1 Introduction

On 3 January 2026, the world was confronted with a display of military force undertaken by the administration of President Donald Trump. Under the name of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States carried out aerial attacks in Caracas and other strategic locations in Venezuela, while special forces apprehended and removed President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to New York City. There is broad agreement among international law experts that the operation constituted a manifest violation of the prohibition on the use of force and the principle of non-intervention. The disregard for foundational rules of the post-1945 world order did not end with the operation itself. In a press conference held in Mar-a-Lago in the aftermath of the attack, President Trump announced that the United States would ‘run’ Venezuela and exploit its oil reserves through American companies.¹ He further made clear that this was not an intervention directed solely at the controversial figure of Nicolás Maduro, whose electoral legitimacy had been widely questioned since the 2024 presidential elections in Venezuela, but part of an enterprise aimed at securing ‘good neighbours’, ‘stability’, and ‘energy’, mentioning Cuba and Colombia as potential future targets.²

The attack on Venezuela and the forcible removal of its head of state are not isolated developments. Since returning to office for a second term, President Trump has pursued a foreign policy marked by hostility toward multilateralism and disruptive unilateral measures – evidenced, for example, by the imposition of steep global tariffs and withdrawal from numerous international organisations³ – as well as by illegal uses of force. Toward states in the Americas in particular, this approach has taken the form of sustained threats. In January 2025, prior to taking office, Trump declared that he would ‘demand that the Panama Canal be returned’ to the United States.⁴ Once in office, the US defence secretary openly entertained the idea of deploying troops to Panama ‘to “secure” its strategically vital canal’.⁵ Toward Canada, Trump suggested that ‘the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State’, adding that this would eliminate tariffs against that country altogether.⁶ Meanwhile, the administration targeted other countries in the region through economic policy. Most notably, the United States imposed tariffs of up to 50 per cent on Brazilian goods⁷ and adopted measures preventing foreign oil from reaching Cuba, described by observers as the most severe step toward the island since the 1962 Missile Crisis.⁸

Even though it is well established that the United States has frequently breached international law, the intensity and character of current US conduct raise questions about the direction in which the international order is travelling. International law scholars have argued that the post-1945 international legal system is itself constituted with and dependent on US power, such that ‘ each of the constitutive features of the U.S.-backed order – its legalization, its institutionalization, its support for states as states, and its intense regulation of states – is under significant strain and may not persist, at least not robustly or globally.’⁹ While such accounts rightly underscore what is at stake at the systemic level, important questions remain as to how contemporary power is being exercised through or against international law in specific contexts and how legal orders are being reshaped in practice. This article is therefore guided by two questions: what kind of disruptions are currently unfolding across the different layers of the international order? And how are states, particularly medium and small powers, responding to, and in some cases consolidating, those disruptions?

This article addresses these questions by foregrounding the regional dimension. As multipolarity deepens, regional spaces increasingly function as sites where power is exercised, negotiated, and contested,¹⁰ a shift reinforced by intensifying competition over territory, natural resources, and infrastructure. In the Americas, the Trump administration has stressed the relevance of this perspective both discursively and in practice. It has promoted a renewed hemispheric logic through the announcement of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,¹¹ characterisations of the region as ‘our hemisphere’,¹² and the adoption of the 2025 National Security Strategy (2025 NSS), where the US government has vowed to ‘restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere’.¹³ These statements have likewise been accompanied by concrete coercive actions. The Americas therefore provide a revealing lens through which to examine whether, and how, international law is being reoriented to accommodate the ‘ordering of greater spaces’.¹⁴

This article’s central argument is that the second Trump administration is transforming inter-American relations by openly claiming and exercising a right to intervene, and that this transformation is being consolidated through the limited and uneven responses of Latin American and Caribbean states. Substantiating this claim requires situating contemporary developments within the longer history of inter-American relations and the institutional framework governing the region. These aspects are not necessarily well known in international legal scholarship, which has tended to focus on US-Latin American relations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁵ The article therefore begins by recovering the legal foundations of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose charter – negotiated at the 1948 Bogotá Conference – embedded a particularly robust conception of non-intervention that diverged in important respects from its global counterpart.¹⁶ It then examines US foreign policy toward the Americas under the second Trump administration, arguing that what distinguishes current conduct from past patterns of behaviour in the region is not the breaches themselves but their character: public, with no recourse to legal justification, and no effort to manufacture regional agreement. Finally, the article analyses the reactions of Latin American and Caribbean states, contrasts them with earlier forms of contestation, and explores the factors underlying the region’s relative silence.

