At the dawn of the new year, the most important foreign-policy debate facing the United States isn’t unfolding in Ukraine or the Middle East. It’s playing out much closer to home—in Central and South America.

The United States has long viewed the Western Hemisphere like a fire extinguisher: important in theory, hopefully unnecessary, out of mind unless something is on fire.

For decades, U.S. foreign policy has reflected that view, chasing crises in every corner of the world while overlooking the one region whose stability most directly affects American security: The Western Hemisphere.

The U.S. National Security Strategy finally breaks from that old pattern.

It is the most radical and long-overdue change in U.S. foreign policy in a generation. For the first time in living memory, the Western Hemisphere is treated as a top priority.

The strategy calls for a reallocation of military resources toward our own neighborhood and is grounded in a principle most Americans would consider common sense: the United States should act abroad in ways that make the United States stronger, safer, and more prosperous.

Imagine that!

Predictably, large parts of the foreign policy establishment hate this. They fail to understand that the National Security Strategy is not novelty. It is continuity with the best of the American tradition.

The document not only resurrects the Monroe Doctrine but invokes it four times, more often than any administration has dared to in generations and introduces what it calls the “Trump Corollary.” It sounds provocative. But to anyone who knows American history, it sounds like America remembering who it is.

The Monroe Doctrine was never an interventionist policy or imperial project. It was a defensive posture for a young republic surrounded by predatory empires: You mind your business, we’ll mind ours.

John Quincy Adams—its principal author (and at the time, James Monroe’s Secretary of State)—warned against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

He knew, as we know now, that our survival depended on a secure neighborhood, and that neighborhood meant our entire hemisphere.

And remember: Adams was speaking for a rising power, not a dominant one. In the early 19th century, European monarchies were actively trying to reassert their colonial claims. The Monroe Doctrine established a protective stance over a region just beginning to fight for its own. That stance gave Latin American nations the breathing room to win and keep their independence.

The United States didn’t liberate Latin America; it helped protect the space for it to liberate itself.

In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran heard him loud and clear.

In the years that followed, China built influence throughout Latin America the way it builds everything: relentlessly and strategically. Today, half the hemisphere has preferential trade deals with China. Russia’s state media saturates regional airwaves. Iran maintains partnerships with anti-American regimes.

And the consequences travel north. Migration surges, cartel-state networks, fentanyl flows, foreign intelligence footholds, none of these phenomena are isolated.

Every crisis in Latin America—crime, authoritarianism, economic collapse—reaches us in days, sometimes hours. The hemisphere isn’t “over there.” It is a tightly linked neighborhood of trade routes, migration pathways, and shared vulnerabilities.

A hemisphere-first strategy isn’t about solving every problem in Latin America. It’s about protecting U.S. interests by ensuring that criminal networks and hostile foreign powers cannot use the region as a staging ground against the United States.

America First is not America Alone. It is America leading where leadership matters most, alongside partners who share both our geography and our exposure to regional chaos. Latin America doesn’t need a savior. It needs a partner that finally takes the region seriously.

China understands this. It is playing an asymmetric game designed to shrink America’s geographic advantage and expand its own. And frankly, it’s winning. As a Bolivian, I can attest that Beijing’s presence is everywhere: embedded into our infrastructure, our mines, even our politics. It is subtle, underestimated, but unmistakable.

Voters understood this long before policymakers did. The collapse of Venezuela and the spread of disorder in the region have produced consequences Americans live with daily.

Americans don’t experience foreign policy through research papers or strategy documents. They experience it through border chaos, cartel violence, and the drugs that reach their streets and schools—consequences rooted in what happens in the Western Hemisphere.

For years, Americans have lived through the crises created and amplified by a government that treated the hemisphere as an afterthought. They have seen their communities endure harm as mass migration surged, drug trafficking expanded, and criminal networks grew more powerful.

By 2024, voters had had enough. They demanded an end to border chaos, an end to global distraction, and a restoration of American leadership where it matters most.

They voted for America First, and the U.S. National Security Strategy delivers just that.

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