The Wall Street Journal featured an article this weekend announcing that the United States “aims to thwart China’s plan for Atlantic base in Africa,” as it supposedly encroaches on America’s “home turf.” The Journal published this just days after the Biden administration ridiculed the very notion of spheres of influence when Russia raised it in the Ukraine context.
It is quite stunning to see how the WSJ in its reporting — let alone its opinion section — pushes for American global military domination by creating a narrative that other countries are expansionist. Consider the numbers: the United States has more than 750 military bases worldwide. China has two.
Yet, according to the WSJ, it is China that pursues an aggressive "expansionist" policy by seeking a base (unclear whether it is military) in West Africa — which WSJ goes on to declare America's "backyard."
This is not about whether China is right or wrong on this issue. If indeed the base is military, there are good arguments as to why Equatorial Guinea should reject it. But one can oppose a Chinese military base in Africa without justifying continued American military hegemony globally — or mislead the readers to not even become aware of that broader context.
WSJ is entirely silent on what the United States itself does, leaving the readers with the impression that China is seeking global military domination while America’s 750 military bases are nothing more than Disneyland-style amusement parks. Though U.S. military bases outnumber Chinese ones by a factor of +300, it’s America that is playing defense, while China is "expansionist"? Perhaps both are?
And though Washington has encircled China with military bases throughout East Asia, some less than 100 miles away from the Chinese mainland, this reporting suggests it is China that is the aggressor by potentially building one in America's "backyard" — West Africa — more than 6000 miles from Florida. The point is not whether China's actions are problematic or not, but rather how the mainstream media often uncritically advances a narrative designed to strengthen U.S. military hegemony, which increases the likelihood of war, and ultimately makes the United States itself less secure.
As I wrote for MSNBC last week, the hard truth is that America's endless wars could not have happened without the media failing to systematically scrutinize the foundational assumptions of American foreign policy. This is a true case in point.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
A Soldier from Senegal observes the firing range with a Marine, assigned to India Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment out of Little Rock, Ark., during Exercise Western Accord 14, June 19, 2014. ((U.S. Army Africa photo by Sgt. William Gore)
Top image credit: Continental Strategy LLC founder and president Carlos Trujillo being sworn-in as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States on April 5, 2018. IMAGO/piemags via Reuters Connect
Top officials from the first Trump administration are cashing in on Latin American countries' hopes and fears about the president’s trade and tariffs policies, recent filings with the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Unit reveal.
In August, Continental Strategy, LLC — a government relations firm founded by Carlos Trujillo, Trump's former ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), and managed by Alberto Martinez, Secretary of State Marco Rubio's former chief of staff in the Senate — took on two new government clients in the region, Peru and the Dominican Republic's Industry and Trade ministry, for $390,000 and $330,000, respectively.
Documents on file with the DOJ indicate the contracts are aimed in part at reversing the 50% copper tariffs impacting Peru and positioning the Dominican Republic as a prime location for nearshoring amid tariffs on Mexico and China.
Continental’s fresh foreign registration filings follow the recent naming of John Barsa — the first Trump administration’s top Latin America official and later acting administrator at USAID — as partner at the firm.
They also come on the heels of at least three other Latin America and Caribbean government contracts Continental has inked so far in 2025 with Guyana, Haiti and the Dominican Republic's intelligence agency, and a major deal it helped broker through a shipping firm involved in the BlackRock-led consortium to purchase billions of dollars of port infrastructure in Panama and around the world. The signing of those contracts, a combined value of at least $1.2 million, coincided with Secretary Rubio's trips to Central America and the Caribbean earlier this year.
The firm’s corporate clients in the region — including a Dominican sugar producer sanctioned by the Biden administration over allegations of forced labor, a Haitian conglomerate whose owner was sanctioned by Canada for “protecting and enabling illegal armed gangs,” and a venture capital-backed Honduran charter city suing the country for a third of its GDP at the World Bank — have paid Continental another $2.3 million thus far in 2025 to represent its interests before the U.S. government, according to lobbying disclosure forms on file with the Senate.
Continental, which also employs White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles' daughter, Katie, reported a 2,800% increase in revenues in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year, adding at least 60 new clients to its portfolio since Trump was elected, including countries around the world like Kenya, Japan, and Albania.