The argument proceeds in three steps, each developed in one of the article’s main sections. Section 2 reconstructs the legal foundations of the Organization of American States. Drawing on the travaux préparatoires of the OAS Charter and additional primary and secondary sources from the 1948 Bogotá Conference, it shows that the inter-American order was structured around a particularly robust conception of non-intervention. This conception expressly prohibited military intervention and ‘any other form of interference’, including political and economic measures designed to bend a state’s will. The articulation of these provisions reflected efforts to mitigate power asymmetries in regional governance and to shield the region from external interference, the latter concern largely shaped by the anti-communist anxieties of the early Cold War.

Section 3 builds on this foundation to show how contemporary US foreign policy departs from earlier patterns of behaviour. The OAS and its legal commitments did not prevent US intervention during the Cold War. What they did produce, however, was an incentive for US administrations to frame or manage their breaches of international law in the region.¹⁷ Even when determined to act unlawfully, the United States generally operated covertly, sought to manufacture regional support through the OAS, or constructed legal justifications, however spurious. Drawing on the 2025 NSS and recent state practice, Section 3 shows that the current US administration has shifted toward open displays of coercion. It issues threats publicly, dispenses with legal justification, and does not treat regional agreement as necessary. Through this approach, the United States has subjected several states in the region to explicit demands targeting decisions that international law reserves to their sovereign discretion, with the aim of aligning those choices with US preferences.

Section 4 argues that the disruption produced by this shift is compounded by the limited and uneven reactions of Latin American and Caribbean states, marking a departure from earlier patterns of regional contestation. This relative silence must be situated against the backdrop of a weakened regional organisation. Over time, the OAS has consolidated its role primarily as a human rights system and its broader functions have fallen short of the more ambitious visions envisaged at its founding in 1948. Yet the OAS’s institutional limitations alone do not account for the present pattern. Unlike earlier periods, in which US intervention was contested, the current landscape is marked by fragmentation and muted contestation. Section 4 further argues that this silence is multi-layered, shaped by fear, strategic calculation, and ideological alignment with US foreign policy. This state of affairs risks normalising coercive practices and weakening the role of law as a tool for contestation in the Americas and beyond.

2 Non-Intervention and the Legal Foundations of the Inter-American Order

The principle of non-intervention played a foundational role in the inter-American order, forming part of a broader architecture of constraint through which states in the region sought to manage asymmetric power. The inter-American order was institutionalised in treaty law, particularly in the Charter of the OAS, concluded at the Bogotá Conference in 1948. The conception of non-intervention that emerged from that process was distinctively robust: it extended beyond military intervention to encompass ‘any other form of interference’, including political and economic measures designed to bend a state’s will. Clarifying the regional consensus and understanding how it diverged from the global articulation of the norm is essential to this article’s argument, as it provides the benchmark against which subsequent state practice and responses to breaches of the principle must be assessed.

At the global level, the principle of non-intervention was not codified at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, even though it is closely connected to other foundational commitments of the UN Charter.¹⁸ It was only with the 1970 UN General Assembly Friendly Relations Declaration that the principle was articulated in writing as a principle of international law.¹⁹ Its authoritative content has since been shaped primarily through jurisprudence and state practice, most notably in the International Court of Justice’s judgment in Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua, where the Court considered non-intervention to be ‘part and parcel of customary international law’.²⁰ According to that decision, a prohibited intervention has two cumulative elements: it must interfere with matters within the target state’s reserved domain – those over which the state is entitled to decide freely²¹ – and it must be coercive in character. It is the content of the second element that has proved most contested;²² indeed, some international lawyers have expressed scepticism about the principle’s normative purchase, pointing to its vagueness and indeterminate scope.²³ Among those who accept that the principle has defined contours, there is agreement that it primarily prohibits conduct already covered by Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and support for non-state armed groups by providing funds and intelligence.²⁴ By contrast, other forms of pressure, particularly political and economic coercion of a non-forcible nature, remain contested.²⁵ As Frédéric Mégret has argued, there is a tendency to see forceful intervention ‘only in the shadow’ of its non-forceful variant.²⁶

