Fighting
the cartels goes international
Trump’s
National Security Strategy is bearing fruit in the Western Hemisphere.
Wendi
Strauch Mahoney | March 7, 2026
Secretary
of War Pete Hegseth stepped away from overseeing Operation Epic Fury to host the
hemispheric defense conference, where the focus was forging a more
unified regional security strategy with neighboring nations. In his
March 5, 2026 remarks at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference (A3C) in Doral,
Florida, Hegseth emphasized plans to expand bilateral and multilateral
cooperation to coordinate military operations, security partnerships, and
contingency response across the region overseen by the United States Southern
Command (SOUTHCOM) which is also headquartered in Doral. Notably,
just days before the conference, the United
States and Ecuador engaged in their first joint military ground operation against
South American drug cartels, the very kind of coordinated action Hegseth urged
in his remarks.
Hegseth
described a kind of “neighborhood watch” writ large, where sovereign nations
work to “prevent external powers from threatening our peace and independence in
our shared neighborhood,” expressly recalling the Monroe Doctrine framework and
referring to it as the Trump Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, while jokingly
calling it the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Representatives
from 17 countries attended the conference, which was described as the first
gathering of its kind “in more than 30 years.” The participating
leaders signed the Joint
Security Declaration, a foundational document committing their governments to
deeper cooperation on border security, countering narco-terrorism, trafficking,
addressing other shared threats, and protecting critical infrastructure across
the Western Hemisphere.
Consistent
with Trump’s
National Security Strategy (NSS) and the administration’s designation of cartels as
terrorist organizations, Hegseth cast cartels and narco-terrorism as military
threats, not simply law enforcement challenges. His remarks echoed secretary of
State Marco Rubio’s Feb. 14, 2026 address at the Munich Security
Conference (MSC), but with a sharper emphasis America’s own
hemisphere. Under the Trump administration, regional leaders,
Hegseth said will no longer “accept the status quo to co-exist with
narco-terrorism or [rely solely on a] law enforcement-alone approach that [has]
failed to deter and dismantle threats.” He made clear that the Trump
administration has made the issue a core national defense
mission. Hegseth also stressed that the U.S. military was deployed
to the border and said the 101st Airborne’s command structure was involved in
operational control there.
Citing
Operation Southern Spear, Hegseth referred to an offensive posture in the
region, one that has moved from surveillance and interdiction to offensive maritime
action. Operation Southern Spear is an interagency mission that began
in January 2025 as a 4th Fleet effort to use “Robotic and Autonomous
Systems (RAS) to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking”
in the SOUTHCOM theater.
According
to the Jan. 28, 2025 press release from the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command,
Operation
Southern Spear will deploy long-dwell robotic surface vessels, small robotic
interceptor boats, and vertical take-off and landing robotic air vessels to the
USSOUTHCOM AOR. 4th Fleet will operationalize these unmanned systems through
integration with U.S. Coast Guard
cutters
at sea and operations centers at 4th Fleet and Joint Interagency Task Force
South. Southern Spear’s results will help determine combinations of unmanned
vehicles and manned forces needed to provide coordinated maritime domain
awareness and conduct counternarcotics operations.
By late 2025, it had
expanded into a Joint Task Force Southern Spear campaign under U.S. Southern
Command involving
kinetic strikes, maritime
interdictions, and tanker
seizures carried out with support from the USS Gerald
R. Ford and the Amphibious Ready Group. In a Dec. 2, 2025
press conference, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the media
there were “to date, a total of 21 kinetic strikes in U.S. Southern Command’s
area of operations ... resulting in 82 suspected narco-terrorists having been
killed.”
Official
Pentagon and SOUTHCOM statements portray it as an interagency mission with DHS,
the Coast Guard, and DOJ aimed at crushing illicit activity, defending the
homeland, and restoring security in the Western Hemisphere. An
important part of Southern Spear is its “quarantine” of sanctioned
vessels
in the Caribbean, with the U.S.
declaring
that “the only oil leaving Venezuela will be oil that is coordinated properly
and lawfully.” It is a broad regional security and coercive maritime
enforcement mission.
Hegseth
went on to say that fentanyl flows are down 56 percent, calling fentanyl a
“weapon of mass destruction.” He boasted of Maduro’s and his wife’s
capture in January, alluding to the difficulty of the operation.
The
Trump administration is committed to a much larger mission than merely snuffing
out narco-terrorists. Hegseth, Rubio, and Trump’s NSS address a
larger civilizational and ideological framework, whereby these nations are
offspring of Western civilization, sharing a more ordered Christian worldview,
one that contrasts with a more violent and chaotic worldview dominated by
“narco-communism, narco-tyranny, mass migration, and globalism.”
The
Trump doctrine is broadly geostrategic. In that vein, Hegseth warned
of adversaries that control ports, infrastructure, and choke points like the
Panama Canal. Calling upon America’s neighbors to “embrace our
shared geography,” he said that these are
the
same adversaries that threaten our shared heritage, threaten our shared
geography as well. They seek to displace the historic “North-South”
relationship that we’ve always shared with some sort of a new “Global South”
that excludes the United States and other Western nations but includes
non-Western powers and other adversaries.
The
answer to our challenge, Hegseth continued, is not to ignore our geography in
the name of global interests, but to embrace our shared geography in the name
of national interests. That is why President Trump has drawn a new strategic
map from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its
surrounding countries.
Hegseth
also signaled a likely institutional shift at U.S. Southern Command, moving
from more effete support systems to the rugged operational support needed “for
this robust mission ahead.”
One
of the great mistakes of the past was that our leaders didn’t provide the U.S.
Southern Command with the support that it needed. It was a command chock full
of lawyers, social workers, NGOs, [and] law enforcement. That’s changing.
Trump’s
national security Cabinet members are on message. They share a
muscular vision that treats cartel violence, porous borders, and foreign malign
influence as interconnected national security threats requiring sustained
regional action, not symbolic diplomacy. The Trump administration
views the Western Hemisphere as a strategic neighborhood that must be defended
through burden-sharing, operational coordination, and a renewed expectation
that partner nations will direct resources toward shared threats and objectives
in defense of their own territory and sovereignty.