The world is more chaotic in 2024 than at any time since the end of the Cold War. While America’s attention and resources are understandably focused right now on the Near East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, there is another theater of potential geopolitical conflict that should be of rising concern to policymakers and the press: Latin America.

Although deprioritized since the Cold War era, America’s backyard has historically been viewed as paramount to our national security. From 1823 onwards, the Monroe Doctrine signaled that the United States would assert itself in the Western Hemisphere, treating the New World south of our border as something of a protectorate for the uniquely American conception of liberty, free from external manipulation or intrigue. America reasserted that doctrinal responsibility numerous times in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, opposing European re-colonization, safeguarding the sovereignty of our Latin American neighbors, and fighting communist infiltration. It’s with good reason that the US takes such interest in our southern neighbors: issues including the scourges of trafficked narcotics, gang crime, and illegal migration have all destabilized a multitude of American communities.

Attacking these issues requires American leadership in our own hemisphere. Giving up said leadership primarily means creating a power vacuum to be filled by foreign competitors. The Biden Administration has consistently undermined our own influence in Latin America through its regional and international policies, choice of allied regimes, and inability to confront malign global actors in our own backyard. These choices have led to greater anti-American sentiment at the top levels of Latin American governments, more regional instability, and positive outcomes for our axis of enemies: Russia, Iran, and China. The biggest issue with the Biden Administration’s policy in the region is its countenancing of regimes that act entirely against American interests and align with our foes. This has been most notably true of Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil.

Venezuela is the clearest case of failure given the persistently strong anti-Americanism of the Maduro regime and total destruction of independent opposition. Upon entering office, Biden pushed for a more conciliatory policy toward Caracas, seeking to bring the pariah state back into the greater hemispheric community. The Blinken State Department engaged in repeated negotiations with the Maduro regime, offering a multitude of incentives without receiving anything of value in the process. As part of this attempt, the administration undermined the sanctions campaign against Venezuelan exports, including its primary product, oil, even allowing some of it to be imported into the United States. Just as with Iran, allowing oil exports has greatly enriched the Maduro regime while providing no benefits whatsoever to the struggling Venezuelan people.

The tangible benefit of sanctions relief was granted in exchange for a promise to allow free elections – a promise that was never going to materialize. In fact, all the relief did was allow a greater crackdown on the opposition, which resulted in a reapplication of the original sanctions. This diplomatic dance did nothing to help the Venezuelan people, undermine the authoritarian Maduro regime, or advance American interests. It has only emboldened the Venezuelan government, allowing it to further cement ties with the anti-American axis and push for a potential invasion of neighboring Guyana.

In Mexico, the Biden Administration has repeatedly backed the budding authoritarian regime of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). In doing so, the White House has granted exemplary status to a regime that has actively worked against American interests. AMLO has been an anti-American presence from the start of his presidency, working to organize voters to enhance Mexican influence in the US, aligning with American enemies like China, and promoting far-left authoritarians across Latin America. Most gallingly, he has completely surrendered the governance and control of northern Mexico to criminal cartels. With his “hugs, not bullets” policy, AMLO has bolstered the cartels, allowing them to run amok in the borderlands.

These barbaric criminal organizations have – in concert with the Chinese Communist Party – flooded the United States with narcotics like fentanyl, contributing to an unprecedented overdose crisis; AMLO has completely denied that this well-documented phenomenon is happening at all. The cartels also control the flow of illegal migration to the US, a tide that has rapidly increased over the tenure of the Biden Administration. AMLO presents himself as a potential partner for the US in controlling illicit migration, but in reality he politically benefits from the chaos he helps cause. His close monetary and political ties with the cartels, going back decades, have allowed AMLO to suborn Mexico’s already-fragile democracy and return it to what is essentially a one-party state. His chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was fêted by the American press and the Biden Administration after winning the country’s recent presidential election. She comes into power with a supermajority that can rewrite Mexico’s political compact and transform it into an authoritarian leftist narco-state along the lines that AMLO laid out. None of this is good for American interests, yet the Biden Administration still, absurdly enough, presents Mexico as a good-faith partner.

The final part of this policy failure trifecta lies further south, in Latin America’s most populous nation: Brazil. The current Brazilian president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, has been championed by the Biden Administration as a paragon of democracy, or at least compared to his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. In reality, he has hardly been better. Lula’s regime has clamped down on dissent and tried to exert control over independent institutions like the judiciary and central bank. He has worked closely with America’s enemies by bolstering trade ties with Beijing, inviting Iranian naval vessels for port calls in Brazil, and promoting a Moscow-backed ‘peace’ plan in Ukraine. Recently, he has led the charge to condemn Israel for a bogus ‘genocide’ in Gaza, despicably comparing the righteous Israeli defensive war against Hamas to the Nazi Holocaust.

Lula has been the most prominent Latin American leftist for years, corruptly running Brazil from 2003 to 2010 before passing the baton to his hand-picked successor Dilma Rousseff, herself removed from office over corruption allegations in 2016 (she has since been promoted by Lula to head of the New Development Bank, a BRICS alternative to the World Bank). His populist authoritarianism was well-evinced by his previous term in office, two years of which intersected with President Biden’s first term as Vice President to Barack Obama. That the White House saw Lula as a reliable ally in terms of geopolitics and ‘democracy’ is a severe indictment of its decision-making capacity, political compass, and basic historical memory.

The United States cannot afford to so egregiously botch foreign policy in our own hemisphere. We often take our hemispheric security for granted given our multi-century hegemony over the region, but this would be a serious error. The most direct way to harm the US directly is through our immediate continental neighbors, as they can apply pressure in ways that are hard to ignore. Choosing to deprioritize our own backyard in favor of hotspots further afield may have worked over the past three decades, but our chickens are rapidly coming home to roost.America’s enemies are at the gates. Russia, Iran, and China are building strong ties with numerous Latin American regimes, working assiduously to promote internal strife in the Americas, drive migration and drug crises in the US, become the region’s top economic partners, and broaden and enhance military ties. Bad policy in this area leads to more illegal migration, more criminal cartel activity, and more antagonistic presence in our hemisphere, none of which we can afford given the chaotic scenes in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. There is still time to aggressively oppose malign influences in Latin America, but the clock is ticking.