In the Americas, the early codification of non-intervention was the culmination of decades of Latin American efforts to secure equality as the basis for inter-American relations. This helps explain why, even before the OAS Charter entered into force, the ICJ described non-intervention as ‘one of the most firmly established traditions of Latin America’.²⁷ Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, non-intervention remained a persistent point of contention between the United States and its southern neighbours. Codification efforts were pursued through the International Conferences of the American States (also known as Pan-American Conferences), the primary regional forum for the negotiation of multilateral projects, and the American Institute of International Law, a scientific body composed of jurists from across the region. Yet US resistance remained the principal obstacle to agreement on a binding principle.²⁸ The reasons for this resistance were not difficult to discern. Between 1880 and 1933, the United States intervened repeatedly in Latin American and Caribbean countries, including in Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. In this light, contemporaries asked how one could speak of inter-American solidarity when ‘nothing less than the most powerful republic of the hemisphere’ stood in the way of peaceful relations.²⁹

As is well known, the first binding codification of non-intervention in the Americas came at the 1933 Seventh International Conference of American States, through the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which established that ‘no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another’.³⁰ Its conclusion was facilitated in part by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newly declared Good Neighbor Policy.³¹ Although the United States famously entered a reservation to the Montevideo Convention,³² it committed fully to the principle three years later at the 1936 Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace by ratifying the Additional Protocol Relative to Non-Intervention.³³ However, this achievement proved short-lived. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, Latin American states sought to transform their conference-based framework of cooperation with the United States into a formal organisation. The Ninth International Conference of American States, held in Bogotá, Colombia, was convened to reorganise what was then already known as the Inter-American System. The conference marked a critical juncture at which all aspects of regional cooperation were open to renegotiation.³⁴ In this context, many Latin American states feared that earlier gains might be reversed.³⁵ The status and scope of non-intervention came under renewed scrutiny, particularly in light of emerging questions regarding the permissibility of collective intervention and the principle’s interaction with nascent human rights protections.³⁶

For the majority of Latin American states, a binding articulation of non-intervention was a necessary condition for accepting a formal organisation with the United States. The initial draft of the charter, prepared by the Pan American Union, included the principle of non-intervention only in the preamble, alongside other rights and duties of states.³⁷ Most delegations regarded this as a step backward and rejected it.³⁸ After intense debates in the First Commission and the Committee on Initiatives,³⁹ states agreed that these principles should be enshrined as binding provisions,⁴⁰ with non-intervention frequently invoked to justify this position.⁴¹ This outcome was understood as a decisive safeguard of the emerging organisation. As one contemporary jurist observed, the OAS Charter’s enumeration of the fundamental rights and duties of states, of which non-intervention was the most important, had ‘no parallel in any other document’, a feature he attributed to the fact that ‘without it the Latin American States would not have entered the pact of [the] organization.’⁴²

Once the binding character of the principle was secured, the central question became how expansively its content should be defined. Various drafts were tabled, some following and others departing from earlier instruments, specifically the Montevideo Convention and the Additional Protocol Relative to Non-Intervention.⁴³ Several delegations considered the language carried over from the Additional Protocol to be overly restrictive.⁴⁴ Indeed, in the ensuing discussions, states insisted that the principle should extend beyond armed force to encompass all forms of interference.⁴⁵ The outcome was what is now Article 19 of the OAS Charter, which embodies an explicitly expansive conception of non-intervention: ‘No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.’⁴⁶

Behind this expansive consensus, however, motivations diverged. For some states, the need for an expansive rule was rooted in historical experience: decades of interventionism and unequal power relations.⁴⁷ These states identified the contradictions inherent in an international legal order that prohibits recourse to force while tolerating coercion early on, a tension that scholars would continue to foreground decades later.⁴⁸ For others, an expansive approach was a matter of principle: equality required a broader conception of non-intervention. As the delegate of El Salvador put it, the principle of non-intervention served as the cornerstone of the regional system.⁴⁹ Anti-communist considerations also played an important role.⁵⁰ Some governments, such as Peru’s, linked the principle to the need to prevent external destabilisation of domestic political orders.⁵¹ This dimension likely made the expansion of the principle more palatable to the United States,⁵² whose delegation later characterised the final text as a response to fears of indirect aggression, particularly those associated with the experiences of Eastern Europe.’⁵³

