The Shield of the Americas || Peter Zeihan

TL;DR

Trump's Shield of the Americas deploys special forces across Latin America to fight cartels, but U.S. drug demand makes lasting impact unlikely.

Key Points

• 1.Shield of the Americas is a security-only pact with ~14 right-leaning Latin American allies. It excludes Colombia and Brazil but includes El Salvador, Argentina, and Trinidad and Tobago, with no trade deals — purely military cooperation against drug trafficking organizations.
• 2.Special forces, not regular army, will be the primary tool. Small, agile, and deniable, the special forces community has more than doubled in size post-war on terror, making them ideal for flexible deployments that can be stood up or folded quickly as political alliances shift between elections.
• 3.The rotating roster of allied governments is a structural weakness. Latin American democracies swing politically, with Colombia's upcoming election potentially changing alignment, meaning permanent bases worth billions are impractical — only lightweight, temporary facilities make sense.
• 4.Mexico is the critical gap — and it's enormous. Mexico, the origin of the major cartels, is twice the size and population of Afghanistan, where 90,000 U.S. troops still saw heroin production increase; deploying even hundreds of thousands of troops would likely fail to change drug economics.
• 5.U.S. consumer demand is the unsolvable root problem. The drug industry generates tens of billions of dollars driven by American consumption; special forces can hit specific nodes and people but cannot alter the fundamental economics, and aggressive military action risks damaging the U.S.-Mexico trade relationship — America's largest trading partnership.