A Hemisphere Reset Worth Taking Seriously — and So Are the Questions

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A Hemisphere Reset Worth Taking Seriously — and So Are the Questions

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar November 2026

After decades in which the United States treated its own neighborhood as an afterthought, Washington has finally put the Western Hemisphere at the center of its foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spent nearly two years shuttling across Latin America, assembling security coalitions, prying countries away from Chinese infrastructure money, and presiding over the fall of one of the region’s longest-ruling strongmen. That reorientation is real, and it deserves more attention than it has received. But the emerging sales pitch — laid out in a recent op-ed circulating from the State Department’s own channels — regularly outruns the record. Americans asked to judge this policy deserve both halves of the story.

What the shift gets right

The credit begins with prioritization itself. For years, Latin America policy was a portfolio handed to junior officers while the region absorbed Chinese investment, drug cartel expansion, and mass migration. The current administration has treated the hemisphere as central to supply chains and security, and built actual architecture: Pax Silica, a State Department-led effort to secure critical-minerals and technology supply chains among trusted partners, and the Shield of the Americas, a regional security coalition for coordinated action against cartels. Regional partners have signed on, including some of the hemisphere’s largest economies .

The diplomatic results have been tangible. Panama announced its exit from China’s Belt and Road Initiative just days after Rubio’s early-2025 visit — a signal that Beijing’s foothold in a country that hosts one of the world’s most vital trade arteries is no longer taken for granted. And the political map has changed: voters in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and elsewhere have elected right-leaning governments sympathetic to Washington’s agenda — a shift those countries’ own voters produced, and one Washington is entitled to welcome but should not claim as its own doing.

Most dramatic was January’s capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces in Caracas . Maduro’s record — dismantling his country’s institutions, jailing opponents, and presiding over an economy whose collapse pushed millions of his citizens northward — made his departure a defensible strategic aim, and one that prior administrations only managed to threaten. U.S. prosecutors have long alleged that his operation functioned in part as a drug-trafficking enterprise. That he is now in U.S. custody is a fact the previous administration never achieved.

Where the record falls short

On closer inspection, however, several of the op-ed’s central claims do not hold.

The fentanyl story is less flattering than told. It is true that the loss of life has been staggering — overdose deaths exceeded 100,000 a year at their peak. But the decline did not begin with this administration: deaths started falling in 2023, and 2025 marked the third consecutive annual decrease, according to provisional CDC data . Continued progress is welcome and may well owe something to the new pressure campaign. But presenting the decline as a fruit of the last two years is the kind of causal inflation that should trouble an argument confident of its merits.

Venezuela’s “liberation” is unfinished. Maduro is gone; his machine is not. The country is now run by an interim president, Delcy Rodríguez — a longtime Maduro ally installed by Venezuela’s Supreme Court — who has promised elections without setting a date. On October 22, thousands of Venezuelans marched in the first coordinated national protests in nearly two years, demanding exactly that . A policy that topples a dictator but leaves the same ruling party, army, and courts in place — with no firm path to the ballot box — has not yet delivered the “different future” it advertises. If the administration’s commitments to Venezuelan democracy are sincere, the proof will be a credible election, not an op-ed.

The oil deal is extraordinary — and not what it’s described as. In August, the White House announced 100-year concessions to 17 oil fields said to hold roughly 65 billion barrels of proven reserves .The scale is genuinely historic. But the recipient is not “an American company” in any straightforward sense: North American Blue Energy Partners is controlled by a Venezuelan businessman, Alejandro Betancourt, and the arrangement gives the U.S. government a 35 percent equity stake, veto power over board appointments, and a guaranteed share of production at cost .The contracts were awarded without competitive bidding, and experts have questioned the deal’s legality . Whatever its merits, a Washington-controlled equity stake in a hand-picked concessionaire is a strange fit for an America First foreign policy that elsewhere decries state-directed economics — and its benefits to the American people remain projections, not results.

The Panama ports claim simply doesn’t hold. The op-ed credits BlackRock with buying two Chinese-owned ports at the Panama Canal “just weeks” after Rubio’s visit. What actually happened: in March 2025, CK Hutchison reached an agreement in principle to sell its global port portfolio, including the Balboa and Cristóbal terminals, to a BlackRock-led consortium. That purchase was never completed for the Panama terminals. In February 2026, Panama’s Supreme Court ruled the concessions unconstitutional, Panama annulled them, and the state took control of the ports, installing Maersk and MSC affiliates as interim operators . Panama removed a Hong Kong conglomerate from its canal — a real achievement for U.S. diplomacy. But it was Panama’s government, not BlackRock, that did it.

The costs deserve honest accounting. Americans returning from centenary events for Fidel Castro were detained at Miami’s airport and had their electronic devices seized . Whatever one thinks of the travelers’ politics, a government that searches its own citizens for what they did abroad raises oversight questions that Congress should examine rather than wave through. The same goes for a military operation that seized a foreign head of state in his own capital — however merited the target, a step of that magnitude demands the accountability that the op-ed’s triumphal tone is designed to skip past.

The measure that matters

None of this means the strategy is wrong. Elevating the hemisphere, competing with China for influence, dismantling cartels, and pressuring dictatorships are defensible aims, and much of the work has been competent. The error is in the accounting: an administration asking Americans to judge its foreign policy by results should not ask them to accept, as results, a falling overdose rate it inherited, a regime change that hasn’t yet changed the regime, an oil deal whose benefits are still theoretical, and a port purchase that never happened.

The verdict on this policy is still open — and it will be written not in op-eds but in outcomes: a firm election date in Caracas, transparent oil revenues that actually reach Venezuelans, a continued decline in the trafficking that kills Americans, and security partnerships that operate within the law and stay answerable to Congress. Those are standards the administration has set for itself. The public should hold it to them.

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