Two hundred years after Monroe, the doctrine bearing his name has quietly flipped. It no longer describes Washington keeping outsiders out of the hemisphere; it describes the hemisphere competing for Washington's attention, on its terms, sometimes gratefully.
Nowhere was that clearer than last week's United Nations General Assembly, where Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's interim president, thanked from the podium the government whose operation unseated her predecessor, calling the oil deal that followed "one of the most all-encompassing and significant" ever signed. It is easy to caricature and hard to admire, but it is the region's new operating reality.
Countries aren't just negotiating with governments anymore; they're competing for access. Since late 2024, at least ten Latin American and Caribbean governments have registered officials as foreign agents under FARA, hiring Washington lobbyists to turn interests into deals. El Salvador's Bukele spent roughly $1.5 million over three years and walked away with an Oval Office meeting and a nuclear deal. That is political management, practiced by states.
There's another layer to this, one that's well known and carries just as much weight. Political influence in the hemisphere no longer stays inside national borders. Washington's posture toward Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia shapes electoral politics in each, and the reverse holds at home, visible in something as simple as a WhatsApp thread running from a family in Doral to grandparents in Bogotá, both watching the same clip within the hour. Cuban-Americans, over 2.6 million strong, remain the most electorally organized; Colombian-Americans (1.5 million) and Venezuelan-Americans (nearing 700,000) are among the fastest-growing.
The people who move between those worlds, running campaigns, advising governments, and managing access, are often GSPMers. You'll read about alumni who shaped Argentina's realignment directly, running digital strategy for the movement that won the presidency and managing campaigns for sitting senators. Alumni also call the shots in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador, among heads of state, ministers, ambassadors, and campaign managers. On this side of the map, our alumni are running corporate affairs for major companies, serving as chiefs of staff in congressional offices and state legislatures, and leading digital strategy for national campaigns—inside the industry, and inside the U.S. government itself. GSPM is the natural bridge to connect that talent across the Americas.
When I came to GW as a student a decade ago, this was the place leaders from Latin America came to train before they governed or before they spoke for a government. That muscle memory is still here, and so is the network. What remains is to switch it back on, deliberately.
In a world where access can be bought and doctrines can flip in a generation, the hemisphere needs people who navigate it with integrity, not just skill. GSPM has prepared them before. It is time to do it again.