Leland Lazarus, Guido Torres
“Economic security is national security.” This core principle, long echoed across the U.S. interagency—from the White House’s National Security Strategy to Treasury and Commerce policy directives—has gained renewed urgency as strategic competition intensifies in the Western Hemisphere. In no place is this more evident than in Latin America and the Caribbean, where economic statecraft has become the terrain of contestation.
For three years, this slogan permeated out of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), stressing that a nation’s economic and national security are intertwined and that economic over-reliance on China could infringe on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)’s sovereignty. While the slogan certainly resonated in Washington, we often discussed with colleagues in the region whether LAC citizens felt the same way.
Oftentimes, they didn’t. Part of the reason is the U.S.’s own fraught history of imperialism in the region, where it militarily intervened in LAC countries dozens of times under the infamous Monroe Doctrine. In the minds of some LAC leaders, U.S. warnings about Chinese threats to their economic and national security come off as hypocritical.
That being said, it is disappointing that the same kind of domestic political discourse in many LAC countries where politicians jealously guard their sovereignty from the clutches of a Monroe Doctrine 2.0 doesn’t also include the same fervent effort to protect their sovereignty from China.
Beijing often cloaks its regional projects in strictly commercial language, but the substance is strategic: using economic leverage to shape the policy behavior of smaller states. In LAC, this coercion is increasingly subtle, pervasive, and effective. China’s tactics constitute a form of irregular warfare as old as Sun Tzu’s Art of War. An ancient Chinese idiom captures this approach well: ‘subdue the enemy without fighting.’ Therefore, LAC countries must identify when and how China is deploying economic coercion, and develop strategies to successfully counteract them and proactively protect their sovereignty.
The following table illustrates all instruments wielded by Chinese embassies.
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