Top image credit: bluestork/shutterstock.com
Is America still considered part of the 'Americas'?
February 10, 2026
On January 7, the White House announced its plans to withdraw from 66 international bodies whose work it had deemed inconsistent with U.S. national interests.
While many of these organizations were international in nature, three of them were specific to the Americas — the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, and the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The decision came on the heels of the Dominican Republic postponing the X Summit of the Americas last year following disagreements over who would be invited and ensuing boycotts.
These parallel developments raise important questions about how the region and the United States view their relationship. In fact, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced his intent to boycott the X Summit of the Americas, he not only railed against the exclusion of other countries, but also proposed an alternative — a special Summit between the United States and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, known by its Spanish acronym, CELAC. This alternative format would mirror how Latin American and Caribbean leaders engage with other external powers such as the European Union and China — both of which held such a Summit in 2025.
Given the current U.S. administration’s pushback against multilateralism and the historic proliferation of regional organizations driven by different ideological positions, leaders across the Americas have an opportunity to reexamine regional governance mechanisms. In doing so, they would also revisit a historical question of whether the United States should be understood as an integral part of the Americas, or as an external power operating within the hemisphere.
Historical context
The question of inclusion within the Americas has a long history dating back to initial discussions about regional cooperation and integration. While the Americas have a long history of Pan Americanism and efforts to integrate the hemisphere, there have been important differences between countries and their histories.
In fact, in 1826, when Simón Bolivar brought together the leaders of Latin America’s newly independent nations for the Congress of Panama, there were open debates over whether to invite the United States. Brazil and Canada, two countries with different colonial legacies, were not yet independent and thus not invited. While the United States was ultimately invited, debate persisted over its inclusion in integration efforts.
By the late 1880s, the United States viewed its position as firmly within the Americas, hosting the First Pan American Conference in 1889-1890, which would lead to the establishment of the Inter-American System and the predecessor to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS). However, Washington’s hemispheric commitment wavered throughout the 20th century. While there were times where the United States embraced its position within the Americas — such as during FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy — there were others when Washington would engage with Latin America and the Caribbean through the lens of great power competition rather than as a member of a shared neighborhood. The United States’ on-and-off-again relationship would lead Latin American and Caribbean to create their own alternative organizations.
Regional pushback on US influence
CELAC is often cited as the clearest example of the region’s post-hegemonic experimentation: an attempt to build a regional body that deliberately excluded the United States and Canada. Created in 2010, CELAC’s founding idea was straightforward but ambitious: strengthen regional integration through an autonomous voice for Latin America and the Caribbean.
But sustaining that vision has proved difficult. Political polarization has repeatedly undermined CELAC, which failed to hold summits from 2018 to 2020. Brazil’s withdrawal in 2020, under former President Jair Bolsonaro, reflected the discomfort of some governments sitting alongside Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Even after Brazil’s return under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, internal divisions persisted.
Despite these fractures, CELAC has become a platform for Latin America and the Caribbean to engage with extra-hemispheric powers, most notably China and the European Union. The establishment of the China–CELAC Forum in 2014 opened a new channel for comprehensive cooperation and made CELAC a vehicle for negotiating with global actors outside the traditional U.S.-led architecture. But the organization’s weaknesses were again visible in the most recent EU–CELAC meeting in Colombia last November, which was overshadowed by absences on both sides, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and several Latin American heads of state.
CELAC’s trajectory reveals a deeper truth about regional politics in the Americas. Even in a forum created explicitly to operate in Washington’s absence, Latin America often confronts its own divisions, reflecting the unresolved question over whether the United States is part of the Americas or an external power.
Inside or outside?
Today there are more than 40 regional organizations and forums in the Western Hemisphere. These range from well-established bodies like the OAS to less formal bodies like CELAC and to specific functional groups like the Pan American Health Organization. The United States is a member of 11 organizations — including its role as a non-borrowing member in the Inter-American Development Bank — and an observer in three more.
