Donald Trump intends to create a defensive line to establish a commercial blockade on foreign maritime spaces – the ports of Latin America. The objective is to prevent goods originating from China, its geostrategic arch-enemy, from being disembarked, whether they have passed through one of its manufacturing centers, or from port charges in this country, to prevent them from paying the tariffs that it will apply on the asian giant.
The surveillance of merchant berthing along the vast Latin American coastline – especially in the port enclaves of the Pacific, but also in the Atlantic, where consignments of Chinese origin could be diverted – will make it almost impossible for loopholes to arise that facilitate escapes. of the taxes with which the US threatens imports from the second global superpower.
Even so, Trump’s future team of Commerce and economic advisors advance that they will put in place a 60% tariff on any Chinese goods that dock in Latin American docks. Quite an exercise decoupling or commercial fragmentation that shows the brewing Cold War between Washington and Beijing.
The declaration of intent was revealed by Republican Mauricio Claver-Carone, perhaps the most powerful lobbyist of the Cuban-American community within the Grand Old Party (GOP); with permission from Marco Rubio, the future Secretary of State. And it has been interpreted among the chancelleries of the New Continent as an urgent containment dam against what is known as invisible hand -investor, commercial and financial- Chinese in the region, in which Xi Jinping’s regime has achieved, in exchange, extractive contracts for raw materials and preferential access to energy businesses; above all, of fossil origin.
Claver-Carone is not just any economic advisor to Trump. A personal friend of Rubio, he will be decisive in the formulation of US foreign policy towards Latin America. For which, he provides an apparent resume consistent with this task. Between 2020 and 2022 he was president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the main issuer of multilateral credits in the continental Southern Hemisphere after serving as representative of the White House before the Executive Committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from where he enabled rescues. to Argentina, Barbados and Ecuador, and renewable financial lines to Colombia and Mexico.
In Trump’s first term he was an International Affairs Advisor to the Treasury and held relevant positions in National Security with George W. Bush.
Nautical emergency flares to the south
“It is a warning shot” towards any country that “partners with China” through “any of the maritime infrastructures,” he said. Immediately, the geopolitical gaze of the region focused on Chancay, the logistics mega-pier inaugurated in early December by Xi Jinping together with his Peruvian counterpart, Dina Boluarte, and which is located about 70 kilometers from the capital, Lima. It is one of the forty ports that Beijing controls in Latin America – as well as a dozen river docks or dry anchorages – with its development financing programs, which are then repaid in returns with interest. This strategy has caused notable increases in bilateral debt with African and American countries in the last two decades.
Beijing has established a map of maritime cargoes on the Pacific coast, around the Panama Canal, where it has located several ports of Chinese capital.
The warning of Claver-Carone, who spent his youth in Madrid, is not trivial. Because he not only pointed out the operations in Chancay, but also extended them to his neighbor Brazil and “other new merchant “refuges” in other Latin American latitudes, “from Manzanillo (Mexico) to Buenos Aires.” In addition, it launches a completely unveiled threat to its southern partner of the USMCA – the North American Nafta 2.0 that Trump himself reset during his first stay in the White House – which has granted several of the port concessions – between Ensenada, on the northern coast of Baja California, bordering the border with the United States, and Lázaro Cárdenas, to the south of its Pacific coast or Veracruz, in the Caribbean Sea of the Atlantic slope – that China has acquired in the region.
Port facilities are becoming authentic black swans of international geopolitics. They have ceased to be mere loading and unloading centers that make goods flows cheaper. The increasingly pressing crisis of globalization and its risks of bankruptcy in two commercial blocs – led by the US and China – of the free trade transit model have transformed its facilities not only into hubs logistics, but in security complexes, with naval bases attached to their territories, energy centers where fossil fuels and clean sources converge, railway and road transport networks with service stations or clusters industrial and distribution sectors of the most varied sectors.
