Writing in the Diplomat, R. Evan Ellis, U.S. Army War College professor of Latin America research, warns about “China’s Growing Strategic Position in Nicaragua.” The Nicaraguan regime headed by Daniel Ortega is expanding trade with China and inviting more Chinese infrastructure projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Nicaragua has also abandoned recognition of Taiwan coincident with China’s expanded commercial, political, and military position in Nicaragua. The Ortega regime back in the 1970s and 1980s aligned itself with Moscow in Cold War I, only to lose power due to diplomatic, political, and military pressure applied by the Reagan administration. Now, Ortega has aligned Nicaragua with Beijing in Cold War II.
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Ellis notes that China’s engagement with Nicaragua follows its expanded relationships with other anti-American regimes in the Western Hemisphere, including the Maduro government in Venezuela, the Morales regime in Bolivia, the Correa government in Ecuador, and Cuba’s communist regime. Other Latin American countries that participate in China’s BRI are Columbia, Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay. Here as elsewhere, China’s BRI will not bring economic prosperity to those countries but will instead, according to Ellis, “help to sustain the regime[s] in power by providing not only resources, but corruption opportunities through non-transparent transactions with China-based entities.” It will also, as elsewhere, give China leverage to achieve Beijing’s strategic goals in the region.
At first glance, projects that involve the building and improvement of highways, ports, airports, railways, electricity transmission, and digital platforms can appear innocuous to U.S. interests. But, as Ellis notes, “China’s footprint in Nicaragua is expanding beyond commercial matters” to “security cooperation.” Ortega has appointed a brigadier general to serve as Nicaragua’s military attache to China, which indicates “a high level of priority to China-Nicaragua military cooperation.” As the Reagan administration understood in the 1980s, Nicaragua is positioned in Central America “to host threats to the U.S.” That is why Reagan armed the Contras to help undermine Sandinista rule in the 1980s.
Ellis warns that in the event of a U.S.–China war in the Indo-Pacific, “Nicaragua’s security relationships with Cuba, Russia, and Iran could also present opportunities for Beijing to coordinate operations with those actors against the U.S. from Nicaraguan soil.” In August of 2023, the journal Modern Diplomacy reported that China is using the BRI to counter and perhaps supersede U.S. hegemony in Latin America, including establishing a presence at both ends of the Panama Canal and developing an alternate Central America canal through Columbia or Nicaragua.
China’s expanding footprint in Latin America may sound the final death knell of the Monroe Doctrine. One wonders what James Monroe and John Quincy Adams would think about China’s strategic encroachments in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. In 1823, they drafted and announced a geopolitical doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy in the face of overseas challengers for nearly two centuries. It is a doctrine that the Reagan administration repeatedly invoked during Soviet-linked challenges in El Salvador, Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua in the 1980s. And, as Colin Dueck has pointed out at the American Enterprise Institute, it is a doctrine that has been virtually ignored by the Biden administration, just as it was ignored by the Clinton and Obama administrations. Indeed, then–Secretary of State John Kerry proudly announced in 2013 that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” The Biden administration, Dueck notes, “gives little sign of either grasping or counteracting the sweep of [China’s] influence throughout Latin America.” He accuses the administration of “genuflecting to anti-American sensibilities” and failing to prevent Beijing “from advancing its own designs on the region.”
Ironically, as Beijing works to undermine the U.S. Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere, it pursues its own version of the Monroe Doctrine in the South China Sea, claiming that body of water a Chinese lake and claiming Taiwan as part of its territory. And Beijing surely realizes, even if the Biden administration does not, that the death knell of the U.S. Monroe Doctrine will help China succeed in enforcing its version of the doctrine in the western Pacific. That is how geopolitics works.