There are advantages for both the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean in including the United States as part of the region. On the one hand, regional organizations can help channel U.S. leverage and identify shared challenges. Washington has also historically helped to fund these organizations when it sees them as part of a shared community agenda, while using these forums to shape regional integration in ways that served its interests. At the same time, it provides a forum for Washington to shape regional developments and, in some cases, counter the influence of external powers, most recently China.
However, regional organizations and forums can only do so much to bring the United States into the regional community if Washington is not consistently responsive to regional priorities. Yet, as the failure of CELAC’s 2018-2020 summits highlight, simply excluding the United States does not resolve intra-regional differences, which limit the effectiveness of collective action.
With the Trump administration pushing a more active foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere through the Trump Corollary while actively pulling away from regional and global institutions, leaders in the region are faced with a unique opportunity. While the situation poses challenges for regional integration efforts, it also poses the opportunity to rethink regional governance structures. The lack of regional cohesion spurred the proliferation of regional bodies that undermined each institution’s effectiveness.
The right-ward electoral swing in the region removes some of the ideological schisms between Latin American states while also aligning it more closely with Washington. As funding challenges the survival of many regional bodies, leaders can look at where and how they can consolidate regional bodies toward pillars that incorporate the United States and ones that promote that sub-regional cooperation more effectively — thus balancing the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of the U.S. within the Americas.
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Top photo credit: Abuja, Nigeria, March 06, 2021: African Medical Doctor giving consultation and treatment in a rural clinic. (Shutterstock/Oni Abimbola)
After shuttering USAID, Trump launches new foreign aid strategy
February 10, 2026
Almost exactly one year ago, the swift dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) got underway with a public statement issued by the State Department.
At the start of July 2025, the State Department officially absorbed what was left of the storied agency. A few short months later, to fill the USAID-shaped hole in America’s soft-power projection abroad, the Trump administration launched an $11 billion plan to provide foreign health assistance.
Called the America First Global Health Strategy, the program intends to foster U.S. influence and interests in developing nations, especially in Africa, in order to protect the American people from infectious disease threats and empower recipient countries to achieve self-reliance.
But having just dismantled the federal agency that would have been tasked to implement such an endeavor, questions remain: why this — and why now?
For one, polls have indicated that a large majority of Americans actually support active U.S. engagement in the world, especially when it comes to assistance for humanitarian purposes.
Furthermore, experts have estimated that since the dismantling of USAID began, up to 750,000 people have died because aid was shut off, though the State Department disputes this figure. It’s possible that these estimates could have motivated Trump administration officials to act quickly to restore aid in some form.
This doesn’t change the fact, however, that many seriously opposed the way that USAID distributed aid. At a United Nations General Assembly side event, Jeremy Lewin said that while U.S. global health efforts have been effective in some respects, “progress has stalled,” with “too much focus on creating parallel health care systems” and “promoting NGOs,” while “the countries and the private sector have been cut out.”
The new strategy will aim to “promote genuine self-reliance,” Lewin said, and will differ from USAID in several key ways.
A foreign makeover
Indeed, one aspect of the America First Global Health Strategy aims to address a common complaint that USAID’s alleged inefficiency and dependence on NGOs perpetuated the issues affecting developing countries.
Rather than working with NGOs to administer aid, the new program will send funding directly to governments, health care organizations and drug manufacturers. This transition, experts say, offers both benefits and drawbacks.
This structure is designed to encourage foreign governments to take steps to eventually be in a place where they require no foreign aid and can operate self-sufficiently, said Max Primorac, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation and author of the section on foreign aid in its Project 2025 report.
“It's cheaper, and it also is going to promote the kind of self-reliance that we were trying to do during [Trump’s first term],” Primorac told Responsible Statecraft. “The benefits are just amazing by cutting out these international NGOs.”
However, many of these governments lack the resources to accommodate the fast-tracked pace of the health agreements made under this new strategy, according to George Ingram, a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Brookings Institution.
“Transitioning private-sector engagement takes time,” Ingram told RS. “You don’t do that overnight.”
Furthermore, many of the NGOs that USAID collaborated with had decades of experience in distributing aid and could often “accomplish things that governments struggled to do,” Matthew Kavanagh, Director of the Center for Global Health Policy & Politics at Georgetown University, told RS.