Beyond Article 19, Cuba’s proposal for a separate prohibition on economic coercion expanded the regional conception of non-intervention further. During the negotiations, Cuba introduced an amendment aimed at prohibiting what it termed ‘economic aggression’.⁵⁴ Addressing the Sixth Plenary Session, Cuban delegate Guillermo Belt described economic aggression as ‘the last stronghold of interventionism in the sovereign sphere of States.’⁵⁵ Unlike the modern use of ‘aggression’, the inter-American use of the concept was open-ended. As Cuba explained, ‘an aggressor is not the one who violates geographical borders, but legal’ ones.⁵⁶ The delegation argued that, although non-intervention already encompassed economic coercion, its scope required explicit articulation. Violence, in this account, was not limited to physical force but extended to ‘moral force’, understood as diplomatic pressure or means of effective coercion.⁵⁷ Among the most critical forms of such pressure was economic coercion, defined as the adoption of measures which, ‘being capable of causing the victim serious and disturbing harm, compel it to agree to what it would not grant of its own free will.’⁵⁸

This reasoning rested on an early recognition of the economic interdependence among states, one that remains strikingly contemporary. As Cuba observed, the economies of states were intertwined to the extent that economic independence could no longer be conceived in absolute terms.⁵⁹ While some states were more vulnerable than others, all could fall victim to economic coercion, whether through the deprivation of essential imports or restrictions on vital exports.⁶⁰ Economic coercion also threatened regional cooperation, incentivising states to pursue self-sufficiency instead of specialisation in areas where they enjoyed competitive advantages.⁶¹ Cuba thus presented its proposal both as a corollary of the non-intervention principle and as a contribution to the progressive development of international law.⁶² The amendment became known as the ‘Belt Corollary to the Drago Doctrine’, the latter having famously asserted that states may not employ force to collect debts owed by other states.⁶³

The negotiations produced what is now Article 20 of the OAS Charter, prohibiting ‘the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind’. This consolidated, in the words of the rapporteur of the subcommittee responsible for the provision’s final drafting, the aim of condemning any attempt to compel a state to act contrary to its interests.⁶⁴ Delegations subsequently voted in favour of the text as drafted by the subcommittee.⁶⁵ The remaining disagreement concerned the article’s placement within the Charter. While some delegates argued that economic coercion was a corollary of non-intervention and should thus be incorporated into Article 19,⁶⁶ others maintained that its importance warranted a separate provision.⁶⁷ The latter view prevailed, resulting in two distinct but complementary provisions.⁶⁸

Revisiting the debates of the 1948 Bogotá Conference thus reveals a conception of non-intervention featuring a distinct pedigree and scope. From the outset, the principle was conceived not merely as a defensive rule against armed intervention but as an architectural safeguard against power asymmetries in inter-American relations, also shaped by anti-communist anxieties of the early Cold War. Two features stand out. First, non-intervention was conceived as a foundational and broad norm, designed to capture a wide spectrum of interference, including forms not already prohibited under general international law. Second, Article 20 makes explicit what has long been contested elsewhere: that coercive measures of an economic and political character fall within the scope of the prohibition. Contemporaneous observers, both in the United States and Latin America, recognised this articulation as one of the most significant contributions of the Bogotá Conference.⁶⁹

3 Transforming Intervention: Open Coercion and Bilateralism

This section argues that the second Trump administration marks a shift in how the United States exercises intervention in the Americas. Drawing on the 2025 National Security Strategy and recent state practice, it shows that the US government has repositioned the Americas as a central priority in foreign policy and shifted toward open displays of coercion. Under this mode of engagement, the United States issues public threats, marginalises legal justification, and does not seek regional support. Through this approach, it has subjected several states in the region to explicit demands targeting decisions that international law reserves to their sovereign discretion. What distinguishes the present moment is not the use of coercion as such, but the unilateralism with which it is pursued and the abandonment of efforts to maintain legal cover.

This represents a departure from earlier patterns of US conduct in the region. The OAS legal framework did not prevent US intervention in Latin American domestic affairs. On the contrary, the United States continued to interfere in its so-called backyard, particularly during the Cold War, when the region occupied an important role in US foreign policy. Yet this history does not reflect a posture of indifference toward legal commitments. Rather, US conduct was typically mediated by efforts to avoid the appearance of illegality. These efforts took different forms: the United States at times acted covertly, sought regional support through the OAS, or constructed legal justifications for its conduct. For example, it intervened covertly against the governments of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile. As Michael Poznansky has shown, the choice of covert action in both cases reflected a concern with maintaining plausible deniability, particularly in anticipation of resistance from Latin American states.⁷⁰ The United States also sought to channel its interventions through existing multilateral arrangements to secure at least partial regional endorsement. It backed the activation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (commonly known as the Rio Treaty) to impose sanctions against Cuba in the early 1960s.⁷¹ It also sought support of other states under the OAS Charter to create an inter-American force to maintain peace in the Dominican Republic, thereby retroactively legitimising its military invasion.⁷² In subsequent decades, the United States also advanced legal justifications for its uses of force in Grenada and Panama.⁷³ The second Trump administration has broken with this pattern.

