Analysis , | 03/26/2026 : US-American Doctrines, Global Dilemmas

The role of the Americas in the creation of what we know today as public international law has long been overlooked, with scholars and practitioners prioritizing the intellectual contributions of European thinkers such as Grotius and Bentham at the expense of Latin Americans such as the Chilean scholar Alejandro Alvarez and the Brazilian lawyer and politician Ruy Barbosa. During the first decades of the 20th Century, these jurists reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine through the prism of Bolivar’s Jamaica Letter, in order to construct the framework of a Pan-American international law, based on principles of state sovereignty, non-intervention, regional solidarity, and democracy.

As we look back over a century later at such efforts, both these Pan-American principles as well as those enshrined globally in treatises such as the UN Charter, the International Covenants on human rights, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court stand out as shining humanist testaments. However, at the same time, they seem to be on the road to irrelevance, as Donald Trump unleashes his unilateral fury against foes and (erstwhile) friends across the globe, and most intensely on the American continent. This article will discuss some of the past and present tensions between US foreign policy and public international law, especially human rights law, in order to analyze whether these legal tools still have any of the necessary validity and credibility in order to stop the US empire from continuing to strike back against its Latin American neighbors.

The instrumentalization of international law

We should begin by acknowledging that the so-called “rules-based international order” as reflected in current interpretations of public international law, was initially crafted at the end of World War II by the United States in its own likeness as part of its multi-faceted hegemony-building project, yet has been mostly used in an instrumental fashion since then. The very project of the United Nations hit a wall soon after its founding, as its political godfather, the United States, was forced into direct competition, not just on the geopolitical and economic planes but also in the ideological and epistemological realms, with the Soviet Union, as well as with radical decolonial projects that were not entirely under the USSR’s wing, such as the forces behind the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement. As a result, this budding liberal world order quickly became a hollowed-out shell, with the UN becoming a site of political quid-pro-quo instead of a multilateral big-tent project, as exemplified in the long struggle to formulate and ratify the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In Latin America at this time, emerging social democratic developmentalist political projects such as that of Joao Goulart in Brazil and Salvador Allende in Chile tried to geopolitically “thread the needle” by not overly antagonizing Uncle Sam to the North, yet at the same time looking favorably towards the aspirations of revolutionary Cuba, with Goulart even attempting to be a diplomatic intermediary between the US and Cuban governments in 1962 after the infamous “Bay of Pigs” incident. However, the political tightropes traversed by these governments soon snapped, leading to a period of vicious unilateral interventionism across Latin America, all in the name of “anti-Communism.”

The ignorance of power

Invoking the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which was originally concocted in the last years of the 19th Century to explicitly infringe upon Cuba’s right to self-determination, the US once again ignored all of the civilizing vestiges of public international law in order to prop up deadly bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in South America and to stifle the flames of new revolutionary projects in Central America, most notably in Nicaragua and El Salvador. And during this period, when Latin American nations tried to use the “masters’ tools” under international law to hold the US accountable for its violations of human rights and state sovereignty, they were blatantly rebuffed. The most telling example of this was the “Nicaragua vs United States” case admitted by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1984 on the grounds that the US was violating Nicaragua’s sovereignty through funding counter-revolutionary armed groups and mining the country’s territorial waters. When the ICJ decided in favor of Nicaragua in 1986, the US simply stopped recognizing the contentious jurisdiction of the Court in order to not comply with the ruling, and used its seat in the UN Security Council to block any enforcement efforts by the multilateral entity.

The Nicaragua case is just one example of many in which the US has actively undermined the “rules-based international order” established under the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) when it comes to its Southern neighbors. We can also cite the US’ failure to ratify the American Convention of Human Rights, the treaty which forms the backbone of the Inter-American Human Rights system, as yet another affront to Pan-American international law. In fact, we can say that the “exception proves the rule,” with some of the few notable exceptions to the US’s disregard for international human rights law in the Americas being Jimmy Carter’s invocations of human rights norms in his dealings with Southern Cone dictatorships at the end of the 1970s and the attempts by Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama to partially embed human, environmental and labor rights provisions into the bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements that they were peddling to countries across the region from the mid-1990s onward.

The multilateral order is dying

So where are we now in regards to the potency of public international law in times of Trumpism (and its crude “Donroe doctrine”)? The beginnings of the end of the UN as an international institution with at least some tangible coercive, normative, and moral force can be traced back to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States without any semblance of authorization by the Security Council. Likewise, the seemingly-final nails on the multilateral coffin were not only Trump’s literal and figurative refusal to buy in to the UN system during his first administration, but also Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu’s blatant violations of Genocide Convention provisions, ICJ rulings and International Criminal Court warrants, in the days, weeks, and months after October 7, 2023. During the Biden administration, Latin America was able to fly under the US’s proverbial radar screen, due to its obsession with the expanding great power rivalry with China (and secondarily with the BRICS), as well as the perverse Wilsonian tendencies that also oriented the US’ attention away from its neighbors and towards the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. 

