Shield of the Americas Summit

Donald Trump is pulling an Hugo Chávez. Chávez thought the OAS was too pro-U.S. so he created CELAC, which was more leftist. He also created UNASUR, which did a few things and then disintegrated. Right-wing governments created PROSUR, which as far as I know hasn't done much of anything and likely barely exists. CELAC still exists but mostly disagrees, which frankly is a lot of what the OAS does as well.

So now Trump is creating the Shield of the Americas, a disparate group of countries whose sole thing in common is that their current government is on the right*. The formal announcement comes Saturday so we don't yet know details but it is hard to imagine it being significantly different from all the others. He just learned that Kristi Noem will be the U.S. "special envoy," which means ideology will be front and center, and reality several steps behind. It also signals this institution is not super important to him because he's putting someone in that he just fired.

Part of the new institution's goal will be to push back on China. As I and plenty of others have argued, however, the U.S. needs to be a reliable partner to make this happen, and impromptu tariffs combined with reneging on past agreements make that challenging. Maybe you can push out Chinese investment to some degree if U.S. investors are ready but what about trade? 

I recommend Adam Ratzlaff's take on it. An additional point to make based on the experience of the other existing multilateral institutions is that governments change and a new leftist government will have considerably less interest. If it becomes ideologically obnoxious they may just leave it. That's the core problem of ideologically based institutions. Ideologies change. A Chilean president helped created PROSUR and a Chilean president suspended the country's participation in it. That's how it goes.

* Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Paraguay, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Honduras, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Chile. And I believe Panama.