This departure is grounded in a renewed prioritisation of the Americas in US foreign policy, clearly articulated in the 2025 National Security Strategy. The document rejects the idea that all regions deserve equal attention, asserting that ‘to focus and prioritize is to choose – to acknowledge that not everything matters equally, to everyone.’⁷⁴ Rather than organising its outlook around great power competition, it foregrounds spheres of influence and assesses regions according to the extent to which they threaten US interests.⁷⁵ The ‘Western Hemisphere’, a choice of terminology that itself may signal a return to earlier US-led hemispheric imaginaries, is identified as the foremost region.⁷⁶ The 2025 NSS is explicit about what this renewed attention entails. It states that ‘[a]fter years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.’⁷⁷ This re-embrace is not framed as a principled commitment but as a policy instrument,⁷⁸ marking a contrast with past experiences where the United States invoked civilisational justifications for intervention.⁷⁹

The 2025 NSS alludes to three converging dynamics underpinning this renewed prioritisation: the externalisation of domestic concerns, the climate emergency, and multipolarity. First, migration and drug trafficking are framed as threats originating in Latin America and the Caribbean,⁸⁰ thereby recasting domestic issues as matters requiring regional control. This logic has featured prominently in justifications offered for attacks on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and for the military operation against Venezuela, where drug production was linked to the deaths of ‘countless Americans’.⁸¹ Second, although the 2025 NSS rejects ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ as guiding ‘ideologies’, it nonetheless emphasises the need to secure key geographies throughout the region.⁸² This rationale is visible in US statements regarding Panama, where prolonged drought has constrained maritime traffic and prompted demands for US preferential access.⁸³ Even symbolic acts, such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’,⁸⁴ may be read as preparing the ground for territorial claims. Third, the United States expresses its determination to counter ‘foreign influence’ in the hemisphere. The 2025 NSS refers to China indirectly, warning against foreign infrastructure investment and ‘low cost’ foreign assistance associated with espionage, cybersecurity risks, and debt-traps.⁸⁵ It accordingly pledges to deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or control strategically vital assets.⁸⁶ This orientation has also been translated into practice, for example with Trump’s complaints about China’s increased presence in the Panama Canal.⁸⁷

The manner in which US objectives are pursued in the region reflects a shift in the mode of engagement: coercion increasingly displaces diplomacy, and bilateral dealings are favoured over multilateral coordination. Whereas earlier administrations relied on coercive measures more discreetly⁸⁸ and cloaked their conduct in the ‘language of freedom, humanitarianism, [and] the rule of law’,⁸⁹ the Trump administration has issued threats publicly and framed demands in blunt terms. At the same time, it has prioritised bilateral negotiations while actively undermining multilateral institutions.⁹⁰ To be sure, bilateralism is neither unique to the United States nor new to its practice.⁹¹ What is distinctive, however, is the intensity with which it is pursued. This intensification has been enabled by international conditions, including wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, widening global inequalities, the erosion of the Western liberal model, and the rise of anti-democratic populist nationalisms.⁹² The turn to bilateralism is itself closely linked to the rise of coercion. As international law scholars have noted, the erosion of multilateral fora – within which weaker states may act collectively – enables stronger states to maximise asymmetric pressure, secure advantages, and limit accountability.⁹³

These dynamics, while interrelated, warrant separate consideration. The first concerns the overt embrace of coercion. The Trump administration has threatened states to act in alignment with US preferences, often framing demands in terms so indeterminate as to preclude meaningful compliance. As Alejandro Rodiles has observed, the imposition of tariffs on Mexico for failing to curb migration and drug flows was articulated through shifting and indeterminate conditions, scattered across executive orders and public statements.⁹⁴ President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured this dynamic with frustration amid the imposition of tariffs on Brazilian goods, criticising Trump’s conflation of political and economic demands.⁹⁵ Comparable tactics surfaced in US policy toward Venezuela. Before the events of 3 January, referring to Venezuelan nationals in the United States, Trump demanded that President Nicolás Maduro ‘get them the hell out of our country, right now, or the price you pay will be incalculable!’, declining to clarify what such consequences would entail.⁹⁶ As Rodiles notes, the United States has ceased to be a reliable partner and has replaced negotiations with deals that are perpetually subject to revision.⁹⁷

