On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe gave his 7th State of the Union address before Congress, using the occasion to advance what would later become known as the Monroe Doctrine.
After a string of former Spanish colonies in the Americas declared their independence, Monroe said the United States would oppose further predation in the region from the European empires to preserve the newly emancipated states.
As American power exploded during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Monroe Doctrine evolved and increasingly came to mean Washington’s opposition to any potentially hostile foreign power establishing itself in the Americas. With this and a variety of more mercantile motives in mind, the U.S. made a series of military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
However, the past few decades have seen a dramatic increase in Chinese economic and diplomatic influence across the region, with one foreign policy expert telling Newsweek that Beijing wants to “turn the Caribbean Sea into a Chinese lake.”
There are also concerns that the cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration since it took over in January could weaken American influence in the Caribbean.
One regional expert described the move to Newsweek as a “huge gift” to Beijing.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. State Department for comment via email and online inquiry form, respectively.
Surging Chinese Influence
China is by some margin the United States’ chief geopolitical rival, having seen its economic strength explode over the past few decades. Data from the World Trade Organization showed the value of Chinese manufacturing experts hit $1.81 trillion in 2023, up 30 times on 2002, while America’s global trade deficit was over $1.2 trillion.
Chinese trade with and investment in Central America and the Caribbean have expanded rapidly over the past few years. According to figures from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chinese trade with the Caribbean went from $1 billion in 2002 to $8 billion in 2019, when $6.1 billion worth of Chinese exports and $1.9 billion in imports were recorded.
The committee identified major Chinese projects, including the development of a $3 billion deep-water port on Grand Bahama, just 55 miles from the U.S. mainland, and a $600 million investment to improve the Dominican Republic’s electricity grid. According to Forbes, China is funding $2.1 billion worth of projects in Jamaica and $773 million in Suriname.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
As of 2022, ten Caribbean countries had signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a major Chinese economic program that critics argue is a Trojan horse for geopolitical ambitions: Cuba, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
Speaking to Newsweek, Evan Ellis, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute who specializes in the relationship between Latin America and China, said that while individual Chinese companies primarily have commercial objectives, Beijing is keeping a close eye on the wider strategic picture.
“Although I don’t believe that Chinese companies pursue presence in the region principally because of the military value, the military opportunities that such commercial presence, and political and military relationships potentially provide in time of war, is obvious to the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government,” Ellis said.
Ellis added, “On a per capita basis, there is no other part of the Western Hemisphere that receives the quantity of trips for its police and defense force officials two Chinese military institutions, gifts of police and military vehicles and material, visits by Chinese hospital ships, and other [People’s Liberation Army] military diplomacy as does the Caribbean.”
Alan Mendoza, executive director of the London-based security think tank the Henry Jackson Society, told Newsweek that Beijing is actively seeking to challenge the U.S. in the Caribbean.
“China appears intent on trying to turn the Caribbean Sea into a Chinese lake with its strategic investments and attempts to secure influence in the region,” Mendoza said. “The Trump administration could easily employ a carrot and stick approach to roll this back however, by offering trade and investment inducements of its own while making clear the consequences of ignoring a generous offer.”
John Lee, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank who served as a senior national security adviser to the Australian foreign minister between 2016 and 2018, told Newsweek that Chinese activities raise a “threefold” threat to U.S. influence in the Caribbean and Latin America.
“First, increased economic, financial, and technological dependency on China offers Beijing opportunity to exert influence in the geopolitical decisions and even domestic politics of smaller states…Second, China seeks to redefine and change the rules and standards used by nations to conduct commerce and trade in its favor,” Lee said.
“Third, Chinese development and operation of ports in foreign countries has been used by Beijing to gather significant military and economic intelligence for the purposes of aiding China in its geopolitical rivalry with the U.S.”
The Taiwan Question
Chinese President Xi Jinping has described the unification of Taiwan, an island democracy of 23 million that Beijing regards as a renegade province, with mainland China as “inevitable” and has refused to rule out using force to resolve the issue.
In an interview with Newsweek, Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America specialist at the London-based Chatham House think tank, said the intensity of China’s involvement in the Caribbean and Central America has partly been an attempt to persuade countries to break off relations with Taiwan.
“If you look at before the recent flurry of diplomatic initiatives, the countries that were recognizing Taiwan, the overwhelming majority of them were in the Caribbean and Central America so it was an obvious target for their efforts if you will, economic and diplomatic,” Sabatini said.
In 2018, Panama and the Dominican Republic cut their long-standing diplomatic ties with Taiwan, followed by Nicaragua in 2021.
