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We welcome you to the Greater Caribbean Monitor (GCaM).
The war in Iran is being fought thousands of miles from Latin America, but anyone who believes that makes it somebody else’s problem has learned very little from history.
Iran brought its war to our hemisphere long before the first missiles of this conflict were fired. Argentina buried 85 people after the AMIA bombing in 1994, only two years after the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was destroyed. Hezbollah networks subsequently found space to operate across South America, while Chávez and Maduro opened Venezuela’s doors to Tehran and turned the Caribbean into Iran’s most valuable political foothold in America.
This is why Colombia’s decision to sever relations with Tehran matters. It reflects an understanding that sovereignty requires knowing who is operating in your neighborhood and refusing to provide hostile powers with the space to establish themselves. For too long, Latin America treated geopolitics as though distance provided immunity. It does not. Terrorist networks cross oceans, criminal organizations cooperate across borders and hostile states exploit every government foolish enough to welcome them.
The Western Hemisphere belongs to the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Iran has already demonstrated what its presence can bring when allowed to metastasize. Colombia is right to show it the door.
In this issue, you will find:
The Art of Trump’s Canada Gamble
Iran’s Final Frontier Is Falling
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The Art of Trump’s Canada Gamble
778 words | 5 minutes reading time
Donald Trump has spent years telling America’s allies that the old arrangement is over, and the cost of that has not been exactly calculated.
In perspective. In the new doctrine, Washington will remain the center of the Western alliance, but wealthy countries can no longer expect the United States to provide disproportionate amounts of their security while simultaneously accepting trade relationships Trump considers unfavorable. Canada may be demonstrating what happens when allies finally believe him. Relations between Washington and Ottawa have deteriorated dramatically, since Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of Canada becoming America’s 51st state, his administration has imposed tariffs reaching 50% on important Canadian products, and negotiations between the two governments collapsed this summer.
Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs and an increasingly urgent effort to reduce its dependence on its southern neighbor.
At first glance, this looks like an American geopolitical own goal. Look closer, however, and something more interesting is happening.
Canada is not running toward Beijing or Moscow. It is looking toward Europe, probably over what some would call trauma bonding.
How it works. Ottawa is pursuing a substantially deeper relationship with the European Union, including participation in its €150 billion SAFE defense-financing program and greater cooperation on artificial intelligence, critical minerals and education. The possibility of some unprecedented form of “associate membership” has even entered the conversation, although what such a status would actually entail remains undefined. More importantly, Canada is reconsidering how much of its security should depend upon the United States.
Ottawa has reviewed its planned purchase of 88 F-35s while considering Sweden’s Gripen as an alternative, and it selected Saab’s GlobalEye surveillance aircraft instead of American options.
There is an obvious cost to Washington whenever an American defense company loses business.
But there is another way to read what is happening: Trump has spent years demanding that America’s allies take their own defense more seriously, and Canada is now doing precisely that.
Why it matters. A Canada that invests more heavily in its military, develops alternative supply chains and strengthens its defense-industrial relationships with Europe is more autonomous from Washington, but it can also become a more capable Western ally. The United States has complained about European and Canadian dependence for decades. It cannot be entirely surprised when pressure to reduce that dependence actually produces results. This is the contradiction at the center of Trump’s Canadian gamble. America benefits from having allies strong enough to defend themselves, but it also benefits from their dependence on American power.
Canada illustrates the latter extraordinarily well. Around two-thirds of Canadian exports go to the United States, meaning geography has constructed an economic relationship that Brussels cannot realistically replace anytime soon.
Deep integration with Europe would take years because Canadian industry is already embedded in North American supply chains. Security dependence runs deeper still.
Back to the future. Since the Cold War, NORAD has effectively made the defense of Canada and the United States a single continental undertaking. Canadian territory gives early-warning systems enormous strategic depth across the Arctic, an increasingly important advantage as Russia expands its cruise-missile capabilities and develops weapons capable of approaching North America through its northern perimeter. Europe cannot change that geography. Neither can Trump nor Mark Carney.
The result is therefore unlikely to be some dramatic Canadian divorce from the United States. What Canada is seeking is optionality.
Enough alternative markets, suppliers and partners that disagreement with Washington no longer leaves Ottawa with nowhere else to go. For Trump, whether that constitutes success depends upon what comes next.
His approach to alliances has always rested on an uncomfortable proposition that previous administrations often preferred to avoid: alliances are stronger when every member has something meaningful to contribute.
In conclusion. If American pressure leaves Canada spending more on defense, protecting the Arctic more seriously and integrating with a rearming Europe, Washington may ultimately inherit a stronger partner rather than a weaker dependent. There is nevertheless a line between pressure and alienation. Canadian public opinion has deteriorated sharply toward the United States, while economic retaliation is already imposing costs on both sides. An ally that becomes more capable is valuable; an ally that begins regarding Washington itself as a strategic problem is something else entirely.
Trump has forced Canada to reconsider assumptions that had governed its relationship with America for generations.
Ironically, the Canadian response looks remarkably similar to what he has demanded from allies elsewhere: diversify, spend, build and stop assuming that Washington will always make dependence comfortable.
The success of Trump’s gamble will depend on whether, when the dust settles, America finds a resentful neighbor drifting away—or a tougher ally finally prepared to carry more of its own weight.
