Photo: FRANCESCO SPOTORNO/AFP/Getty Images
Largely ignored amid news of the U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean was a brief statement from the Dominican Republic (DR), host country for the 10th Summit of the Americas, announcing that it would postpone the triennial gathering, scheduled for early December, citing “the deep differences that currently make productive dialogue difficult.”
With Haiti in turmoil and Venezuela facing possible U.S. military intervention, postponing the 10th Summit of the Americas may have seemed the prudent option. Over the past three decades, the high-level gatherings have grown increasingly irrelevant to major hemispheric challenges. None has matched the ambition of the first summit, held in Miami in 1994, which ended with an agreement to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA) by the end of 2005.
The Miami meeting was a celebration of democracy in a hemisphere that had recently emerged from military rule. Thirty-four elected presidents and prime ministers attended, representing every country except Cuba. “A spirit of cooperation barely imaginable only a short time ago has taken root and blossomed,” the U.S. Department of State proclaimed as it prepared for the second summit in 1997. “Building on our remarkable progress to date,” the statement continued, “we are moving forward toward the hemisphere’s definition of a brighter future.”
That optimism and purpose have faded. Dreams of an FTAA are dead and buried. Much of the region looks to China as its major source of trade and foreign investment, while the United States focuses on bilateral agreements, using tariffs to punish ideological rivals, such as the government of Brazil, and to reward allies, such as Argentina and Ecuador. The hemisphere faces a democratic recession, as many Latin American governments limit due process and civil rights to battle organized crime. Cuba is no longer the hemisphere’s sole dictatorship: Nicaragua and Venezuela have also devolved into full-fledged authoritarianism.
The Americas also face escalating violence as cocaine traffickers compete for new routes toward lucrative European markets. Gang violence linked to drug and arms trafficking has soared in much of the Caribbean, pummeling island nations best known for their pristine beaches and luxury resorts. In 2024, Turks and Caicos, a small British Overseas Territory with only 43,000 people, suffered the highest murder rate in the Americas.
The security challenges that now preoccupy the region demand regional solutions, especially in Haiti, the poorest, most volatile country in the Americas, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the DR.
Haiti’s extreme poverty, natural disasters, political instability, and horrific gang violence have combined to generate a humanitarian crisis, displacing more than 1.4 million people, many of whom have fled across the Haiti–DR border.
Although Haiti was not officially on the summit agenda, it would have been hard to avoid discussing the collapse of governance right next door to the DR. The United States has backed a new UN-supported security mission to Haiti, the Gang Suppression Force (GSF), which should be bigger, better equipped, and more aggressive than a previous Kenya-led mission.
Recent U.S. actions against Venezuela have overshadowed efforts to win international backing for the new Haiti mission. Staffing, equipping, and deploying the new mission will likely take at least six months. Although the United States may provide the bulk of GSF financial support, it has not been willing to put boots on the ground. Nor have the major Latin American nations that supported past interventions, such as Chile and Brazil, offered substantial help so far, either for personnel or financing.
Moreover, Haiti faces another looming crisis after February 7, when the Transitional Presidential Council—a temporary body established in April 2024—was scheduled to hand power over to an elected president and legislature. The nine-member council, whose mandate is unlikely to be extended, has yet to agree on a plan for elections or an interim government capable of carrying them out.
The theme of the 2025 Summit of the Americas was supposed to be “human security,” defined broadly as citizen security as well as food, water, and energy security. The U.S. airstrikes on 23 suspected drug boats since early September—killing 87 people—have polarized any discussion of security, however, especially when combined with threats to take out targets inside Venezuela.
Such actions trigger painful memories in South America, where the United States often backed military governments during the Cold War. The Caribbean Basin has its own history of “gunboat diplomacy” dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the United States cited the 1823 Monroe Doctrine to prevent colonialist European powers from meddling in the Americas.
