US President Donald Trump hosted Latin American leaders at his Miami-area golf club for the “Shield of the Americas” summit, the White House said. The meeting followed a summit on drug-trafficking enforcement hosted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at US Southern Command in Doral, Florida.
Trump made a brief appearance, signing a proclamation to launch the regional coalition, fulfilling his administration’s renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere even as the US is involved in the war unfolding in Iran. Attending leaders included those from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago. Notably absent were the leaders of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, each currently led by left-leaning presidents.
The administration billed the initiative as the “Trump Corollary” to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine and presented the summit as the founding of the “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition,” a new military partnership with regional leaders to counter drug cartels. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will serve as the coalition’s special envoy. Noem, who was recently sacked as chief of Homeland Security, said she looked forward to the role and to working with Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on regional security issues. She said the summit’s declaration focused on “how we’re going to go after cartels and drug trafficking in the entire Western Hemisphere.”
In his remarks, Trump emphasized the region’s potential and argued that defeating cartels and criminal gangs was necessary to realize it. He said the only way to defeat these enemies was by “unleashing the power of our militaries” and offered US missile strikes as an option to target cartel figures, saying, “We’ll use missiles. You want us to use a missile? They’re extremely accurate,” and mimicking the sound, “’Piu,’ right into the living room,” to illustrate his point. “But we’ll do whatever you need,” he added.
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko
