The White House set out the Trump administration’s objective to reassert U.S. control over the Americas in a new National Security Strategy unveiled on Friday.
Billing it as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — the 19th century principle that declared the Western Hemisphere a sphere of influence reserved for the United States — the NSS collects into a unitary vision several of the policies the administration has been pursuing all year, including missile strikes against alleged drug boats. But the document also contextualizes a move that’s been provoking puzzlement and outrage since October: Trump’s $20 billion bailout of the Argentinean economy.
Combined with a promise (not yet fulfilled) to nearly quadruple U.S. imports of Argentinean beef, the bailout amounted to a major intervention in a foreign country’s economic and political affairs at the direct expense of U.S. taxpayers. The intervention came as a lifeline to Trump’s ally, Argentinean President Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian and close friend of the MAGA movement. Milei’s party faced tough midterm elections in October, but it outperformed expectations — something analysts in Argentina attribute largely to Trump’s help.
The $20 billion came in the form of a currency swap line, essentially a loan straight from the U.S. Treasury that gave Argentina’s central bank access to dollars it can use to prop up its own currency. The loan, as well as the promised beef imports, drew outrage from some Republicans on Capitol Hill, who criticized the moves for straying from Trump’s stated “America First” principles.
“I am against bailing out any countries,” Sen. Rand Paul told reporters at the time. “If we had an extra $20 billion lying around, we should put it towards our own debt.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent justified the bailout in straightforwardly political terms. “We used our financial balance sheet to stabilize the government of one of our great allies in Latin America during an election,” he told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”
This justification aligns with the vision laid out in Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which makes clear that his new Monroe Doctrine, like the old one, is just as much a matter of economic influence as it is an expression of military policy. One stated goal of this policy is to foil the growing influence of “non-Hemispheric competitors” — namely, China — in the region.
But that’s a tough objective to achieve, said Monica de Bolle, an economist with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. After decades of neglect from Washington, many Latin American economies, including Argentina’s, have long-standing relationships with China.
“Now that the U.S. is trying to make its way back in, it is facing a set of countries that are deeply intertwined with China and who will not be willing to cut those ties,” de Bolle said. “Trying to force their hand is not something that’s likely to take the U.S. very far.”
So who benefits from the bailout — other than Milei? De Bolle and other economists say that the actors best positioned to take advantage of a bailout are hedge funds and other big, international investors, which are historically invested in sovereign debt from emerging markets and can quickly move around large amounts of money.
Several press reports in both the U.S. and Argentina have singled out hedge fund manager Robert Citrone, co-founder of Discovery Capital Management and a former colleague of Bessent’s, as one investor who stands to benefit from the deal. Other firms that have historically held large positions in Argentinean debt include BlackRock and Pimco. The Financial Times, meanwhile, reported that several London-based hedge funds posted substantial profits from investments in Argentina in the wake of the bailout.
Although the bailout helped Milei politically, many Argentineans remain skeptical.
At a wholesale market on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Ana Noble, a small-business owner, said many people are struggling economically even after Milei’s reforms. And the U.S. bailout would do nothing to help, she said.
“That’s for financial speculators,” she said. “That’s for people who are using that money to make more money. It’s not for us, the common people.”