Borrowing from Walter Russell Mead and Grady Nixon’s typology of US foreign policy, the second Trump administration appears to be scrapping Biden’s twisted Wilsonianism in favor of an imagined Jacksonianism. In recent months, the US has invoked its “right” to interventionism under the Roosevelt/Trump Corollaries as a supposedly rational response to the perceived political and ideological threats posed by actually-existing socialist projects in Cuba and Venezuela, leaving behind any Biden-esque pretexts related to “democracy promotion.” MAGA revanchism (conducted as retaliation for the failure of the Juan Guaido debacle during Trump’s first administration and as a principled stand against the audacity of socialist Cuba’s continued existence) is a complete nullification of the norms against the unilateral use of force enshrined in the “rules-based international order,” and most specifically in Article 2.4 of the UN Charter. 

However, at the same time, these unilateral actions are constrained by the current geopolitical correlation of forces. At this time, the US is aware that it does not have the moral, economic or political strength to completely force its will on the entire American continent, hence the delicate dance playing out between Trump and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico on matters related to trade policy and the elimination of transborder narcotrafficking, as well as the on-again, off-again cordial relations between Trump and Lula da Silva of Brazil. 

Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted 33 times to condemn the illegal US economic embargo of the island.

Outside of the continent, the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran will certainly test the limits of US military prowess and of US public opinion with regards to the participation of American troops in unprovoked foreign armed interventions in practice. Likewise, back in the Americas, the escalating tensions with Cuba will test the limits of US political discourse, in the face of historic, widespread global condemnation. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted 33 times to condemn the illegal US economic embargo of the island. 2025 was no exception, with 165 States-parties voting against the policy, as the impacts of the embargo, especially after the fuel shipment blockade decreed by Trump in January 2026, are now beginning to resemble a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Surprisingly, in the 2025 vote, two Latin American countries abstained from voting (Costa Rica and Ecuador) and two actually voted in lock-step with the United States (Argentina and Paraguay), putting into evidence the sharp ideological divides within GRULAC (Latin American and Caribbean Group in the UN). This divide is a product of not just widespread anti-incumbency bias in recent Latin American elections, but also the direct intervention by Trump in electoral processes in Argentina, Ecuador, and most recently Honduras. 

History does not repeat itself

The current political polarization in Latin America mirrors political tendencies observed all around the planet. While the US has decidedly slipped from its post-Cold War position of indisputable hegemony and at the same time, China and its BRICS partners have not yet been able to fully fill the political and cultural vacuum left by the declining US empire, space has opened up for both national and transnational far-right movements and for new anti-capitalist left movements to take political root. Due to this, comparisons between the present moment and the inter-war period of the 20th century have become commonplace. However, there are a number of substantial differences that cannot and should not be overlooked. 

First of all, the advances in information technologies and in long-haul transportation have led to a broadening and a deepening of formal and informal transnational political networks, in ways that the Communist International of the 1930s would have never imagined. Because of this, for example, I myself can play the part of a leader of a US-based socialist organization while living in sunny São Paulo, Brazil, and also millions if not billions of people can live-stream events from anywhere in the world (be it a football match in Germany or a massacre against civilians in Gaza) into their own living rooms at any time. 

Secondly, the number of geopolitical big players in the world today is significantly greater than that of the handful of Global North “Great Powers” during the 1930s, due to decolonization, globalization and in particular the increased dependency of Global North countries on Global South natural and human resources that they need to expropriate in order to “ecomodernize” their societies and economies.

Finally, despite all the significant compliance and credibility gaps, the fact that a truly universal body of public international law, and especially human rights law, does exist, distinguishes this current moment from the 1930s in a positive sense. The robust civil society networks that have sprung up around the world, including and especially in Latin America, in the last five decades that use international human rights norms to make claims for justice, equality, and peace have succeeded in diversifying and intensifying popular participation in the global polis.

While international norms in and of themselves have not yet succeeded in deterring the US either now or in the recent past from continuing to treat a great swathe of Latin America as its private “backyard,” the regionally-connected resistance by both progressive governments and civil society activists are keeping the Pan-American dream of Simón Bolívar, Ruy Barbosa and Alejandro Álvarez alive. Electoral victories by the anti-capitalist and progressive left across the region, most recently by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to the North and Pacto Historico of Colombia to the South, coupled with direct citizen action, such as the upcoming Convoy to Cuba that will bring needed humanitarian aid to the besieged island, can help usher out this “time of monsters” in the Americas, and usher in a time of peace, self-determination and real democracy, as our political ancestors dreamed of, decades and centuries ago.