Second, the bilateral approach is reinforced by the 2025 NSS’s strategy of ‘enlist and expand’, which seeks to rally ‘regional champions’ capable of supporting US objectives in the region.⁹⁸ Within this framework, alliances and cooperation are explicitly made conditional on reducing ‘adversarial outside influence’.⁹⁹ In practice, this has materialised in a system of reward and punishment. A prominent example is the provision of a twenty-billion-dollar bailout to Argentina under President Javier Milei, whose government has aligned closely with Washington’s agenda. Public statements by US officials framed their support not only in economic terms but also as backing for a political project aligned with US preferences. As reported in the media, Trump ‘made clear that he viewed the financial support for Argentina as a lifeline […] for a leader willing to spread his pro-capitalist – and pro-Trump – ideology in Latin America.’¹⁰⁰ During negotiations with Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also added that Milei was ‘committed to getting China out of Argentina’.¹⁰¹ Conversely, governments perceived as adversarial have been subject to punitive measures. The United States imposed steep tariffs on Brazilian exports and sanctioned a judge of the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), Brazil’s highest court.¹⁰² The measures were justified by reference to the criminal prosecution of Trump’s ally, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and the STF’s decisions constraining US technology companies operating in Brazil to curb online misinformation.¹⁰³

What emerges from these developments is not a series of isolated incidents, but a reorientation of how the United States exercises power within the Americas. The shift from covert action and multilateral cover to open coercion and bilateral dealings marks a departure from the logic that shaped US conduct in the region for decades. The point is not that earlier conduct was normatively preferable; the mode of violation matters for understanding how power operates through and against international law and how resistance to it becomes possible. It is against this backdrop that the reactions of Latin American and Caribbean states become especially significant.

4 Silence, Fragmentation, and the Limits of Regional Contestation

The second administration of Donald Trump presents a critical test for the inter-American order, built around an expansive conception of non-intervention. Threats to use force against Panama and Colombia can be understood as falling within the kinds of intervention the regional framework was designed to prohibit. This remains so even where such threats are not carried out: intervention must not succeed to be considered wrongful, as such a requirement would unjustly reward states capable of resisting coercion.¹⁰⁴ Likewise, the imposition of tariffs against Brazil and Mexico can be understood as falling within the prohibition set out in Article 20 of the OAS Charter, which proscribes coercive measures of an economic or political character aimed at forcing the sovereign will of another state.¹⁰⁵ The demands advanced by the US government concern matters falling within the domestic jurisdiction of the targeted states and are designed to elicit specific behaviour from them. Brazilian authorities retain competence over domestic criminal proceedings and the regulation of digital platforms operating within their territory, which the US government sought to alter.¹⁰⁶ In the case of Mexico, US demands have been framed in expansive and changing terms, encompassing not only migration and drug control but potentially broader aspects of Mexico’s external relations.¹⁰⁷ Similar concerns arise in relation to US threats aimed at halting oil supplies to Cuba, targeting Mexico in particular.¹⁰⁸ Yet these breaches appear to have generated little meaningful contestation in the Americas. This section therefore examines how Latin American and Caribbean states have reacted to these practices and what this relative silence reveals about the current state of the regional legal order.

Throughout 2025, questions of non-intervention were largely absent from the OAS. Based on publicly available information, the OAS Secretary-General issued no statement,¹⁰⁹ the Permanent Council convened no meeting on the matter,¹¹⁰ and no formal notes were circulated.¹¹¹ The most recent OAS General Assembly, held in June 2025 in Antigua and Barbuda, likewise adopted no resolution addressing these developments.¹¹² This silence extended beyond non-intervention to encompass other alleged violations of international law, most notably the extrajudicial killings carried out by US forces in the Caribbean as part of the military build-up preceding the attack on Venezuela. In an interview with El País, recently elected OAS Secretary-General Albert Ramdin stated: ‘I don’t think any country can object to the formal reason the United States has given […] that it’s fighting international organized crime. I haven’t heard any country say that’s not a good thing, because drug trafficking is one of the great scourges we suffer in this hemisphere.’¹¹³

