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While news outlets remain hyper-focused on the Middle East, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been touring South America to build out the “Shield of the Americas” security alliance—or what I like to call the “Miami Pact.”
Sure, Saudi Arabia is a far cry from being the Middle East’s version of the United States, and Mecca certainly isn’t a skyline of high-rises and beachfront condos. But there is a parallel worth noticing.
Yet alongside the millions of working-class immigrants who moved to the U.S. from Mexico and Latin America over the decades, America has also welcomed a distinct wave of wealthier, highly educated transplants, many of whom settled in Miami.
Those communities helped turn Miami into something more than another American city. It became a meeting point between the United States and Latin America, a place where political, commercial, and cultural ties that might look distant on a map are often only a short drive apart.
That is why the inaugural Shield of the Americas summit was held at Trump National Doral in Miami in March.
Trump brought together 12 governments to coordinate against drug cartels and other transnational criminal groups, while also framing the coalition as a response to foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere. China was an obvious part of that second argument.
Six months later, the shield is becoming less of a diplomatic logo and more of an operating concept.
The final stop of Rubio's South American tour was Peru, which joined the coalition after the secretary of state met with President Keiko Fujimori in Lima. Peru follows Colombia and Ecuador as Washington's latest security partner in a regional effort built around intelligence sharing, counter-narcotics operations, and cooperation against transnational criminal organizations.
Rubio posed the question himself before answering it.
"What is it a shield against?" he asked, describing threats to the sovereignty of independent nations and criminal groups that, in his telling, can have more money and better military equipment than the states trying to contain them. "That is unacceptable, and the only way to defeat it is to confront it forcefully."
Peru is one of the world's major cocaine-producing countries, and Fujimori is positioning her government as another conservative partner willing to deepen counter-narcotics ties with Washington.
"For those of us who have had to face terrorism," Fujimori said, "we know how difficult it is now to confront a criminality that does not respect borders." Peru's experience of fighting the Shining Path insurgency gives that argument some domestic context. The government is not being asked to confront the problem of organized violence for the first time.
But the shield is doing more than stopping drugs.
Peru's trade with China rose 35% in the first half of this year, surpassing its trade with the United States, according to Reuters. Chinese companies have also become deeply involved in Peru's mining and infrastructure sectors. For Washington, a coalition that brings Lima closer on security while Beijing becomes more important to the Peruvian economy is a useful arrangement—precisely because those two relationships don't have to cancel each other out.
That tension is visible elsewhere along Rubio's route.
In Colombia, Rubio met with President Abelardo de la Espriella and discussed deeper cooperation against armed groups and drug trafficking. Bogota has also moved toward restarting aerial eradication of coca, with the government approving a pilot program using glufosinate-ammonium on up to 1,000 hectares. The move comes after coca cultivation reached a record 261,000 hectares in 2024, according to UN figures.
Ecuador offers an even clearer picture of where the shield can lead once it leaves the conference room.
U.S. forces have been operating with Ecuadorian authorities against vessels Washington says support drug trafficking networks linked to Los Choneros. In several recent operations, American personnel boarded suspected floating refueling stations in the eastern Pacific, removed their crews, and transferred them to Ecuadorian authorities before sinking the vessels. U.S. Southern Command says the operations are part of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.
The Ecuadorian government has defended the operations as part of joint investigations. Families of some crew members, however, say the men were fishermen and that no drugs were found aboard their vessels. The dispute is precisely the sort of problem that becomes harder to resolve once military force enters what was previously treated as a law-enforcement matter.
That is where the Miami Pact acquires its second meaning.
The word "shield" suggests protection. But a shield also has an operator, a direction, and a decision about what it is being held against. Washington says the answer is organized crime and threats to national sovereignty. The same framework increasingly brings China, migration, and U.S. strategic access into the conversation.
For governments such as Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, the attraction is straightforward. Washington brings intelligence, military capabilities, equipment, and access to a security apparatus that individual governments cannot easily replicate. For the United States, cooperation creates partners willing to act on problems that Washington increasingly treats as part of its own national security.
That bargain also explains why the protests in Lima matter, even if they do not determine policy.
Demonstrators accused Rubio of consolidating an alliance of right-wing governments under Trump and warned against growing U.S. military involvement. Their objection was not really about the architecture of the shield. It was about who gets to hold it.
That question is unlikely to disappear. The United States can offer Latin American governments something China cannot offer in quite the same form: a security partnership backed by American military power. China, meanwhile, offers trade, infrastructure, and investment without asking governments to align their security policies with Washington.
The Miami Pact therefore has an unusually American contradiction at its center. It is presented as a coalition designed to defend the sovereignty of its members, but its effectiveness depends on those members allowing Washington deeper access to their security decisions.
A shield is useful only if someone is holding it. The question now is how much of the hemisphere wants to hold it, and how much wants to decide where it points. Starting with the upcoming elections in Brazil, that will be the continent's decision.
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