Yet its principals' particular experience at the nexus of Latin America policy, Florida campaigns and Republican politics, combined with the region's unique vulnerabilities to the administration's trade and tariff policies, have turned Continental into the top K Street firm for Latin American and Caribbean governments seeking access to the Trump administration, according to a review of active FARA filings.
While former Bush and Obama administration officials responsible for Latin American affairs like Amb. Tom Shannon, Amb. Hugo Llorens and Amb. Roger Noriega, among others, continue to represent regional governments during the second Trump administration, no other firm’s Latin America portfolio has witnessed growth in 2025 quite like Continental’s.
That access could be in part because Trujillo and his colleagues helped raise $15 million for Trump’s inauguration and established an in-house policy of only working with foreign clients that it sees as aligned with the Trump administration’s objectives, according to insiders familiar with the firm.
“We didn’t just show up in Trump World two months ago,” Trujillo said in May, adding that his relationships “make it easy to navigate” Washington.
Martinez, who worked on Rubio’s team for 10 years, was named managing director of Continental’s Washington office a matter of days after his former boss was nominated as secretary of state. On his new role, then-nominee Rubio put out a statement saying that Martinez “possesses a rare blend of strategic insight, integrity, and unmatched experience” as well as a “deep understanding” of Trump’s policy agenda.
Continental’s senior vice president Rick de la Torre, a former CIA Chief of Station in Latin America, similarly shared a picture on LinkedIn with Rubio, his “hometown hero,” upon the Florida senator's nomination as the United States’ top diplomat.
Trujillo, a four-term Florida state legislator who was nominated to become Trump’s top State Department official for Latin America in 2020, could be seen sitting directly behind Rubio at his Senate confirmation hearing this January. According to an investigation by Politico and a profile of Trujillo in The New Yorker, Trujillo — who multiple Latin America analysts call “Little Marco” — wound up in the first Trump administration per the recommendation of both Rubio and Susie Wiles.
A Miami-born Cuban American like Rubio and his Continental colleagues Martínez, Barsa, de la Torre and partner Alex García, Trujillo was a firm supporter of economic sanctions and regime-change efforts aimed at left-wing governments, such as Cuba’s, during his tenure as Trump’s first term OAS ambassador.
“If you look at what’s happened in Cuba, the complete collapse of their economy was all driven by the pressure that President Trump implemented,” Trujillo told NBC last November as his name was being floated to become the Trump administration’s top official for Latin America.
Along with its representation of foreign governments, Continental lobbies for a number of public entities and prominent institutions in South Florida, as well as many multinational corporations owned by powerful Cuban Americans, including those who have underwritten Rubio’s political career (the Fanjul brothers’ American Sugar Refiners and Central Romana Corp) and financed the pro-embargo lobby (Jorge Mas Santos’ Inter Miami FC and MasTec).
This summer, to expand the firm’s domestic work, Continental also brought on Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) long-time chief of staff, Craig Carbone, as its newest partner.
For Latin American governments, Continental’s unique access to Trump’s world has already seemed to bear fruit, particularly the recent deals with Peru and the Dominican Republic. The day after President Trump announced 50% tariffs on copper imports, Peru, the world’s second largest producer, signed its Continental contract, which states that the firm will provide “facilitation of engagements between Peruvian government officials, members of Congress [and] administration officials” as well as engage in “advocacy regarding ‘America First’ trade policies that impact Peru.”
The following day, the conservative think tank Hudson Institute organized a panel titled, “Peru’s Strategic Moment,” at the same time as four Republican members of Congress and one Democrat, led by House Financial Services Chairman French Hill (R-Ark.), participated in a bipartisan delegation to the country, meeting with President Dina Boluarte and other top officials. A month prior, the Peruvian embassy organized a commemorative event on next year’s bicentennial of U.S.-Peru relations at the U.S. Capitol featuring three South Florida Members of Congress.
And just last month, House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Rob Pittman (R-Va.) led a separate congressional delegation to Peru, the same day as Alfredo Ferrero, Peru’s ambassador to the U.S. and the foreign principal listed on the Continental contract, met with the National Security Council’s top official for Latin America, Michael Jensen.
The Dominican Republic’s industry and trade ministry, for its part, hosted a high-level Atlantic Council delegation shortly after foreign principal Claudia Pellerano, president of the country’s free trade zone association, signed the contract with Continental. Pellerano is a member of the Atlantic Council’s DR-US Economic Advisory Group, which according to its site was made possible through a grant from the country’s industry and trade ministry.