Sabatini said China had a “long-term strategy of lining up countries that would support it in multilateral organizations,” adding, “It wasn’t an immediate military threat…there was a larger long-term plan of picking a team, stacking up chips.”
Ellis made a similar point: “Five of the 12 countries in the world that recognize Taiwan rather than the [People’s Republic of China] are found in the Caribbean basin at a moment in which eliminating Taiwan’s sources of international legitimacy is of increased importance to President Xi Jinping.”
Panama Canal
Chinese influence has increased significantly around the strategically vital Panama Canal over the past couple of decades, with two of the five ports near its entrance being run by Hong Kong-based companies. This has infuriated Trump, who has vowed to restore the canal to American ownership, which was handed over in 1999 following a 1977 treaty.
Speaking at his inauguration in January, Trump said, “Above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
Trump has also refused to rule out using force to regain control over the canal.
Ellis said China’s influence around the canal could “give the Chinese opportunities to interrupt canal traffic in time of war, whether by physical or electronic attacks on locks, disabling a large ship in the Culebra Cut, mining the canal, or other activities.”
However, Sabatini warned against overestimating the threat from Chinese-owned ports near the canal, commenting, “The truth is much of that intelligence that could have been gathered could equally have been gathered by satellite imagery or even by setting up listening posts. These were not insidious outposts of Chinese military influence.”
In a victory for the U.S. president earlier this month, CK Hutchison Holdings, the Hong Kong-based company that owned two ports by the Panama Canal, announced it had sold them to an American BlackRock-led acquisition in a $23 billion deal.
Immigration
There has also been a surge in the number of encounters between suspected Chinese illegal migrants and U.S. law enforcement on both the Mexican and Canadian borders.
According to a May 2024 report by the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, the figure surged from 1,970 in the 2022 fiscal year to 24,376 two years later. Trump has made cracking down on illegal immigration one of his main policy priorities.
Sabatini told Newsweek that China views mass migration via the southern border, via failed states in Latin America and the Caribbean, as a way of tying down American resources that could otherwise be deployed elsewhere.
“In the case of Haiti, or other failed states, China and Russia are more than happy to see those states continue to just collapse to send migrants, to send insecurity and drugs to the United States,” Sabatini said.
“So they don’t actually have to militarily intervene. They’ve got a number of dumpster fires basically on the doorstep of the United States. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and of course Haiti now.”
In the event of open war between the U.S. and China, Sabatini said: “What they’re counting on Latin America for is being able to lock down a theater of operations…what they’re looking to do is make sure they can lock up the U.S. on the southern border. We’re not talking about an invasion, we’re talking about reducing the operations of the United States in the theater of conflict.”
USAID Cuts
The Trump administration has slashed staffing at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk has indicated that it will be closed down altogether.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the Biden administration requested $2.2 billion in USAID assistance for the Caribbean and Latin America in the 2025 fiscal year, so these cuts could significantly impact U.S. influence in the region.
Sabatini said this will reduce U.S. influence in the Caribbean and Central America to the benefit of rivals like China, describing the move as “an own goal” and a “huge gift” to Beijing.
He said the move “sends a signal that the U.S. simply isn’t interested in extending a hand” and that China will likely move to “take advantage.”
He also noted that civil society groups, such as independent media and educational organizations, in authoritarian Beijing-friendly countries such as Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela have been big recipients of USAID.
“That’s now disappeared,” Sabatini said. “Now, none of those NGOs that were receiving money are going to suddenly embrace the Chinese but [cutting] that money did just hand the Chinese a huge gift because those are Chinese allies…It’s an own goal; they gave the field to the autocrats.”
Lee agreed that the U.S. will struggle to contain Chinese influence in the Caribbean and Latin America without seeking to make a positive contribution to the region.
“There is no point worrying about increased Chinese leverage if these countries are not given alternatives in the form of ready access to fair rates of finance and market access,” Lee said. “The Trump administration will need to balance legitimate concerns about unimpeded access to its domestic economy with these geopolitical concerns.”
Professor Eric Hershberg, an expert in Latin American politics who used to teach at the American University in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek that China’s growing influence was partly a response to the U.S.’s failure to provide what the Caribbean and Central America need.
“Despite intermittent pledges to partner with countries in the region around these needs, the U.S. government has not been a reliable source of access to major investment, and though substantial in some cases neither U.S. trade nor U.S. assistance to the region even remotely approximates what is needed in order for these countries to do minimally well,” Hershberg said.
“In this context, the substantial commitments made by Chinese investors in recent years, particularly in infrastructure, have been vital to prospects for prosperity in Central America and the Caribbean.”
