The Pan-American Network

A Hemispheric Strategy

By guest author Rory McIlroy.

Extending the Trump administration’s reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine and its wholesale renegotiation of the global order, the United States must develop new political and organizational doctrines to consolidate its strategic position, recalibrate the national consensus on immigration toward restriction, and safeguard domestic and near-shore sources of critical raw materials and manufacturing capacity. This essay asserts that these objectives are deeply interconnected from both an American and hemispheric perspective and, if properly pursued, could benefit all countries within the Western Hemisphere. This new imperative is sound not only on its material and strategic merits but may also serve as a source for ideological cohesion within the post-Trump MAGA movement and the future Republican Party. As historian Greg Grandin observed in a recent New York Times op-ed:

For presidents of both parties, Latin America has served as a wellspring of perpetual reinvention and the source of much of their ideological creativity. This is especially true for what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls “reconstructive” presidents, leaders who work to build new political orders and restore political legitimacy after periods of acute crisis.¹

Before outlining such a hemispheric strategy, it is essential to examine the shared political and revolutionary history of the Americas (as well as past efforts at regional integration), since this history provides critical context for understanding both the opportunities and the limits of coordinated action today. Drawing on the legacy of several nationalist thinkers throughout American history, the Pan-Americanism articulated herein stands in direct opposition both to wanton forever war and to favelization and leftist open-borders alternatives.

The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 unintentionally set into motion a chain reaction that would catalyze and nurture nearly 50 years of rolling revolution across the Americas. Though typically conceived as independent phenomena, these upheavals shared strikingly similar underlying dynamics, political crises, and ideological influences. In the British North American Colonies, revolution was precipitated by fears of an encroaching mother country bent on abrogating Colonial rights as Englishmen, by more than a century of local self-governance and the growth of incipient nationalism among Colonial elites, by the presence of imperial appointees who were often antagonistic toward Colonial interests (and resented for monopolizing offices), and by a long tradition of salutary neglect that ultimately facilitated the rupture between Britain and its Colonies.²

The Spanish American revolutions were driven by comparable forces: fears of metropolitan encroachment on Criollo (Spaniard born in the New World) rights as Spaniards, traditions of local governance and emerging Criollo nationalism, tensions with peninsular officials and exclusion from high office, and a form of salutary neglect that (while more de facto than de jure) likewise eased the eventual separation between Spain and its American possessions.³ Both Spain’s latter Bourbon Reforms and England’s Intolerable Acts sought to manage more tightly and extract wealth from their respective colonies.

A transatlantic figure who personally embodied these shared revolutionary currents was Francisco de Miranda. Traveling through the United States in the 1780s, this Venezuelan Criollo aristocrat observed the workings of the new republic, met with the Founding Fathers, and absorbed the nascent political ideals that finally bloomed during the American Revolutionary welter.⁴ His experiences helped transmit revolutionary ideology across the Americas, fortifying and foreshadowing the later independence movements in Spanish America. Through Miranda, a young captain named Simón Bolívar (widely regarded as South America’s George Washington) was positioned to assume a leading role in the Venezuelan and later Andean revolutions. A similar part was played by Colombia’s Jeffersonian analogue in Antonio Nariño. Nariño assembled what was likely the largest private library in South America, collected busts of Washington and Jefferson, organized clandestine political gatherings among fellow travelers of New Granadan high society, and personally translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man (an act for which he was imprisoned and exiled).⁵ Networks of Spanish American Criollo dissidents during the early stages of their wars utilized the young North American republic as a launchpad for revolutionary activity, and often traveled:

Restlessly amid the constellation of port cities that illuminated the East Coast: Washington and Baltimore, New York and the City of Brotherly Love itself. In the process, they spun a sprawling, underground web of agitators, one in which… other like-minded gathering places — dockyards, freethinking taverns, sympathetic printing shops — became pulsing centers of revolution. (Still more visitors, disproportionately from nearby Mexico and the Caribbean, congregated along the Gulf Coast, developing an overlapping but distinct web of contacts and focusing more consistently on privateering and territorial raids.)⁶