Another member of the advisory group — which touted the Emirati-financed Caucedo Port during its delegation and will soon release a report on nearshoring opportunities in the DR — is Jessica Bedoya, the romantic partner and senior adviser to former State Department Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone, a longtime ally of Rubio and Trujillo’s whose private equity group LARA Fund is focused on seeking Middle Eastern investors for Latin America.
As the Trump administration’s trade and tariffs policies continue to both roil and seduce Latin American and Caribbean governments, Continental will likely continue to be first in line to cash in — another conspicuous, albeit underreported, case of the revolving door in Washington's murky foreign influence web.
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Top image credit: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron stand in front of screens during a joint military visit to the MARCOM centre, maritime command centre in Northwood, on July 10, 2025 in London, England. Leon Neal/Pool via REUTERS
The choice of Paris as the venue for a summit of the European “coalition of the willing” to discuss a “reassurance force” for Ukraine this week has turned out to be deeply unfortunate; for five days after the summit, France may well not have a government. Then again, it’s not clear that any other European capital would have made for a better choice.
France has been plunged into a renewed political crisis by the decision of the prime minister, Francois Bayrou, to hold a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 over his plans for steep cuts in public spending in order to reduce France’s public debt while greatly increasing its military spending. French trades unions have promised a general strike on September 18 to block these moves.
Unless a deal can be stitched up with the parties of the right and left that have vowed to oppose the budget, Bayrou will be defeated in parliament and forced to resign, and France will enter its third governmental crisis in barely a year.
President Emmanuel Macron will be left with a choice of bad and risky alternatives: choose a new prime minister and try to gain a parliamentary majority by abandoning most of the budget cuts — leaving Macron to struggle on till the next presidential elections in the Spring of 2027 as even more of a lame duck than he is now — or call new parliamentary elections and risk another electoral defeat that might leave him with no realistic option but to resign.
How can a country in this political and fiscal situation be seriously planning a very risky and expensive military deployment far from France’s own borders? Britain, the co-sponsor of the Paris summit and would-be joint leader of any European force for Ukraine, is in only relatively better shape. Unlike Bayrou, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has a large parliamentary majority (though with only one third of the popular vote). Much good it has done him.
He has suffered two humiliating climb-downs over cuts to social welfare in the face of revolts from within his own Labour Party. The last one saw his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, burst into tears in Parliament as her spending plans collapsed. Now Reeves has been virtually sidelined in the last in a series of government reshuffles intended to give a sense of new policies and restore Labour’s crumbling popularity. In the view of the former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, writing in FT:
“The Chancellor has now ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. Trapped by negative [economic] expectations, tax rises and/or deep spending cuts are deemed inevitable. The first is a confidence killer; the second anathema to the Labour Party…”
According to a new opinion poll, only 27 percent of voters now have a favorable opinion of Labour (and only 24 percent of Starmer), while the right-wing populist Reform Party led by Nigel Farage exceeds both Labour and the Conservatives with 34 percent, largely on the strength of a surge in public concern about illegal migration.
In these circumstances, for Britain to raise the money radically to increase its armed forces would seem impossible. As for the “reassurance force” for Ukraine — as now revealed by the Wall Street Journal — the proposed British contribution is not nearly as large as previously imagined. Rather than the ground troops previously envisaged, it will be “focused on maritime and air domains,” and the combined French and British contingents will be only 6,000 - 10,000 strong.
Previous estimates for the necessary size of a credible European reassurance force were in the region of 50,000-100,000 troops. Where are the rest to come from? So far, only Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the Baltic States have indicated — in very vague terms — a possible willingness to contribute to a reassurance force; of these, only Sweden and Spain can be considered remotely serious military powers.
Moreover, it is not clear that they even mean that their contribution will include actual troops. The Spanish Defense Ministry has said that the Spanish contribution could consist only of observers and trainers. The Spanish government is facing strong opposition to this plan and to higher military spending from within its own coalition — and Spain opted out of NATO’s commitment to spend five percent of GDP on defense, and its military spending relative to GDP is the lowest of all NATO members.