In an increasingly tense world, with geopolitical risks and economic rivalries that are intertwined with processes of automation, technological innovation and energy transition and that require port authorities to reconvert their businesses to align them with the course of a shaky globalization. Through maritime trade, responsible for 80% of the 25 billion annual goods that circle the planet annually and which have been an indispensable emission focus of multipolar exchanges.
Major investments in turbulent waters
For all these reasons, investments flow towards these enclaves intensely. Until reaching an estimate of 200,000 million annually, for a total of two trillion, an amount equivalent to the Italian GDP, eighth in the world. Peter de Langen, owner of the consulting firm Ports & Logistics Advisory, based in Malaga, tells Businessweek that, “currently, the assets that ports represent from a geopolitical point of view are evident,” something that, in his opinion, “had never been the case before.” In reference to the “complex geostrategic games that they must use if they wish to put their commercial ambitions into practice and exert their influence in volatile areas with high labor, climatic or economic risks.”
It is no coincidence that Xi Jinping said a few years ago that a prosperous nation “must start with the construction of ports.” And China has followed its designs to the letter. Of the 10 main merchant ports in the world, seven are in the Asian giant and none in Europe or America, according to Lloyd’s List. Some of them, like Shenzhen, have been crucial for it to become the leading exporter of vehicles or manufacturing. “The combination of private firms, industrial zones and state-owned ports has been perfectly coordinated in China as if it were a textbook execution,” explains Jacob Gunter, of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, who attributes this port fervor to the Belt and Road Initiative. and the trillion dollars to modernize the transportation infrastructure provided by Beijing for the New Silk Road.
India is also preparing for it. Vadhvan Port, with its 9 kilometers of terminals and capacity for 23 million containers, will enter the top-ten when it is operational later this decade, after the Delhi government covers a $9 billion check, with automated terminals and fuel charges. “They cannot take the Chinese scepter of the world factory with Make in India without having megaports” says Gagan Seksaria, investment director of the Red Sea Gateway International Terminal, an operator in Saudi Arabia.
In Europe, the US has complained to Poland, a NATO partner, about the ownership of a container dock in Gdynia in the name of Hutchison Port Holdings, a Hong Kong emporium, which is located just 600 meters from a military shipyard that build frigates for the Alliance and in the middle of the understand cordiale between Beijing and Moscow. “The critical importance of maritime infrastructure on global trade and geopolitics has never been more apparent,” admits Nicole Gorton-Caratelli, an expert at Bloomberg Economics.
While others, such as Antwerp Bruges, in Belgium, are a monument to sustainability. Its 1,400 industrial companies have embarked on a dazzling energy transition without fossil fuels, low electricity consumption and examples of a circular economy. Just like Los Angeles, which has set out to achieve net zero CO emissions2 in 2030. Or Singapore, a global commercial, logistical and financial engine at the same time, which dedicates 90% of its naval traffic to merchant transportation, thanks to its high automation.
In this geostrategic race, China has doubled its shipments to South America to increase its current maritime connectivity. And, in this tactic, Chancay has emerged, recently inaugurated, with a cost of 1.3 billion dollars and capacity for 24,000 containers that can travel directly from Asia and which represents for Peru fluid income and competitive advantages with other Latin American, American and European ports. Europeans. Although Cosco, a Chinese multinational shipping company, has set its eyes on Brazil, a founding member of the BRICS, with a common interest with Jinping in ending the commercial dominance of the dollar, and also threatened by tariff increases trumpistswhose Commerce and Treasury team see in the Peruvian pike another invisible hand of the asian giant to control intercontinental trade and logistics between the Andes and the Amazon.
No wonder: Xi Jinping wants the Peruvian port to be the hub Chinese exporter in America and its maneuver reduces the Shanghai-Chancay-Brazil route to 10 days. More than enough reason, for Brian Winter, specialist in the region of Foreign Affairswarn that, “perhaps, Latin America should be one of the priorities of the future Foreign Policy of the White House.”
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