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Iran’s Final Frontier Is Falling
982 words | 6 minutes reading time
Colombia just severed diplomatic relations with a country almost 7,500 miles away. Geography makes the decision look ideological. History makes it considerably less surprising.
In perspective. On September 24, Bogotá announced that relations with Tehran had formally ended five days earlier, citing national and hemispheric security, transnational crime and alleged Iranian links with international terrorist and narcoterrorist organizations. The same day, Colombia designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, describing its covert operations beyond Iranian territory as a threat to international security.
The decisions represent an extraordinary reversal in Colombian foreign policy, but they also recognize something South America has learned painfully over the last three decades.
Iran may be geographically distant from the Western Hemisphere, but its confrontation with the West has never remained confined to the Middle East. Argentina learned that first.
Back to the future. In 1992, a bombing destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. Two years later, another bomb demolished the AMIA Jewish community center, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds in the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. In 2024, Argentina’s highest criminal court formally concluded that the AMIA attack had been carried out by Hezbollah under a strategic directive from Iran, while Tehran continues to deny responsibility. Last year, an Argentine judge ordered an in absentia trial for ten suspects, including former senior Iranian officials and Hezbollah-linked figures who have remained fugitives for decades.
Those attacks should have permanently changed the way Latin America understood Iranian power projection.
Instead, the following decades allowed Tehran to develop something considerably broader than isolated terrorist operations.
Venezuela, then, became central to that strategy.
How it works. Under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, relations between Caracas and Tehran evolved into one of Iran’s most important political partnerships outside the Middle East. What Iran gained was not simply another friendly vote in international organizations, but access to a government strategically located in the Caribbean and openly hostile to Washington. Political cooperation expanded alongside commercial, aviation and security relationships, embedding Tehran inside a regional network of governments that regarded opposition to the United States as a common cause. Hezbollah, meanwhile, developed a different kind of footprint.
The Triple Frontier connecting Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay has faced scrutiny for decades over networks linked to Hezbollah financing and support.
Investigations elsewhere have demonstrated that the organization’s South American presence cannot simply be dismissed as a relic of the past.
Brazil’s Operation Trapiche, launched in 2023, investigated an alleged Hezbollah network accused of recruiting people to identify and attack Jewish and Israeli targets inside the country.
Why it matters. For years, discussions about Iranian influence in Latin America were often trapped between two equally inadequate interpretations. One imagined an Iranian operative hiding behind practically every mosque or commercial relationship; the other treated concern about Tehran as Washingtonian paranoia imported into a region with more immediate problems. The historical record permits neither luxury. Iran does not need armies stationed across South America to exercise influence there. Its model has relied on relationships with sympathetic governments, intelligence activity, financial networks and partners such as Hezbollah capable of operating far beyond Iran’s borders.
Not every Iranian diplomatic or commercial activity belongs to that architecture, but Buenos Aires demonstrated with 85 dead bodies why governments cannot afford to pretend the architecture does not exist.
Colombia is now explicitly treating the issue as hemispheric security rather than Middle Eastern foreign policy. That language fits a much larger transformation occurring across the Americas.
What now. Maduro, Iran’s most valuable regional partner, is gone. Javier Milei has aligned Argentina firmly with Washington and Israel while reopening the pursuit of accountability for AMIA. Colombia has moved dramatically closer to the United States under Abelardo de la Espriella; Marco Rubio visited earlier this month for talks centered partly on regional security, while Bogotá and Washington signed new agreements involving critical minerals and civilian nuclear energy. Colombia’s rupture with Tehran therefore looks less like an isolated diplomatic decision and more like another piece of an emerging hemispheric doctrine.
Washington increasingly sees the Western Hemisphere as a single strategic theater in which cartels, hostile states, terrorism and foreign penetration can overlap without necessarily being the same threat.
The Trump administration’s renewed emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine reflects that worldview: problems thousands of miles away become American security problems when adversarial powers establish operational, political or economic footholds close to home.
Iran provides perhaps the clearest historical justification for taking that possibility seriously.
Yes, but. Its relationship with Latin America was never comparable in scale to China’s enormous commercial presence or Russia’s political and military relationships. Iran instead demonstrated how a relatively distant power could exploit ideological alliances, permissive governments and transnational networks to project influence into America’s backyard at remarkably low cost.
And the Middle Eastern war has made the stakes considerably harder to ignore. Colombia cited Iran’s obstruction of nuclear inspections and the blockade of Hormuz alongside its concerns about terrorism when severing relations.
Tehran’s ability to disrupt energy markets thousands of miles away already demonstrates how geographical distance has become a poor measure of strategic relevance.
In conclusion. South America has an additional reason to understand this lesson: it has already buried the victims. More than three decades have passed since the attacks in Buenos Aires, yet Argentine courts are still pursuing the men accused of organizing them. Iran’s regional relationships subsequently expanded rather than disappeared, while Hezbollah-related investigations continued surfacing long after AMIA faded from international headlines.
Colombia’s message this week is consequently larger than Iran. Latin America spent much of the post-Cold War era imagining itself sufficiently distant from the world’s major geopolitical conflicts to avoid becoming one of their battlegrounds.
Buenos Aires proved otherwise in 1992 and 1994. Venezuela demonstrated how quickly an extra-hemispheric power could acquire a political foothold when invited by a sympathetic government.
Bogotá appears determined not to relearn either lesson the hard way.
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