Germany has already indicated its refusal to contribute troops to such a force (as has Poland, supposedly Ukraine’s greatest major supporter in Europe). This week, in a highly unusual move, the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (widely regarded as a hawk on Ukraine) sharply rebuked the (German) EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who had told the Financial Times on August 31 that European governments are working on “pretty precise plans” for troop deployments to Ukraine and have a “clear road map” for this. Pistorius responded that discussing this publicly at present is “completely wrong,” adding,
"Apart from the fact that the European Union has no jurisdiction or competence whatsoever when it comes to the deployment of troops — regardless of for whom or for what — I would be very cautious about confirming or commenting on such considerations in any way."
This unprecedented and immediate rebuke may be partly due to German government uneasiness about another of von der Leyen’s claims to the FT, that, “President Trump reassured us that there will be an American presence as part of the backstop. …That was very clear and repeatedly affirmed.”
Maybe. But Trump has also reportedly suggested Chinese peacekeepers for Ukraine (something that the Chinese have never proposed and that was immediately rejected by Kyiv). What Trump is also actually reported to have said to European leaders was also very significantly different from von der Leyen’s account. According to Politico:
“[The sources for Trump’s private remarks] — a European diplomat, a British official and a person briefed on the call — all said the U.S. was willing to play some sort of role [emphasis added]in providing Kyiv with the means to deter future Russian aggression if a ceasefire is reached. The person briefed on the call said that Trump said he would only make such a commitment if the effort is not part of NATO. …Trump did not specify what he meant by security guarantees and only discussed the broader concept, the person briefed on the call said.”
And in the words of an alarmed German former diplomat, “Surely we know by now not automatically to take everything Trump says seriously?”
Admittedly, some statements from members of the European security elite raise questions as to whether they seriously believe in this force, or are in fact using the proposal to block any peace agreement with Russia.
Thus former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has written that a “well armed European deterrence force in Ukraine should be ready to fight if Ukraine is attacked again, should signal NATO’s willingness to go to war with Russia (something that NATO governments have consistently refused to do), should be based on NATO structures and modeled on NATO forward deployments in the Baltic States.” Moreover, he says, this force should be deployed not as part of a final peace settlement but in advance of one.
It is very unlikely that Trump would ever agree to back up such a force. It is certain that it would make any peace settlement with Russia impossible and that the war would go on indefinitely. And if one risk of a prolonged war is that the Ukrainian army will collapse, another is that the European governments that have backed Ukraine will be voted out of office. Maybe Bayrou will get lucky next week and the French government will survive.
Maybe Macron will be succeeded by another centrist in 2027. Maybe the rise of the far right AfD in Germany can be checked. Maybe the British Labour government will pull itself together — with or without Starmer — and prevent a victory of Reform at the next elections. But existing European establishments would be very lucky indeed to dodge all these political bullets.
So the question hawkish European officials need to ask themselves is the one famously asked by Clint Eastwood in his role as Detective Harry Callahan, "do you feel lucky?"
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Top photo credit: Beijing, China.- In the photos, Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Daniel Noboa (left), during a meeting in the Great Hall of the People, the venue for the main protocol events of the Chinese government on June 26, 2025 (Isaac Castillo/Pool / Latin America News Agency via Reuters Connect)
Marco Rubio is visiting Mexico and Ecuador this week, his third visit as Secretary of State to Latin America.
While his sojourn in Mexico is likely to grab the most headlines given all the attention the Trump administration has devoted to immigration and Mexican drug cartels, the one to Ecuador is primarily designed to “counter malign extra continental actors,” according to a State Department press release.The reference appears to be China, an increasingly important trading and investment partner for Ecuador.
Washington undoubtedly noticed that the first visit abroad undertaken by conservative Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa after being reelected for a second term earlier this year was to China. Ecuador has a significant foreign debt that it needs to service. It thus depends heavily on export markets to generate the hard currency to repay its creditors. The last thing the country needs at this point is to be pressured by Washington to do less business with China.
Such pressure would only add to the travails of a country that has been beset by enough trouble in the recent past. This includes the devastating impact of the pandemic (during which the death toll in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port and largest city, was such that bodies were piled up on the street, as the mortuaries were packed), skyrocketing gang violence, and the growing presence of organized crime.
Yet, for several years now, Washington has pressed Ecuador to minimize its economic links with China, while doing little to help it overcome the serious challenges it faces. Over the years, for a variety of reasons related to the fluctuations in the price of oil, its main export commodity, and other factors, Ecuador racked up a significant foreign debt, to China, to the International Monetary Fund, and to other creditors.