Recognition between American and South American revolutionaries remained evident well into the early national period of the United States. Bolivar County, Mississippi, was established by an act of the state legislature in 1836 and was named for the famed South American. Towns in Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere (largely concentrated in the American South, despite slave state concerns about a perceived hasty South American manumission) were likewise named in his honor. The name “Bolivar” itself even became a modestly common personal appellation in early America,⁷ most notably borne by Confederate general and Kentucky governor Simon Bolivar Buckner and his son, World War II general Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.

The first attempt at Pan-American collaboration occurred shortly after the Spanish American wars for independence. Conceived as the Congress of Panama, this meeting was convened by Simón Bolívar in 1826, shortly after he had completed and promulgated his centralist (and notably undemocratic) Bolivian Constitution in its namesake state and across other newly independent republics. Often portrayed as a doctrinaire egalitarian, the development of Bolívar’s political thought signaled less the outlook of a committed social reformer than the calculations of a leader intent on foreclosing any possibility of pardocratia or degeneration of democracy into mass and rancorous multi-ethnic rule.⁸

Although Bolívar consistently maintained and “had always made it clear that the continent could not function as a single, integrated country; the landmass was too sprawling, the population too diverse,”⁹ his lingering idealism nevertheless led him initially to exclude the United States and Brazil, citing the former’s recently proclaimed Monroe Doctrine and the latter’s Monarchy (and their lack of shared Spanish heritage) as being disqualifying. It was instead Gran Colombia’s Vice President Francisco de Paula Santander, more closely attuned to the imperatives of pragmatic foreign policy, who recognized the strategic value of broader hemispheric integration and extended invitations to both countries, an act of insubordination that Bolívar nonetheless chose to tolerate. Although one of the United States’ delegates died en route to the conference and the other arrived only as it was ending, the hemispheric vision more closely aligned with Santander and then-Secretary of State Henry Clay¹⁰ would be carried forward in subsequent attempts.

Despite Bolívar’s decision not to attend the proceedings so as not to influence their outcome, the limits of Bolívar’s more utopian vision of a union “bound by common laws and protected by a single military”¹¹ were laid bare by the conference’s fruitless proceedings:

When all was said and done, the congress was a resounding failure. Delegates gathering in the stuffy Franciscan monastery in Panama’s sweltering capital had been all too eager to be done with the debate. Some were ailing, others fearful of the pestilential climate; all were anxious about the motives. The proceedings, which had been meant to go for almost two months, lasted a mere three weeks. Only Colombia ratified the empty initiatives, and nothing was done to advance Bolívar’s concept of a league of nations. The only country that made progress worth recording was England, which attended as an observer and walked away with a passel of commercial contracts.¹²

By prioritizing pragmatic diplomacy and commercial expansion over utopian institutional designs, Britain emerged as the only beneficiary from the Congress’s otherwise failure. While Britain’s commercial ascendancy in the region predated this Congress, this event served to consolidate its position as the de facto financial and security influence across much of the hemisphere for the better part of the 19th century, a role that would only gradually be assumed by the United States as its economic and strategic capacities expanded.

Several more attempts were made at hemispheric partnership throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Initially proposed in 1882, set aside, and later revived with the election of Benjamin Harrison, the initiative led by prominent Clay-acolyte and newly minted Secretary of State James G. Blaine culminated in an invitation to South American delegations to the First International Conference of American States, held in Washington from October 1889 to April 1890. Much like his childhood hero, Blaine recognized the potential for commercial hemispheric integration with Latin America. Once he ascended to the role of Secretary of State, his ideas

crystallized with remarkable speed. He moved to increase U.S. control over a future canal zone, soon came to advocate general hemispheric arbitration, and insisted on Washington’s primacy in hemisphere affairs. He envisaged a system of American states in which the United States was the final arbiter, territorial conquest was a thing of the past, and a peaceful Latin America could grow in wealth and stability.¹³