Expectations regarding the OAS, however, must be approached with caution. The organisation’s role in regional affairs does not correspond with the transformative ideals that animated its founders in 1948, particularly with respect to securing robust inter-state cooperation and constraining US power. Instead, the regional organisation has primarily consolidated its role as a regional human rights system. While this system has functioned effectively and produced landmark outcomes for individuals and communities across the region, scholars have noted that its focus on monitoring state conduct has come at the expense of sustained attention to the material conditions necessary for social justice and the realisation of economic and social rights.¹¹⁴ Beyond the organisation’s institutional trajectory, states that have historically acted as counterweights to US influence have withdrawn or disengaged. Venezuela and Nicaragua withdrew from the OAS Charter, invoking a pro-US bias,¹¹⁵ and Cuba has chosen not to resume participation despite the lifting of its suspension in 2009. The organisation’s credibility was further strained during the tenure of Secretary-General Luis Almagro (2015–2025), whose positions were often seen as closely aligned with those of Washington and as disproportionately targeting Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.¹¹⁶ Nevertheless, even in light of the constraints limiting the operation of the regional organisation, one might have expected practices of this nature to prompt at least some engagement within the OAS.

This pattern of limited contestation is visible beyond the OAS, including in fora less directly shaped by US influence. With the exception of Venezuelan complaints,¹¹⁷ OAS member states did not seek to proactively engage the UN Security Council in response to US threats and actions targeting states in the region.¹¹⁸ While the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) emerged as an important institutional space in which some governments attempted to articulate a response, these efforts failed to secure consensus. Following Trump’s imposition of tariffs on countries in the Americas in early 2025, a group of states tabled a declaration reaffirming the validity of the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a ‘Zone of Peace’ and rejecting unilateral coercive measures contrary to international law, including those affecting international trade.¹¹⁹ The proposal was ultimately blocked under CELAC’s consensus rules.¹²⁰ As the regional situation deteriorated, in November 2025, states adopted a declaration together with EU members that reiterated generic commitments to international law that avoided any explicit reference to the United States.¹²¹ Media reports suggested that this omission was deliberate, aimed at securing agreement.¹²² Notably, even this carefully calibrated and relatively anodyne text prompted reservations from several governments, particularly to a paragraph simply recalling the region’s designation as a Zone of Peace and the importance of maritime security and regional stability in the Caribbean.¹²³

The US military operation against Venezuela on 3 January 2026, culminating in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, further exposes the depth of political fragmentation in the region. Despite constituting a paradigmatic breach of the prohibition on the use of force, the operation triggered condemnation from only a small number of states – namely Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Uruguay – within the OAS Permanent Council. Most governments, by contrast, remained silent or openly supportive of US actions.¹²⁴ The OAS Permanent Council adopted no resolution and did not formally consider one during its debates. Efforts to coordinate a response within CELAC proved even more elusive than in November 2025, as a coalition of ten states reportedly blocked the adoption of a resolution.¹²⁵ Moreover, the limited objections that were voiced were framed primarily in terms of the prohibition on the use of force, largely sidelining the principle of non-intervention.¹²⁶ This minimalistic approach is consequential. Although US troops withdrew following the operation, the United States made clear that it expected the Venezuelan government, led by former Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, to align with its plans.¹²⁷ Other legal issues – including questions of sovereign immunity, unlawful enforcement jurisdiction, and regional security obligations – were largely absent from regional debate.¹²⁸ In this sense, silence does not merely weaken the principle of non-intervention but extends its effects to other norms of the regional order.

This pattern contrasts with earlier periods of inter-American practice, in which intervention was a central object of regional contestation. While a comprehensive comparison would require a fuller historical account, it is worth recalling that Latin American states were once able to contest and at times shape US conduct through institutions such as the OAS and related diplomatic processes. Latin American states, for example, initially resisted the exclusion of the Cuban government from the OAS;¹²⁹ that decision was taken only after Fidel Castro publicly declared himself ‘Marxist-Leninist’, against the backdrop of an earlier regional resolution condemning the activities of the international communist movement as constituting intervention in American affairs.¹³⁰ In addition, as Poznansky has shown, Latin American states’ staunch defence of the principle of non-intervention influenced and constrained US decision-making in cases such as Guatemala, Chile, and Panama.¹³¹ During the Cold War, governments engaged actively with the scope and limits of non-intervention through diplomatic and juridical processes, including meetings of foreign ministers¹³² and recourse to the Inter-American Juridical Committee.¹³³ Intervention was disputed, even when resistance failed. Similar dynamics were visible in relation to the use of force, as illustrated by the regional condemnation of the US invasion of Panama in 1989.¹³⁴ Although the OAS adopted a resolution with mild language, this has been attributed to the diplomatic efforts undertaken by the US administration in advance of the operation, including engagement with Latin American governments to justify its actions and mitigate perceptions of a broader return to interventionism.¹³⁵

