stick; it no longer has the carrot.

The contrast with the past is stark. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink over Soviet deployments. Today, Russian bombers land in Venezuela and Washington barely musters a protest note. The deterrent power of the Monroe Doctrine is gone.

The Map Has Already Redrawn

For Washington, the stakes are existential: not just influence, but control over resources — lithium, oil, soy — and the ideological struggle with authoritarian models that are no longer confined overseas. Yet the choice facing the U.S. is simple. Either adapt to a hemisphere that demands partnership rather than obedience, or watch permanent irrelevance set in.

The Monroe Doctrine is not under challenge. It is dead. Latin America has already buried it.