Rejecting both imperialism and underdevelopment, Blaine envisioned commerce and U.S.-led arbitration as the two best guarantors of hemispheric stability. Although the summit produced no substantive agreements (owing in part to a disorganized American caucus and concerns among the Latin American republics about foreclosing future European ties) it nevertheless laid the groundwork for an eventual chartering of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948. In the interim between Blaine and the creation of the OAS, eight additional hemispheric meetings were held as the United States consolidated its position as the preeminent protector of the Western Hemisphere. This status was reinforced by clear-cut achievements (most notably the construction of the Panama Canal and the removal of European powers from the region), but it also entailed heavy resource commitments and prolonged military occupations. The Coolidge and Hoover administrations subsequently scaled back interventionist policies in an effort to strike a more prudent balance, though the 1932 election redirected U.S. policy toward Latin America along a markedly different course.

After FDR’s election, his administration’s “Good Neighbor Policy” marked an idealistic turn toward the opposite end of the interventionist spectrum earlier that century. While the policy resonated rhetorically as a gesture of hemispheric “neighborliness,” the most left-wing elements of the New Deal used this concept to advance anti-market policies in the region, which coincided with movements that, according to a recent testimonial for Radical Sovereignty by Tony Wood, moved “effortlessly between Moscow, Mexico City, Havana, and more.”

Much as Bolívar’s hemispheric dream collapsed by 1826, the limits of this arrangement were later exposed by the United States’ necessary pivot toward a more protective Cold War strategy in Latin America, as well as by the eventual unraveling of the New Deal coalition itself on the altar of egalitarianism.¹⁴ In a similar vein, comparable language included in the OAS’s charter has likely contributed to the organization’s mixed record and lack of consistent results. Even today, the contemporary darlings of Grandin’s preferred “social democratic” tradition mentioned in his 2025 book America, América — Claudia Sheinbaum and Gustavo Petro — have presided over the worsening or outright expansion of cartel/guerilla control in their respective countries, with Petro further embroiled in scandal over alleged ties to FARC dissidents.¹⁵ Having previously oscillated between competing poles, a coherent hemispheric policy must now reorient itself toward economic cooperation, public safety, and tangible results along the Clay–Blaine line.

The Western Hemisphere now faces a range of unresolved threats in the 21st century. A review of projected U.S. Census figures is sobering, particularly when contrasted with the country’s relative demographic homogeneity even just a decade ago. Although career prospects for early-career professionals remain bleak, the U.S. economy is strong enough to obscure the growing polarization of the electorate, as evidenced by the partisan social media reactions and occasional triumphalism toward the death of Charlie Kirk. Contrary to Abundance-style delusion, the contemporary Democratic Party’s central organizing principle revolves around racial grievance politics. This extends from policy to factional maneuvers like efforts to truncate or block a competitive 2024 primary, and to the Congressional Black Caucus’s stance that, if Biden exited the race, they “would accept no option other than Vice President Kamala Harris.”¹⁶ At the same time, voter support within the party for socialism jumped from +7 in 2010 to +24 today per a September 8, 2025, Gallup poll, marking a devolving ideological climate.¹⁷ While anti-White rhetoric has unfortunately become a feature of Democratic campaigning, New York City’s recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, drew renewed attention to the issue by explicitly framing a proposed tax policy around increasing burdens on what his platform described as “richer and whiter” neighborhoods, presenting the measure as a corrective to “structural inequities.”

