A State Department official confirms to TIME that the department notified Congress that $52 million in foreign military funding for Iraq, North Macedonia, Slovakia, and Tunisia will be diverted to Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru, and that the funds will be used to “combat narcoterrorism in our own backyard and help continue to secure the Panama Canal.” The department did not specify how much military funding the U.S. will continue to provide those Middle Eastern and European nations following the shift.
The reallocation of military funding reflects a broader shift in the U.S.’s priorities when it comes to foreign policy. Since Trump’s return to office last year, his Administration has worked to buttress the U.S.'s presence in the Western Hemisphere in the name of curbing drug trafficking from Central and South America and squashing the influence of other nations, such as China, in the region.
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“You're eroding silently, quietly, bit by bit, this trust in the United States,” Jim Townsend, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy for eight years in the Obama Administration, tells TIME of the Administration diverting military funding from European and Middle Eastern countries. “And then when we need them to do something … well, you're turning to a weaker country because you have been pulling their assistance and all of these tools that we have to make them a stronger ally.”
“U.S. security relations, these are some things you build over time, and if they start to become relationships only with particular governments rather than with countries, that's risky,” she says. “We have to show the region that we are a reliable partner. And one of the best ways to do this is to be consistent.”
The U.S. has also conducted a number of military operations in the region since Trump returned to the White House, including a series of lethal attacks on what federal officials claimed were vessels transporting narcotics to the U.S. from the Caribbean that have drawn blowback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Washington. The Trump Administration has also partnered with Ecuador for a joint military operation targeting “narco-terrorists” in the South American country, while announcing plans for further campaigns of the same kind in other nations in the region.
These moves reflect what the President has referred to as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine or, later, as the “Donroe Doctrine,” a revival of a 19th century foreign policy framework first articulated by former President James Monroe that was used to justify assertions of U.S. military and economic control in Latin America.
“Reinvigorated by my Trump Corollary, the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well—and American leadership is coming roaring back stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a December proclamation.
“We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations,” the strategy document reads.
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Experts warn about the potential consequences of shifting military aid
“It creates allies who are not as strong as they could have been,” Townsend says. “It creates allies who are not as helpful as they could have been, and they're creating allies that are not as integrated and as pro-U.S. as they could have been.”
Foreign military financing (FMF) allows other governments to purchase U.S. military equipment and carry out military trainings in tandem with the U.S. Without it, countries may be left unable to purchase key defensive equipment, such as drones or aircrafts, Townsend explains, which in turn weakens U.S. military alliances in the region.
“All of this raises the question whether U.S. security assistance is increasingly being tied to the political orientation of a president rather than to long-term relationships with countries and institutions, and there's a risk there,” Chavez says.
“In the past, the trouble has come when we've been feeding money to a regime that ends up killing the opposition,” he says. “It's been a very spotty record in terms of assistance that we give to countries in the Caribbean or in Central America, Latin America, where this money ends up going to the wrong people.”
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