The administration’s new National Security Strategy, issued on December 4, reorients U.S. military resources to the Western Hemisphere, asserting a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine designed to “prevent and discourage mass migration,” ensure that regional governments “cooperate . . . against narco-terrorists,” and prevent “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.” Secretary Hegseth summed up the new stance when he announced Operation Southern Spear on social media in November, proclaiming, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”
Some Caribbean leaders—including Dominican President Luis Abinader and Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago—have embraced the U.S. military deployment, promising to collaborate in joint counternarcotics operations. But the issue has split CARICOM, an economic community with 15 Caribbean member states, which issued a statement calling for a “zone of peace” in the region, respect for international law, and support for “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Latin America’s largest democratic states—Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia—have all warned against U.S. military action, especially threats against the regime of President Nicolás Maduro, which the White House says functions as a narco-terrorist network.
For Dominican President Abinader, hosting the high-level gathering in the resort town of Punta Cana was a chance not only to showcase his country’s white-sand beaches but also to celebrate its extraordinary economic development. The DR, which in the 1960s was among Latin America’s poorest countries, has since then enjoyed growth rates averaging more than 5 percent a year, putting it on a convergence track with the hemisphere’s most advanced economies.
The DR has its own history of U.S. interventions: President Johnson secured Organization of American States approval for a multinational invasion force, made up mostly of U.S. troops, to halt an April 1965 uprising by young army officers and prevent “another Cuba” in the Caribbean. The country was also occupied by U.S. forces from 1916 to 1924 (as was neighboring Haiti from 1915 to 1934), ostensibly to restore political stability, protect U.S. investments, and forestall European (especially German) intervention to collect foreign debts.
The country’s rapid economic growth has largely extinguished any residues of anti-American feeling. A 2020 poll conducted by Vanderbilt University found that more than two-thirds of the Dominican public trusted the U.S. government, the highest level in Latin America, where overall trust in the United States was found to be low (averaging less than 50 percent) and declining.
President Abinader, who ranks among the region’s most popular presidents, is positioning his government as a key U.S. ally, offering the U.S. military temporary use of Dominican airports for counternarcotics operations, access which might also assist the deployment to Haiti of the GSF. The DR reported record cocaine seizures in 2024, much of it bound for Europe. Abinader has also won U.S. praise for his anti-corruption efforts, including the appointment of an independent attorney general who launched a multipronged investigation into high-level embezzlement under the previous government dubbed Operation Antipulpo (anti-octopus).
Abinader’s tough line on Haitian migration is an issue that helped him win reelection resoundingly in 2024. Dominican authorities have tightened border security by building a wall and deploying additional troops, which now total about 12,000. The government has also ramped up deportations, setting a goal of up to 10,000 a week. Those deported include Haitians who were born in the DR or have lived there most of their lives; many simply return, paying smugglers who bribe border guards to let them across.
Corruption among Dominican security forces along the border remains a problem, as Abinader himself has acknowledged. While migrants flow from Haiti into the DR seeking work and security, arms and other contraband goods flow from the DR into Haiti. Despite a UN arms embargo, Haitian gangs are well supplied with U.S.-made guns, which are often smuggled on cargo ships into the DR and then transported across the border into Haiti.
On a recent tour to the Indo-Pacific, Secretary Hegseth declared, “‘America First’ does not mean ‘America alone,’” echoing President Trump’s own declarations to global finance leaders at Davos in 2018. That should also apply to America’s own increasingly divided Western Hemisphere, especially amid the political storms that are roiling the Caribbean Basin.
The United States has opted for multilateral action to restore peace and democratic governance in Haiti by pushing for a UN-supported security mission to suppress the violent gangs that traffic in weapons and drugs, fueling mass migration into the wider region. In contrast, the United States has chosen to act unilaterally against the regime in Venezuela by threatening to strike targets within the country and close its airspace.
The United States will need regional allies to bring lasting peace and prosperity to both Haiti and Venezuela, however. Failure in either Haiti or Venezuela will reverberate throughout the Americas, undermining U.S. claims to regional leadership. Worse, as the U.S. experience over the last 25 years shows, military interventions cannot on their own bring about stable, democratic governance.
Postponing the 2025 Summit of the Americas may have been a prudent short-run call. But the United States still needs regional partners to address the Caribbean’s and the Hemisphere’s complex long-run economic and political challenges. Reviving the “spirit of cooperation” that all-too-briefly united the region at the 1994 Summit of the Americas is just as important today.
Georges Fauriol is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Mary Speck is a former senior advisor to the Latin America Program at the United States Institute of Peace.
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