Shifting our view southward, many of the political dynamics emerging in the United States have long been familiar to South American Criollos. For decades, left-populist and insurgent movements (such as Venezuelan Chavismo and Peru’s Shining Path) have articulated their projects in anti-White¹⁸ and anti-Western terms, framing political legitimacy around opposition to Colonial and Criollo inheritance. Similarly, liberation theology movements like Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement recast Christian theology in parallel forms of political ideology by reframing religious doctrine as a tool of revolutionary struggle. Even today, the Chinese government justifies its involvement in Latin America as building a unified “Global South” alliance, an anti-concept that at its best serves only to recapitulate the dysfunction that similar Soviet ideological imports brought to the region.¹⁹ All of this occurs while China assumes increasingly assertive control of key passages in their own backyard in the South China Sea (through island fortifications and maritime claims), demonstrating how infrastructure and geography are leveraged in great power rivalry. Russia pursues similar ambitions on an albeit smaller scale, most notably through its past relationship with Venezuela (including the presence of PMC Wagner). The corrosive nature of their ideological exports is perhaps more starkly illustrated by their reception among some Western conservatives, exemplified by figures such as Tucker Carlson, who (despite fantastic work elsewhere) had unfortunately been taken in by the notion that Maduro’s rule may be brutal but is at least tough on LGTBQ. Shifting our view back north, Canada has transformed into a self-styled “Post-National” state while simultaneously serving as a permissive environment for Chinese espionage and political intrigue.²⁰ Lacking a robust conservative political tradition, Canada has increasingly become a caricatured reflection of the United States’ own political neuroses.

It is here through recognition of these shared hemispheric challenges that I propose the formation of a “Pan-American Network” as an ideological and organizational concept. In many respects, it represents the fulfillment and the synthesis of the sagacity of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, Henry Clay’s vision of commercial hemispheric integration with the United States as the “natural head of the American family,” and the Wilsonian aspiration for a “peace without victory” across the hemisphere.²¹ This network does not represent a mere recommitment to an enhanced Monroe Doctrine, nor does this concept align with Adrian Vermeule’s “Empire of Our Lady Guadeloupe.” Rather, it entails the integration of Latin America, Canada, and the United States into a consolidated hemispheric partnership. As demonstrated earlier, the hemisphere’s republics emerged in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. Although founded on similar European principles and shaped by broadly comparable historical trajectories, they all retain significant differences that make utopian designs foolhardy. What, then, might a shared Pan-American politics look like in the 21st century? While the specifics will be elaborated in future essays, its core elements include:

• Stabilizing the hemisphere’s republics as coherent political entities.

• Forms of “security populism” à la Bukele or Brazil’s Partido Missão.

• Reversing the compounding polarization seen in hemispheric electorates.

• Ending anti-White politics.

• Promoting hemispheric economic flourishing and infrastructural development.

• Removing adverse foreign ideological and economic influence from the hemisphere.

• Establishing free-trade agreements to facilitate the unimpeded flow of materials, capital, and ideas.

• Restricting immigration to and within the New World.

This framework seeks not only to preserve but to renew the foundational character of the hemisphere’s governments amid profound global transformation. That said, this network does not envision the Americas devolving into a polyglot free-trade zone. Consistent with the well-documented risks of mass immigration,²² each partner nation’s sovereignty, demography, and unique cultural heritage within this larger framework will be scrupulously respected. The cause of immigration restriction, too, has become a hemispheric concern, as citizens and governments in Chile,²³ Argentina,²⁴ Mexico,²⁵ and Colombia,²⁶ as well as America and Canada, have all expressed desire for heightened enforcement and more orderly policy. Economic growth, as well as commercial integration and infrastructural improvement, will raise hemispheric standards of living and lessen immigration pressures and gulfs between have and have-not countries in the region, especially when paired with competent public safety.²⁷

These goals will be reinforced by strong frameworks of good governance, ensuring that the hemisphere is secure for its citizens and attractive for long-term investment and growth. The Trump administration’s masterful removal of tyrant Nicolás Maduro received overwhelming approval from South Americans, while also eliminating hemispheric footholds of both China and Russia, providing a clear thematic example of how surgical intervention and a commitment to hemispheric freedom and sovereignty can peacefully coexist.²⁸ Nayib Bukele’s miraculous turnaround of El Salvador (once dubbed the “Murder Capital of the World”) has driven the country’s homicide rate down to a comparatively scant 1.3 per 100,000, earning him a deserved 90% approval rating among Salvadorans and demonstrating to other countries in the region that public safety is a matter of choice.