“NGOs and nonprofit organizations often can serve the most vulnerable and the most marginalized in ways that major formal public institutions struggle to do,” Kavanagh said.
Investing in the future
The new strategy will also differ from the agency it replaces in terms of funding model. The “global health investments” will be structured around two- to five-year Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs), which place an emphasis on performance benchmarks and commitments from partner governments to provide co-financing that will increase over time, with an end goal of transitioning from U.S. assistance to self-reliance.
Each partner country will pledge to increase their domestic health spending as the U.S. decreases its assistance. The U.S. will focus on providing funding for commodities and front-line health workers, while reducing “nonfrontline” costs.
“That is a strength that was not always apparent in USAID,” Gyude Moore, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development and former Minister of Public Works for Liberia, told Responsible Statecraft. “USAID sometimes created the impression that it would be there forever. Encouraging countries to plan for self-financing is a good thing.”
Primorac concurred, saying that encouraging developing nations to spend alongside U.S. aid will encourage them to work toward self-sufficiency.
“If they're not spending money, they don't have skin in the game,” Primorac said. “If you get something for free, you're not really going to appreciate it. You're going to take it for granted. But if you have to pay for it, you're going to be much more attentive and much more willing to make sure you're not wasting your own money.
But the issue with solely transferring commodities without offering wraparound support arises when developing countries lack the necessary capabilities to apply the resources they receive. Former Chief Economist of USAID and Northwestern professor Dean Karlan compares it to trying to bake chocolate chip cookies with only chocolate chips.
The strategy is contradictory, according to Karlan. “It’s internally inconsistent to say, ‘We want you to be sustainable,’ while taking away the very parts of the aid program designed to help build sustainability,” Karlan told RS.
'Nakedly transactional'
Another key way that the America First Global Health Strategy differs from USAID lies in its apt name — the strategy seeks to put America first in a way that USAID purportedly did not.
For example, in Zambia, the health agreement was linked to U.S. access to mining opportunities. The conversation over Rwanda’s health agreement took place concurrently with discussions about American access to the nation’s critical minerals.
These “commercially based” agreements “are good, obviously, for our businesses, but they're good for the recipient company or recipient country,” according to Primorac.
“It forms a really nice relationship between us and those countries,” Primorac said. “It's commercially based. It's recognizing that it's the private sector that creates wealth, not government spending.”
This shift is striking, Kavanagh said, and is “nakedly extractive in a way that the previous approach was not.”
“Now it’s a much narrower interest about a very narrow understanding of pandemic preparedness, a very narrow set of activities that they’re willing to fund,” Kavanagh told Responsible Statecraft. “Most importantly, rather than a big approach to global health, it’s a set of bilateral deals that have come with really big political strings.”
Global implications
Foreign aid programs have long been one of the most predominant and effective soft power tools and this new strategy will undoubtedly have implications for American soft power and foreign influence.
Primorac believes the new strategy will “tremendously increase” American influence abroad, especially because the program prioritizes transparency.
“It's good for us in terms of creating more stable and healthy environments to sell things, creating more wealth,” Primorac said. “And it's good for these countries because they're able to strengthen their own government capacity to care for their own people.”
But with a relatively abrupt shuttering of USAID and the transactional undertones of the America First Global Health Strategy, other experts are unsure of whether the new U.S. foreign aid efforts will be received with the same open arms.
In fact, some say America’s approach could run the risk of eroding its soft power abroad, especially if the MOUs developing nations are agreeing to prove fatal for their relatively fragile states, according to Conor Savoy, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development who has served in two different capacities at USAID.
“My fear is that we are setting countries up for failure, which will damage perceptions of the United States as a constructive partner,” Savoy told RS. “Global health is an area where the U.S. has carried real moral weight and earned significant goodwill, and this strategy risks undermining that.”
On the other hand, it is possible that the Trump administration is looking to achieve a different kind of influence abroad, Kavanagh said.