How states react to breaches of international law matters for doctrinal and analytical reasons. On a doctrinal level, silence may shape treaty interpretation through subsequent practice or contribute to shifts in customary international law as violations are acquiesced rather than protested.¹³⁶ Contextual factors, such as regional proximity and the erga omnes (partes) character of the norm breached, may help determine whether silence means acceptance.¹³⁷ Legal change may also occur more subtly through the formulation of legal argument, including attempts to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of economic coercion.¹³⁸ This article suggests, however, that silence should also be treated as a diagnostic tool: patterns of muted contestation can expose the conditions or constraints under which small or medium states operate, revealing reluctance or incapacity to resist the conduct of a dominant power.

Although it may seem intuitive to attribute the silence of medium and small powers to their inferior material resources and political clout, this explanation does not fully account for the regional pattern documented in this article. To be sure, coercion undoubtedly shapes the calculations of some states, particularly those that have already been at the receiving end of US pressure. Mexico, for example, has shifted from supplying oil to Cuba to halting such exports fearing US ‘crippling tariffs’,¹³⁹ with Brazil and Colombia also adopting restrained positions reportedly out of concern of US retaliation.¹⁴⁰ However, at the same time, silence reflects the agency of governments that are ideologically aligned with Washington or that seek to benefit from the current configuration of US foreign policy. Several right-leaning leaders in the region find in Trump a transnational echo of their own political projects, including the governments of Javier Milei in Argentina, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Santiago Peña in Paraguay, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, as well as the recently elected José Antonio Kast of Chile and Nasry Asfura of Honduras. In some of these cases, silence may also simultaneously operate as a strategy, grounded in the expectation of preferential treatment under the 2025 NSS’s ‘enlist and expand’ approach.

This diagnosis of silence opens a broader set of inquiries. On the one hand, it invites closer examination of the new right-wing political configurations shaping several regional governments, both in their ideological foundations and in their implications for contemporary statecraft. Such inquiry can deepen our understanding of the agency of medium and small powers, particularly in those counterintuitive cases where alignment with great powers entails acquiescence in practices that limit their own sovereign autonomy and offer uncertain long-term benefits. On the other hand, a distinct set of concerns arises for those states that might otherwise rely on law and multilateralism as strategies of protection but are unable to mobilise these tools under conditions of coercion. While it is well established that powerful states are better positioned to bear the costs of legal contestation,¹⁴¹ the present moment reflects an even more acute asymmetry, as the United States actively pressures states to act in certain ways or to refrain from speaking. This presents important challenges in how international law assesses states’ behaviour. At the same time, alternative configurations of power offer limited counterweight: multipolarity and fora from which the United States is absent have so far provided few effective avenues for collective resistance or autonomy. It remains unclear what role transregional groupings such as BRICS can play in enabling such strategies in practice.

5 Conclusion

This article has examined US foreign policy under the second administration of Donald Trump and shown how its interventionist practices strain the architecture of constraint embedded in the inter-American order. It has also brought into focus the limited and uneven reactions that have met such practices. By adopting a regional lens, the article has presented the Americas as a revealing site for observing the interaction between international law and power in a moment of instability. While the United States has intervened in the region before, and the inter-American order has long struggled to respond effectively, the present conjuncture reflects a more profound disruption. First, explicit claims to a right of intervention now coexist with the regional framework, as the United States repositions the Americas as a central priority while embracing open coercion and disengaging from legal justification and multilateralism. Second, intervention, once a central object of regional contestation, has largely receded from debate. The reactions of Latin American and Caribbean states thus point to larger transformations, including the reconfiguration of statecraft under contemporary new right-wing political alignments and the difficulties of interpreting silence in contexts where coercion has become a central instrument of policy.

Even if this pattern of conduct proves temporary, its effects may endure. Military and security agreements recently concluded by the United States with several Latin American and Caribbean countries risk further reconfiguring regional governance, while the opaque terms governing financial assistance, investment, and the imposition and lifting of tariffs may generate longer-term dependencies and asymmetries. Close engagement with these developments, despite their fragility, is therefore essential to understanding the direction in which regional and global orders are travelling. Only through such analysis can effective strategies of resistance be conceived.