The “Pink Tide” of the 2000s–2010s has receded as voters increasingly prioritize effective governance, with conservatives such as Argentina’s Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, Honduras’s Nasry Asfura, and Costa Rica’s Laura Fernández (as well as anticipated right-wing victories in Colombia and Peru later in 2026) underscoring this trend. With these considerations, trends, and context considered, where will this proposed hemispheric network seek to influence policy? Perhaps a redefined OAS, or the wholesale creation of another hemispheric body? Those, too, will and should be explored further. The Pan-American Network isn’t a revolutionary or radical idea. Rather, it reflects a pragmatic effort to soften the local impacts of global dislocations in the Western Hemisphere, while safeguarding collective welfare amid potential political restructuring in the decades ahead.

1. Greg Grandin, “President Trump’s Turn Toward Latin America Isn’t Surprising,” New York Times, January 15, 2026.

2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

3. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).

4. Alexander Hamilton and Francisco de Miranda, Francisco de Miranda to Alexander Hamilton, 4 November 1792, Founders Online, National Archives.

5. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 269.

6. Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017), 49.

7. Ibid., 129.

8. Aline Helg, “Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of Pardocracia: José Padilla in Post-Independence Cartagena,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35, no. 3 (August 2003): 447–71.

9. Marie Arana, Bolívar: American Liberator (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 353.

10. Halford L. Hoskins, “The Hispanic American Policy of Henry Clay, 1816–1828,” Hispanic American Historical Review 7, no. 4 (November 1927): 460–78.

11. Marie Arana, Bolívar: American Liberator (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 353.

12. Ibid., 354–5.

13. David Healy, James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 250.

14. “THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972: Mighty Daley has struck out,” Roseland, Chicago: 1972, July 16, 2022.

15. “Archivos secretos de ‘Calarcá’: la charla con ‘Mordisco’ y señalamientos a campaña Petro presidente,” Noticias Caracol, November 23, 2025.

16. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (New York: William Morrow & Company, 2025).

17. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Image of Capitalism Slips to 54% in U.S.,” Gallup, September 8, 2025.

18. Amílcar Antonio Barreto and Diego Maldonado, “Race and Populism on the Left: Political Rhetoric in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 20, no. 3 (2024): 1–16.

19. Anna O’Connor, “China Reaffirms Commitment to Brazil and to Global Stability,” Macao News, January 26, 2026.

20. Arctotherium, “The Canadian Question: What Should the U.S. Do About Canadian Decline?” Aporia Magazine, February 12, 2025.

21. Cal Crucis, “American Archangel,” Fiat Iustitia, January 10, 2026.

22. Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).

23. “Fear of Crime and Migration Fuels Chile’s Swing to the Right,” BBC News, December 15, 2025.

24. Associated Press, “Milei orders immigration crackdown to ‘make Argentina great again,’” South China Morning Post, May 15, 2025.

25. Jorge Antonio Rocha, “‘We’re Being Pushed Out’: Gentrification Stirs Outrage in Mexico City,” Anadolu Agency (via AA News), July 30, 2025.

26. Tibisay Zea, “Latin America Tried Welcoming Migrants. Now That Model Is Under Pressure,” The World, December 10, 2025.

27. Texas A&M University Bush School of Government & Public Service, “Violent Crime Is Indeed a Root Cause of Migration, According to New Texas A&M University Study,” Bush School News, March 3, 2025.

28. Emma Bubola, “In Latin America, Loathing of Maduro Smothers Outcry Over U.S. Raid, Several Polls Show,” New York Times, January 21, 2026.