It was an observation so dismissive that it has since become shorthand for relations between the United States and Latin America, though it is rarely quoted in full. In 1971, Richard Nixon told Donald Rumsfeld, by way of a primer on foreign policy, that ‘the only thing that matters in the world is China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter. Consciously, people don’t give one damn about Latin America now’. Over 50 years later, little had changed when the 47th president of the United States chose to reiterate a similar sentiment: ‘We don’t need them; they need us.’ It was the manner of the delivery – by turns grandiose and petty – that revealed something interesting: Donald J. Trump may be more a creation of the Americas than he would like to believe.

Much has been made of Trump’s clickbait presidency, a product of this age of reality television that helped guide him to the White House. His now infamous meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, which should have taken place in camera, signed off with what sounded like a catchphrase: ‘This is going to be great television.’ The recent quixotic stance on tariffs – ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’ – has made the import tax both a moral and diplomatic issue again. And yet, given Trump’s lack of constancy and an uncanny ability to live in the moment, any policy can be open to reversal. It might come as a surprise, though not to those better acquainted with the history of the western hemisphere, that Trump tends to comport himself, both politically and culturally, as a Latin American politician.

Early this year, Mike Waltz, then the United States’ national security advisor-designate, set out the administration’s vision in saloon-bar fashion: ‘This is about reintroducing America in the western hemisphere, whether that is taking on the cartels, the Panama Canal, Greenland, the “Gulf of America” – which I love, I’m waiting to see the maps redrawn. You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but this is all part of the America First agenda and it’s been ignored for far too long.’ Though Steve Bannon was more succinct (not to say unnerving) in his formulation: ‘Monroe Doctrine 2.0 meets American fortress meets Manifest Destiny.’

It is in the context of the ‘Western Hemisphere Idea’ that Trump’s presidencies should be seen. In a letter written to Alexander von Humboldt in 1813, Thomas Jefferson first gave voice to the notion that the ‘European nations constitute a separate division of the globe’ (in which the United States should never engage); whereas America ‘has a hemisphere to itself… its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe’. It was this idea of Pan-Americanism – Jefferson had already exchanged philosophies with that most universal of Americans, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda – that percolated through Latin America.

By 1823, the Monroe Doctrine finally became manifest, the result of a convergence of US and British interests against French expansion. The doctrine sought to shore up the Americas against future colonisation by European powers. Indeed, one of its basic principles was that the recognised republics were proscribed from ‘future colonization by any European power’. By the beginning of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt ushered in a ‘Corollary’ to the doctrine, which allowed the United States to ‘exercise international police power in “flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence”’. Roosevelt, another president partial to an aphorism, underpinned his foreign policy with the telling line ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’.

That Trump can be myopic in his view of Latin America is to be expected. His recent policy objectives – to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal, restore Cuba to the state-sponsored-terrorism list, and rebrand the Gulf of Mexico (though not América) – seem a bizarre and somewhat high-handed combination of the thornier aspects of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. His position in relation to the region remains Janus-like: engagement coupled with uninterest. The executive order that he signed in 2017 to build a wall along the country’s Mexican border was what Freudians might term a ‘protective shield’ (Reizschutz): a distancing mechanism from a region with which the United States shares a common history. And yet, despite this, he has favoured those Latin American leaders in whom he sees something of himself.

The Latin American obsession with the caudillo (‘strongman’ or ‘chief’) can be traced back to the military leaders in the wars of independence, if not further back to the conquistadors. The Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz, believed these men to have taken ‘over the state as if it were medieval booty’. The ‘liberator’ was the ‘image of the “Spanish American dictator”… in embryo’. The 21st-century iterations of this type can be seen in three of Trumps’s favourite Latin American presidents: Javier Milei (Argentina), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador) and Daniel Noboa (Ecuador).

Trump has spoken openly about his ‘favourite president’, Javier Milei. In him, he sees a cultural ally, a contrarian not afraid to speak out. The Argentinian is an adherent of anarcho-capitalism, with a deep-seated animus for the state and its political elites. Moreover, he sees himself as a warrior on the front lines of the culture war, which he believes to be rooted in the very Marxism he loathes.

