US War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday, March 29, outlined a new strategic doctrine dubbed “Greater North America,” explicitly redefining the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive US security perimeter under President Donald Trump’s leadership.
Speaking at the US Southern Command headquarters in Doral, Florida, Hegseth declared that “every sovereign nation and territory north of the equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana,” falls within this “immediate security perimeter” of the United States.
This announcement was coupled with the State Department’s call last week for a June or July conference of allied governments to coordinate intelligence sharing and operations against leftist organizations under the banner of fighting “Antifa.” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed a task force “to focus on the threat posed by Antifa,” signaling domestic repression fused with hemispheric domination.
This doctrine amounts to the Monroe Doctrine on steroids—a preemptive blueprint for hemispheric recolonization and US-backed police state regimes aimed at crushing imminent social explosions fueled by skyrocketing gas, fertilizer and food prices driven by the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
While Hitler invoked the fight against Bolshevism to justify subjugating Europe, Trump and Hegseth demand the Americas unite as “Christian nations under God” against “radical narco-communism.”
Several commentators have drawn parallels to the Zionist “Greater Israel” project backed by US imperialism in the Middle East, but Greater North America operates on a vastly larger scale, echoing Hitler’s Anschluss—the annexation of Austria into a “Greater Germany.” Just as Hitler incorporated ethnic Germans under a racial banner, Hegseth advances a religious supremacist ideology, both serving as covers for anti-communist enslavement of oppressed masses.
The timing is no coincidence. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has unleashed what analysts have called a “financial bomb” across import-dependent Latin America, with oil prices surging as much as 75 percent in countries like Peru amid currency devaluations against the dollar.
Fertilizer costs, critical for the region’s massive agro-export economies in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, have jumped 30 percent since late February, with urea—the most widely used fertilizer—up 74.67 percent due to the war.
These shocks recall the 1970s oil crisis, which ignited two of Latin America’s largest mass movements: the 1978-80 Brazilian strikes involving over 100,000 metalworkers that nearly toppled the military dictatorship, and the revolutionary movements against US-backed dictators across Central America.
Hegseth’s vision explicitly continues Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” coalition of far-right Latin American regimes, launched in early March. The World Socialist Web Site has described this as a modern Operation Condor—a CIA-orchestrated network of military dictatorships that coordinated repression and coups across the continent in the 1970s and 1980s.
This counterrevolutionary program is already in motion. Venezuela has been transformed into a US protectorate following the January 3 operation that ousted Nicolás Maduro, handing its oil riches to Chevron and Shell. Cuba faces strangulation through a fuel blockade, as Trump openly threatens that “Cuba’s next” for military action. US forces have bombed small fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing 163 men in what Pentagon sources call “preemptive strikes” against drug smuggling. In Ecuador, recent joint military operations with the Pentagon have involved torturing agricultural workers and burning small farmers’ homes under the pretext of fighting narcoterrorism. Threats to invade and bomb Mexico, annex Greenland, seize the Panama Canal and even absorb Canada have escalated, alongside endorsements of far-right regimes in Honduras, Argentina, Costa Rica and Chile.
The White House earlier this year lionized the 1846-48 Mexican-American War—during which the US stole half of Mexico’s territory to expand slavery—framing it as a guiding precedent for today.
Economic disruption
This aggressive recolonization drive responds to mounting economic devastation across Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, and among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, the US-NATO war in Ukraine and now the Iran conflict.
Fertilizer and food price hikes were already central to the 2022 parliamentary coup against Peru’s Pedro Castillo, sparking mass protests that were met with murderous repression that killed dozens.
Today, the fallout is far broader and more acute. Chile, incoming fascistic President José Antonio Kast’s 60 percent diesel hike and 30 percent gasoline price increase have triggered mass protests and pot-banging demonstrations. Mexico saw farmers and truckers blockade roads on Monday in a national strike, demanding higher grain prices, with protest leaders explicitly citing “new problems arising from the war in Iran, such as increases in diesel costs and fertilizer prices.” This unfolds amid a strike wave in auto, education and manufacturing across Mexico driven by inflation-beating wage demands and mass layoffs.
The new strategic aim, rooted in lessons from the 1970s oil crises, is to crush any repetition of mass uprisings that could challenge imperialist control over key minerals, resources and access to cheap labor. Hegseth’s framework builds on initiatives from Trump’s first term, such as the 2017 Atlantic Council report on the “Alliance for Prosperity” in Central America, co-chaired by war criminal John Negroponte and presented by Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly. It emphasized “public-private supply chain security” for physical goods transport—code for militarizing cheap-labor corridors across North, Central and South America to secure them for war production against China and Russia, while undercutting ostensible European “allies.”
As the WSWS warned in 2017, this extends the Pentagon’s focus on “resilient supply chains” deeply into the hemisphere, ensuring access to lithium in the Lithium Triangle (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile), oil in Venezuela, copper in Peru and Chile, and agricultural exports from Brazil and Argentina—all funneled into the US war machine. The aim: a network of military dictatorships and puppet regimes to smother strikes, protests and revolutionary stirrings before they erupt.
During a WSWS May Day online event in 2019, Bill Van Auken stressed the “domestic component to the waving of the sullied flag of the Monroe Doctrine” by the first Trump administration, aimed at promoting fascism and a police state within the US itself. The entire US foreign policy establishment—from Democrats to Republicans—backs this hemispheric Anschluss. The New York Times and Washington Post have cheered the Venezuela operation, the Cuban blockade and the “Shield of the Americas.”
This is not mere rhetoric. It is the first stage of World War III, fusing the Ukraine war, the Gaza and now Iranian genocides, hemispheric subjugation and dictatorship at home, into a single counterrevolutionary offensive.
Trump’s offhand remark at an investors’ forum last week—“I built this great military. I said you will never have to use it but sometimes you’ll have to use it. And Cuba’s next by the way. But pretend I didn’t say that please”—reveals the casual normalization of aggression.
The road forward
The working class, objectively united in transnational production chains, confronts common enemies: Wall Street banks, transnational corporations, US imperialism and Latin America’s national oligarchies. As Van Auken concluded in 2019, “the working class ... can find a way forward only through the conscious unification of US and Latin American workers in struggle to defeat their common enemies.”
From the JBS meatpackers’ strike in Greeley, Colorado, to GM Silao and Tornel in Mexico, from Chilean pot-bangers to Argentine tire workers and Brazilian metalworkers, the objective basis exists for an international counteroffensive. Rank-and-file committees, independent of all pro-capitalist unions, must coordinate across borders to defend jobs, crush the war drive and expropriate all major corporations.
The alternative is dictatorship and recolonization. The Greater North America doctrine is a declaration of war on the working class of the hemisphere. The response must be a unified socialist movement to abolish the profit system that breeds it, establishing the United Socialist States of the Americas.