Biden’s Latin America Reset Slowed US Decline but Could Not Reverse It, Review Finds

A new open-access review published in Discover Global Society offers one of the most systematic assessments yet of how the Biden administration tried to rebuild American influence in Latin America between 2021 and 2024, and its verdict is deliberately double-edged. Researchers Tran Thi Thanh Van, Tran Thi Hanh Loi, and Le Hoang Kiet, affiliated with Saigon University and Vietnam National University in Hanoi, applied a four-stage policy analysis framework to three strategic pillars, political-diplomatic, economic-commercial, and defense-security, and reached a conclusion they describe as moderate and structurally constrained effectiveness. The administration, they find, achieved many of its own stated tactical objectives, yet failed to alter the deeper structural trend the policy was designed to reverse: the erosion of U.S. primacy in a hemisphere Washington had treated as its own since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

The theoretical engine of the study is hegemonic transition theory, a structural realist framework rooted in Organski’s power transition model and later elaborated by Robert Gilpin. Gilpin argued that a dominant state’s relative capabilities inevitably erode as the costs of maintaining global commitments rise while rising states benefit from faster growth, generating pressure along three pathways: negotiated accommodation, hegemonic conflict, or managed adjustment, in which the declining power slows its relative erosion without fully arresting it. The Biden administration’s pivot away from the ideologically selective unilateralism of the Trump years toward economic pragmatism and multilateral institution-building is, in the authors’ reading, a textbook attempt at that third pathway. Latin America is an especially revealing test case precisely because it is the region where U.S. hegemonic prerogative was historically most assumed and least contested.

The review distinguishes carefully between efficacy, meaning the degree to which a policy achieves its own stated objectives, and effectiveness, meaning its broader impact on the strategic environment. On the efficacy side, the diplomatic record is genuinely positive. The administration restored functional relationships with left-wing governments that had been actively antagonized under Trump, navigating Colombia’s transition from conservative President Ivan Duque to leftist Gustavo Petro in 2022 without any disruption to security, energy, or climate cooperation. Biden held five bilateral meetings with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador between 2021 and 2024, compared with a single meeting under Trump, and sustained engagement with Brazil after Lula’s 2022 electoral victory through summits in February and September 2023. Crucially, the authors note, this flexibility ran in both ideological directions: the administration maintained workable ties with libertarian President Javier Milei in Argentina alongside left-wing governments in Bogota, Brasilia, and Mexico City, indicating a genuinely bidirectional shift toward interest-based engagement.

Public opinion data reinforce the diplomatic gains. Favorable views of the United States among Brazilians rose from 26 percent under Trump to 37 percent under Biden, a change the authors judge plausibly attributable to policy recalibration rather than confounding factors. Yet the same section of the review documents the limits of normalization. Limited sanctions relief for Venezuela, extended in October 2023, was suspended just six months later after the Maduro regime disqualified opposition candidates. Relations with Cuba barely moved, with the embargo structure intact, and Nicaragua’s withdrawal from the Organization of American States in November 2023 represented outright deterioration of the multilateral framework. Accommodation, the authors conclude, persuades disaffected partners far more readily than governments already embedded in a rival power’s orbit.

The economic pillar reveals the sharpest gap between ambition and outcome. The Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, launched at the June 2022 Summit of the Americas, was deliberately built as a soft framework of memoranda of understanding and technical cooperation rather than binding commitments, because negotiating new free trade agreements faced insurmountable congressional opposition. By late 2024, APEP’s concrete achievements remained limited to those memoranda, and the absence of Brazil and Argentina significantly constrained its regional scope. The Inflation Reduction Act did generate measurable nearshoring momentum: U.S. automobile and parts imports from Mexico rose 15.6 percent, from 153.88 billion dollars in 2022 to 177.84 billion dollars in 2023, driven by electric vehicle battery tax credit provisions that incentivized regional manufacturing while excluding Chinese producers. The USMCA Rapid Response Mechanism was deployed 27 times, resolving 22 cases, including one in which workers at a Goodyear plant received over 4.2 million dollars in retroactive wages.

But the aggregate trade numbers complicate any story of success. U.S. Census Bureau data show total goods trade with the region averaging 839 billion dollars annually under Trump and 1,113 billion under Biden, an increase of roughly 33 percent, though much of that gap narrows once the pandemic-depressed 2020 baseline is set aside. The growth was driven disproportionately by imports: the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with the region more than doubled, from an average of 47.6 billion dollars annually under Trump to 78.8 billion under Biden, reaching 123.4 billion dollars in 2024, the highest in the eight-year series. The U.S.-Mexico goods deficit grew from an average of 89.4 billion to 148.6 billion dollars, hitting 168.6 billion in 2024, more than double the 2017 level. A services surplus of 24.24 billion dollars in 2023, while real, remained an order of magnitude smaller than the goods deficit. The widening gap, the authors argue, is not a single-year anomaly but a sustained four-year trend running directly counter to APEP’s stated goal of balanced regional integration.