Unfortunately, a lack of diplomacy, or plain tactlessness, has been misconstrued as honesty. Milei’s insults – at odds with an over-formality inherent in Spanish-American culture – are despatched with alacrity. Economists who fail to agree with his policies are called ‘econochantas’ (‘econo-frauds’). He called the ex-president of Mexico ‘ignorant’. Not content with describing the prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, as an ‘arrogant socialist’, he went after his wife with the epithet ‘corrupt’.

Unlike the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerilla movement, whom Milei called a ‘murdering terrorist’, Trump has found an ally, or deportation partner, in El Salvador’s Bukele. The swaggering self-styled sobriquet – the ‘world’s coolest dictator’ – is a Trumpian formulation. Bukele may have turned his country into one of the safest in Latin America, partly through his policy of incarceration, but the ‘crackdown’ is fast becoming a purge. The construction of the region’s largest maximum security prison, CECOT, has started to attract labels such as ‘concentration camp’ and ‘gulag’. Where these hard-line policies are enacted, human rights abuses will duly follow.

Noboa’s recent re-election in Ecuador has been put down to the ‘Trump effect’. During the election campaign, Noboa was a guest of the United States president at Mar-a-Lago, which demonstrated the kind of access he has to the White House. With Ecuador having transformed itself from one of the safest countries in the region to the most dangerous (it has the highest homicide rates), Noboa may turn out to be a less successful authoritarian than Bukele. He nevertheless sees himself as a ‘terrible’ enemy to have. Not that he has sought to make friends with other leaders in the region. He has been unguarded in assessing his fellow presidents’ shortcomings: Petro is a ‘left-wing snob’, Milei seems ‘full of himself (which is very Argentinian)’, and Bukele is ‘arrogant and only seeks to control power for himself and to make his family rich’.

This regional factionalism, presented by verbal mudslinging, is nothing new. When, in the early 2000s, Argentina suffered the kind of financial meltdown that only stems from over a century of political and economic mismanagement, the country became toxic in the eyes of its neighbours. Such was the ill-feeling engendered by the crisis that the then president of Uruguay, Jorge Batlle, fulminated: ‘Do not compare Argentina with Uruguay… [the Argentines are] a den of thieves from the very top to the bottom.’ Twenty years later, at the 30th anniversary of the South American trade bloc Mercosur, there was an ill-tempered exchange with Argentina, when Uruguay pushed for more flexibility to negotiate free trade agreements. ‘If we are a burden, take another boat’, was the Argentinian president’s caustic response.

For the moment, Trump’s relationships remain expedient, but, as his cooling partnership with Elon Musk demonstrates, are unlikely to stay the course. Other Latin American governments – especially Peru, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela – will have to chart the choppy waters between China’s strategy for the region and Trump’s changeability. The $3.5 billion Chinese ‘mega-port’ at Chancay in Peru has already incurred the Trump administration’s indignation and is likely to attach vertiginous tariffs for any Latin American user. Yet China has only sought to fill the vacuum in the region left by a succession of US administrations.

The United States’ recent protectionist trade policy will be familiar territory for Latin Americans, who had to endure the nightmare decades (from the 1930s to the 1980s) of import substitution industrialisation (ISI) to protect domestic industries against the competitiveness of foreign goods. Heavy borrowing to fund rapid industrialisation finally led to a dramatic collapse under unsustainable debt and chronic ineptitude. Not that the United States will suffer similar misfortunes (no country of such economic importance has implemented ISI as a strategy), but its effect on the country’s neighbours will be marked.

The postmodernist Robert Coover once called the ‘Boom’ in Latin American literature the ‘region’s headiest and most dangerous export’; he was reviewing a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. The recent death of the Peruvian Nobel laureate sees the end of a generation of Latin American writers who sought to understand their uncertain democracies and counter the authoritarian strain inherent in the region (especially through that very Latin American literary genre: the dictator novel).

Vargas Llosa understood the significance of a Trump presidency early. In 2016, he reasoned, ‘[The United States] is too important a country… to have in the White House a clown, a demagogue, a racist, like Mr Trump.’ He thought the triumph of Trump, the triumph of populism; one that negated the best traditions of the United States, which had allowed the country to become the world’s greatest power. He saw Trump’s election as in part national suicide. At the beginning of his novel Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa has his protagonist ask the unforgiving question: ‘At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?’ Might a similar question be asked of the United States in time? After all, those countries in the western hemisphere share a common history and, perhaps, common ideas.