Explaining the belated US response to China's advances in Latin America

Abstract

China has become a major actor in Latin America. It has increased its influence within the region at an unprecedented pace without facing significant contestation from the United States during most of the first 20 years of the twenty-first century. The US response came during Donald Trump's first administration (2017–2021), when it adopted significant measures to counterbalance against China's regional advances. Which factors explain Washington's belated response? Why did the policy shift occur during Trump's first presidency? I answer these questions by advancing a neo-classical realist argument that stresses the interaction of structural constraints, namely waning US regional influence and China's emergence as a major regional actor, and a domestic intervening variable, a unique policy window that aligned the ‘problem’ (concerns about China's advances in the region) with ‘policy’ (sticks and carrots readily available to counter Beijing) and ‘politics’ (an anti-China national mood and the turnover of key personnel in the US), enabling a significant policy shift against China's advances in Latin America. The paper makes a contribution to the literature analysing the geopolitical implications of China's increasing foothold in the region by focusing on the US response, and to International Relations theory by proposing an original neo-classical realist explanation that ‘brings in’ public policy processes by incorporating John Kingdon's multiple streams framework, one of the most widely-used approaches in policy studies.