“I think it is interested in a major disruption to the geopolitical order and supporting a set of governments that are aligned with its worldview,” Kavanagh said. “If we see this as an effort to build a coalition of more conservative governments around the world and have the ability to reward certain governments and extract certain concessions, then it makes a lot more sense.”
So far, Rubio has signed 15 agreements with African countries, with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and maternal health, committing $11.1 billion over five years to the developing nations. In turn, the countries have pledged $12.2 billion in matching funds and agreed to achieve specified performance goals. The State Department has stated that it hopes to have agreements with 50 countries within the next couple of months.
However, the new strategy is not grounded in legislation, so just as easily as the America First Global Health Strategy was created, it could be dismantled by future executive actions.
But in the meantime, the impacts of this strategy will be felt across the world and domestically. As Moore points out, “we live in a global society where we are only as strong as our weakest links.”
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Top photo credit: Volodymyr Selenskyj (l), President of Ukraine, and Boris Pistorius (SPD), Federal Minister of Defense, answer media questions after a visit to the training of soldiers on the "Patriot" air defence missile system at a military training area. The international reconstruction conference for Ukraine takes place on June 11 and 12. (Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect)
What happens when we give Europe first dibs on US missiles for war
February 09, 2026
For weeks the question animating the Washington D.C. commentariat has been this: When will President Donald Trump make good on his threat and launch a second round of airstrikes on Iran? So far at least, the answer is “not yet.”
Many explanations for Trump’s surprising (but very welcome) restraint have emerged. Among the most troubling, however, is that it is a lack of the necessary munitions, and in particular air defense interceptors, that is giving Trump second thoughts. “The missile defense cupboard is bare,” one report concludes based on interviews with current and former U.S. defense officials.
Even those who hope Trump chooses to avoid military action in Iran altogether should be taken aback to hear that eight months after the last extended U.S. military campaign ended (the defense of Israel during the 12-day war and Operation Midnight Hammer), American missile defense arsenals could still be in such rough shape.
To be sure, slow production timelines and the deep materiel debt mean that any effort to fully restore U.S. stockpiles to their pre-2022 level will take time. But eight months should be sufficient to return stocks of some types of defense interceptors to less critical levels. If the missile defense cupboard is truly still bare, however, something else must be going on.
That something else, it turns out, is Ukraine.
Although President Trump and his advisers are quick to argue that the United States is no longer paying for the military aid supporting Ukraine’s ongoing war, this is only one piece of a larger story. In fact, the United States is still sending billions in weapons to Ukraine, often diverting new weapons intended for the U.S. military directly to Ukraine instead. The implications of this reality are far-reaching — for U.S. military readiness, the Pentagon’s ability to respond in case of a real threat to U.S. interests, and diplomatic efforts to end the war.
To understand the scope of the continuing U.S. commitment to Ukraine, we need to look closer. There are two primary channels through which U.S. weapons continue to make their way to Ukraine instead of into U.S. military arsenals.
For starters, there is the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which the Trump administration tried to cut out of its most recent budget, before Congress saved it. The $400 million in aid allocated for 2026, however, is a small piece of resources currently in this aid pipeline. Something on the order of $19 billion in outstanding orders, contracts signed under the Biden administration, have yet to make it to Ukraine. This new production will flow into Kyiv and to Ukraine’s frontline over the course of 2026 and 2027. Among the weapons included are air defense interceptors as well as other types of valuable munitions, GMLRS and 155mm shells.
This money was appropriated before Trump came into office, so this is not new spending. But the orders themselves are filled from the same production lines as the ones that would go to replenish the U.S. military’s own stockpiles. In effect, Ukraine’s defense needs compete with those of the U.S. military for scarce U.S. defense industrial capacity.
The second way that Washington continues to arm Ukraine at the expense of production that might go to the U.S. military is through the PURL program. Promoted as a mechanism to force Europeans to pick up the bill for arming Ukraine, the program does not directly involve U.S. taxpayer funds. Instead, European countries buy new U.S. weapons that then go to Ukraine.
