David E. Sanger

as the big player in the region.

And there's been some debate about why that is.

Some people think it was the work of Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, who's trying to negotiate trade deals with China.

He doesn't want to particularly anger them before President Trump's scheduled visit to Beijing in April.

But what it certainly does is it suggests the U.S.

is going to boot out anybody who it thinks shouldn't be there.

Well, in some cases, the president has declared he wants Chinese companies physically out of, say, the Panama Canal, where he exaggerated the control of the Chinese military, which has very little presence there.

But what he really means is that by expanding the American economic presence, by making sure that everyone in the region buys American products and runs on American operating systems,

that basically he would squeeze out the Chinese and other competitors.

And of course, you travel in Latin America.

What do you see?

You see Huawei phones.

You see Chinese 5G networks.

And it's those areas where I think the president wants to get that replaced with American hardware and software.

There is certainly a split in MAGA world about isolationism and interventionism.

And there are a lot of the president's followers who would like to just build big walls around the continental United States, maybe include Hawaii and Alaska in that, and basically say, everybody stay away and we're not going to mess in your business.

You saw MAGA members who were opposed to taking out the nuclear facilities in Iran.

The president basically told them to sit down and shut up while he bombed them and then came home.

But what we're discussing in Latin America is really pulling MAGA apart here because they see in our conflicts over the boats, in the president's promise repeated just this week that there would be land strikes, that we could end up in forever wars in our own neighborhood.

Well, one possibility of what we get out of it is basically a spheres of influence kind of organization of the world, something we haven't really seen since the late 1800s.