The infrastructure contest tells a similar story of structural asymmetry. U.S. foreign direct investment accumulated to 1.04 trillion dollars in Latin America by 2022, but 61 percent of it flowed through British Overseas Territories, reflecting financial intermediation rather than productive manufacturing. China’s accumulated FDI of roughly 520 billion dollars remains half the U.S. total, yet its growth rate is far higher and its projects concentrate in high-visibility infrastructure that shapes how regional governments perceive partnership value. The 3.6 billion dollar Chancay Port in Peru, majority-owned by COSCO Shipping Ports, marked the first time a Chinese state-owned enterprise held majority control of a hemispheric seaport. The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment committed to mobilizing 200 billion dollars globally, but actual disbursed capital by late 2024 remained limited and deployment lagged far behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers captured the asymmetry in a remark the review cites: developing-country governments reported receiving an airport from China and a lecture from the United States. On critical minerals, despite memoranda with Argentina, Chile, and Brazil and a 62.5 million dollar U.S. investment in the Pastos Grandes lithium project, Chinese firms still control 60 percent of global lithium production, 85 percent of processing capacity, and 70 percent of battery production.

The defense-security pillar is where the United States retained its clearest first-mover advantage, and the operational numbers are striking. The 64th UNITAS exercise in July 2023 assembled 7,000 military personnel from 27 countries, SOUTHCOM planned 1,014 cooperative operations during 2023-2024, the International Military Education and Training program trained roughly 800 students from 28 countries in fiscal year 2023, including three defense ministers and thirteen chiefs of staff, and the State Partnership Program conducted 426 events in a single fiscal year. Joint Interagency Task Force South disrupted 361 smuggling events, seizing nearly 308 tons of cocaine and 78 tons of cannabis worth 7.7 billion dollars, with partner forces conducting 79.5 percent of operations. Yet containment failed at the strategic level. China established at least ten space facilities across five countries, including a deep space station in Argentina that SOUTHCOM Commander General Laura Richardson warned could support surveillance, tracking, and targeting of U.S. forces. Huawei’s entrenched position across 24 countries, built over fifteen years of price advantages and preferential financing, proved resistant to U.S. advocacy for Open RAN alternatives, and Russia maintained active military cooperation with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua throughout the period.

The review also documents a persistent contradiction that undermined the administration’s democracy-promotion rhetoric. Washington secured the release of 357 Nicaraguan political prisoners and allocated 453.1 million dollars in aid to Colombia in 2023, though that figure represents only a modest increase over late Trump-era baselines of 391.3 to 447.9 million dollars, suggesting bipartisan congressional continuity rather than a distinctive Biden initiative. Meanwhile, the administration maintained security and migration cooperation with El Salvador despite President Bukele’s authoritarian consolidation and unconstitutional re-election in 2024, and sustained strong relations with Peru after the controversial removal of President Castillo. Prioritizing relationship preservation over normative conditions, the authors observe, inevitably narrows the credibility gap between what the hegemon claims to stand for and what it tolerates.

The study’s central lesson is carefully framed. The authors do not conclude that managed adjustment failed; rather, they find that managed adjustment without the underlying structural capacity to match a rising challenger’s terms of engagement can slow a hegemon’s relative decline without reversing it. Congressional opposition to new trade agreements, slow administrative procedures for capital deployment, the asymmetry between U.S. conditionality-laden engagement and China’s unconditional financing model, and two decades of entrenched Chinese commercial penetration all constrained any administration regardless of ideological posture. The authors also acknowledge limits of their own analysis, including the difficulty of isolating the Trump-to-Biden shift as a causal variable and the framework’s hegemon-centric neglect of Latin American agency, exemplified by Brazil’s deliberate decision to stay outside APEP while deepening BRICS engagement. For future research, they point toward bottom-up analysis of how regional governments actually perceive U.S. versus Chinese partnership value, longitudinal tracking of Biden-era frameworks under subsequent administrations, and subnational studies of nearshoring that separate policy-induced gains from structural trends.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of Biden administration policy effectiveness toward Latin America through hegemonic transition theory

Article Title: Reassessing Biden administration policy toward Latin America between multilateral ambition and geopolitical constraints

Article References: Van, T. T. T., Loi, T. T. H., & Kiet, L. H. (2026). Reassessing Biden administration policy toward Latin America between multilateral ambition and geopolitical constraints. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00591-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00591-4

Keywords: Biden administration, Latin America, hegemonic transition theory, managed adjustment, great-power competition, China, nearshoring, APEP, trade deficit, U.S. foreign policy, SOUTHCOM, policy effectiveness