So far, NATO has pledged over $4 billion in funds for PURL and two $500 million shipments have already been sent through the program, which expects to grow to $15 billion in 2026. PURL has been heavily used for specific types of weapons, including especially air defense and munitions of all kinds. Reports suggest that as much as 75 percent of Patriot missiles used in Ukraine (and 90 percent of all air defense) comes through this mechanism. Reports say two additional packages (via Canada and Germany) at $500 million a piece were being readied, and more were being coordinated by the U.S., at the end of 2025.
URL sounds good on the surface, since it shifts the cost of arming Ukraine from the United States to Europe. However, once again, the U.S. military likely comes out on the losing end.
What Europeans actually purchase through PURL is prioritized spots in the manufacturing queue, near the front of the line. This allows Europe, and by association Ukraine, to again skip the wait, receiving new missiles and military hardware originally intended for other buyers right away. The defense contractor gets money, but orders for the original buyers, including most likely the Pentagon, are necessarily delayed in part or in full. In some cases, PURL buys weapons directly out of U.S. stocks, meaning that PURL not only slows replenishment of U.S. arsenals, but drains them further.
It is hard to say how extensive delays caused by PURL are, either in terms of length or quantity of munitions or other materiel involved. We also don’t know for sure how much of the burden of any delay falls on the United States versus other clients. But given Ukraine’s significant demands and slow U.S. production timelines, it is likely that the impact on all buyers is substantial. Only about 60 Patriot missiles can be produced per month, for example, leaving limited supplies of this key interceptor to meet Kyiv’s stated requirements (which may be as high as 60 Patriot missiles per month) and all other global demand.
There is one more piece to the puzzle and this one implicates U.S. taxpayers. Aware of the continued readiness impact of aid to Ukraine — not just in the past but ongoing — the Pentagon has asked for significant investment in the defense industrial base, including the 2026 appropriation bill and most likely in the $90 billion classified spend plan Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth submitted to Congress in February. This money is intended to speed up production, to backfill the weapons and hardware the U.S. military needs more quickly.
Certainly, some investment in U.S. air defense and munitions production is needed no matter what, but the amount requested is likely higher (since it is classified the American public has no visibility here) than what would be required if the United States prioritized U.S. military requirements more narrowly. U.S. taxpayers may not be paying directly for aid to Ukraine. But they are subsidizing European purchases of weapons for Ukraine in the form of the higher contributions to defense industrial base expansion needed to meet Ukraine’s needs and those of the long list of existing clients (including the United States).
The implications here are many.
First, no matter what senior U.S. officials say, U.S. aid to Ukraine continues to drain U.S. military resources and leave the United States less prepared than it should be for real threats to U.S. interests that might emerge in the future. Already resource constraints are impinging on U.S. strategy. If limited stockpiles are what is keeping the United States from bombing Iran, this may be a blessing in disguise, but the broader loss of U.S. strategic flexibility is something everyone should worry about. If the United States is currently not prepared to operate in the Middle East, imagine how far it is from being ready for a contingency in Asia or some real challenge to U.S. interests elsewhere. This puts the Trump administration’s more accommodating position toward China in the National Security and Defense Strategies in a new light.
Second, there is the issue of transparency. The costs of continuing aid to Ukraine may now be smaller for taxpayers than under Biden and indirect, but policymakers owe the general public a clear and upfront explanation for how U.S. resources and military power is being distributed abroad. This would include an accounting of previously contracted aid still to go to Ukraine and an honest summary of how PURL works and its implications for the United States.
Finally, continued U.S. aid to Ukraine on the scale described here complicates U.S. efforts to end the ongoing war. Trump has suggested that the United States intends to act as a neutral mediator — not on Ukraine’s side, not on Russia’s side. But with billions in U.S. military aid flowing to Ukraine, this claim strains credulity. The United States is most certainly still a party to this war and despite complaints that Trump has taken Putin’s side, it is Kyiv that Washington continues to back institutionally, if indirectly in part.
This does not doom negotiations or prevent the United States from leading the way toward peace, but it likely does require a different approach, one where Washington is honest about its continued role as a party to this war.
As for war with Iran, it is becoming clear that the U.S cannot afford to engage everyone, everywhere, at once. Let us hope the White House can fully grasp that truth, too.
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