After Ecuador partially defaulted on its foreign debt in 2008 and was largely excluded from international credit markets, China came through with several loans. These loans allowed Ecuador to build up its infrastructure, show one of the highest investment rates in the region through 2013 ( gross capital formation went up from 20.25 per cent in 2009 to 23.77 per cent in 2013) and improve its economic performance.
In fact from 2006 to 2016 Ecuador’s average annual per capita economic growth was 1.5 percent, versus 0.6 in the previous 26 years. At some point, however, those credits and those of the IMF package that followed them came due, and by 2020 Ecuador was caught in a foreign exchange squeeze.
In January 2021 — that is, in the last days of the first Trump administration — Washington’s newly created International Development Finance Corporation extended one of its first major loans in South America to Ecuador, for 3.5 billion dollars, ostensibly to help Quito repay part of its debt.
The conditions attached to the loan, however, were unprecedented. Among other things, they required that Ecuador’s telecommunications grid be free of any Chinese technology (from Huawei, ZTE or any other Chinese company), which at the time happened to be the most advanced and cost-effective available, thus adding a significant cost to the country’s efforts to improve its connectivity and digitize its economy.
Another condition required that Ecuador privatize the equivalent of $3.5 billion dollars in public assets. Moreover, the determination of which assets to be sold off to private interests would not be left to the Ecuadorian government alone, but would rather be jointly decided by Washington and Quito. This led to many questions about the transparency of such decisions and the associated effects of “crony capitalism” at its worst. (It’s notable that, while former President Joe Biden could have changed these terms, he failed to do so during his term.)
With the IDFC loan providing only partial debt relief, then-President Guillermo Lasso, a wealthy conservative businessman from Guayaquil travelled to Washington to explore the possibility of negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) similar to those from which Ecuador’s neighbors — Colombia, Peru and Chile — had already been benefiting. In his view, preferential access to the U.S. market would go a long way towards increasing Ecuadorian exports, and thus earning hard currency that could be used to service the debt.
Biden rejected the demarche and stated in no uncertain terms that Washington was no longer in the business of signing FTAs.
Without missing a beat, Lasso then flew to Beijing, where his proposal for a China-Ecuador FTA was well received. The agreement was negotiated, signed and ratified quickly and came into effect in May 2024 .
China today provides a growing market not just for Ecuadorian oil, but also for its prized shrimp, and the fresh fruits and vegetables. Chinese companies, which have established a strong presence in Ecuador over the years, are thriving there.
The decision not to open its market to Ecuador via an FTA is obviously a legitimate and sovereign U.S. choice. What is questionable, however, is the attempt to pressure Quito to reduce its economic links with Beijing, which opened its market and provided preferential access to Ecuadorian exports. This is what Secretary Rubio’s mission to Ecuador is apparently intent on doing, as per the State Department’s release.
The issue, however, goes beyond Ecuador. For much of the past decade, U.S. policy towards Latin America has focused on excluding China from the region. Much pressure was exercised on Chile, Panama , Brazil, and other countries to cancel China-related projects and to exclude Chinese companies from doing business there.
Unsurprisingly, this approach has mostly backfired. In 2024, China-Latin America trade reached a record $518 billion (up from $12 billion in 2000, a more than 40-fold increase). For South America, China has become its number one trading partner. Chinese investment in the region is estimated at $200 billion, still much less than that of the U.S., but growing fast, especially in cutting-edge sectors like e-mobility and the green economy.
Exhibit A for this trend are the openings this year of Chinese e-vehicle factories in Brazil — by BYD in the state of Bahia at an industrial park once owned by the Ford Motor Company, and by Great Wall Motors in the state of Sao Paulo, in a locale that once produced cars for Mercedes-Benz.
As political scientist Francisco Urdinez shows in a forthcoming book, Economic Displacement and the End of US Primacy in Latin America, one key reason Chinese companies have moved into Latin America is because U.S. business has been moving out. The policy of attempting to exclude China from Latin America has failed and is bound to continue to fail, because the region badly needs more foreign trade and investment, not less. The United States should compete with China in the Americas, proving that it can build a better mousetrap, not by banning rival producers of mice-catching devices.
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