US think tanks and the manufacturing of geopolitical consensus on Chinese infrastructure in Latin America
US think tanks and the manufacturing of geopolitical consensus on Chinese infrastructure in Latin America
Authors: Tamara Lajtman, Cristian Lorenzo, Silvina Romano, Fernando Estenssoro 1
Since the mid-2000s, the United States has identified China as an actor challenging the international order led by Washington since 1945. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), this process can be understood as an update of a logic that, through the construction of various “threats,” has sought to preserve US primacy in the region: from anti-communism during the Cold War, to terrorism and drug trafficking in the immediate post-Cold War era, and currently, to competition with “extra-regional actors,” particularly China. This framing has translated into a specific narrative: the Chinese presence in deep-water ports, space and satellite stations, and telecommunications networks constitutes a covert military threat to hemispheric security.
This Notebook presents a synthesis of the main findings of two studies that analyze how this narrative is constructed, sustained, and projected between 2021 and 2025, with antecedents dating back to 2010. The central argument is that the narrative of the “dual use” of Chinese infrastructure—according to which facilities financed, built, or operated by Chinese companies could be adapted for military purposes—does not refer to proven facts but operates as a performative threat: an anticipatory hypothesis that, systematically repeated by specialized think tanks and the US media, becomes a premise of foreign policy; and the justification for increased military budgets and diplomatic and military intervention in the region. 2
The argument is not new: the Reagan administration had already appealed to a similar logic to justify the invasion of Grenada in 1983, suggesting that civilian infrastructure projects were part of a Soviet-Cuban military network. What is distinctive of the recent period is the scale, systematicity, and institutional density with which this narrative is produced and circulated, in a context of declining US hegemony and a multipolar reconfiguration of the world order, characterized as a hegemonic interregnum. 3
Consensus manufacturing and critical geopolitics
The analysis draws on two complementary theoretical traditions. The first is the concept of “manufacturing consent,” developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (2000) from a critical political economy of communication perspective. This concept describes a dynamic that legitimizes and reproduces, in both material and ideological terms, a power network comprised of institutions, organizations, and public and private figures linked, directly or indirectly, to decision-making within the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). This network includes government agencies, universities, think tanks, and defense corporations, all connected through the revolving door mechanism and cross-funding. Think tanks operate there as intermediaries between political elites and public opinion: they produce interpretive frameworks that present certain worldviews as inevitable or unquestionable, and project these narratives onto concentrated media outlets, thus contributing to "structuring" information bias (Mastrini and Becerra, 2011).
The second tradition is critical geopolitics, particularly the notion of “intellectuals of statecraft” proposed by Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew (1992): experts, advisors, and analysts who, from within the state or from related institutions such as think tanks, create interpretive frameworks for the international order. These actors “spatialize” world politics, representing it through categories of places, peoples, and dramas, and fulfill the function of anticipating what should be a concern, what constitutes a risk, and what requires intervention. From this perspective, geopolitical discourses are neither neutral nor merely descriptive: they are situated constructions that express power relations and are performative, insofar as they shape perceptions of threat, guide strategic priorities, and legitimize foreign policy responses.
The articulation of both approaches allows us to distinguish three interrelated analytical dimensions, which also organize the empirical corpus of this research: a practical geopolitics, linked to the strategies and declarations of state decision-makers—in this case, primarily the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM); a formal geopolitics, associated with the interpretive frameworks produced by universities, research centers, and think tanks; and a popular geopolitics, which refers to the dissemination and naturalization of these narratives through mass media, both international, regional, and local. These three dimensions do not function in isolation but are articulated through mechanisms of circulation and feedback.
Based on this conceptual synthesis, we propose the notion of “strategic suspicion” to characterize the representation of China that emerges from this framework: a suspicion that does not require conclusive evidence to produce concrete political effects; that turns anticipatory hypotheses—what China “could” do with certain infrastructure—into legitimate and actionable premises of foreign policy.
A brief methodological note
The two studies summarized here combine a deductive and inductive qualitative approach, supported by content analysis and source triangulation. The empirical corpus includes official documents from the Southern Command and the United States Congress (hearings, testimonies, and annual posture statements); extensive reports and policy briefs published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the RAND Corporation, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA); books and articles on strategic analysis; and international and regional media coverage featuring experts affiliated with these institutions.
The period analyzed extends from 2021—when the concept of “dual use” was explicitly incorporated into official Department of Defense documents and testimonies from Southern Command under the Biden administration—to June 2025, with particular attention to the first months of Trump’s second term, marked by tensions surrounding the Panama Canal. The evolution of Southern Command’s discourse since 2010 is also reconstructed to account for the process of progressive securitization of Chinese infrastructure in the region.
The sources were systematized and thematically coded according to categories derived from the theoretical framework, which made it possible to map a power network composed of institutions, organizations and personalities linked —directly or indirectly— to the US CIM, and to reconstruct their institutional, personal and media connections.
The power network: defense-focused think tanks
The research identified four US think tanks with the greatest influence on building this consensus: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, founded in 1921), the RAND Corporation (1948), the Atlantic Council (1961), and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS, 1962). In addition, on the political-business front, there is the Council of the Americas/Americas Society (AS/COA), founded by David Rockefeller and historically oriented toward promoting the neoliberal agenda in the region.
The institutional profile of these centers reveals close ties to the CIM. The RAND Corporation, funded since its inception by the Department of Defense, is the think tank that receives the most funding from the U.S. federal government: between 2019 and 2023, it received approximately $1.422 billion, of which roughly $783 million came directly from the Department of Defense. The Atlantic Council, meanwhile, receives the most funding from Pentagon contractors—just over $10 million during the same period, out of a total of nearly $39 million—followed by the CSIS, the third-largest recipient of contractor funding, with $4,1 million. The CFR receives comparatively smaller amounts from these companies—just over $2 million between 2019 and 2023, from firms such as McKinsey & Company, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Deloitte—but it includes heavyweight executives from the defense industry on its board of directors: its chairman, David Rubenstein, is a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm specializing in defense, and its members include executives from Raytheon, Leonardo Systems, and Lockheed Martin.
A recurring feature is the so-called “revolving door”: officials who move between the government, the security apparatus, and these think tanks. This doesn't necessarily imply direct instruction on their output, but it does ensure a solid and stable network between the public and private sectors. John Hamre, president of the CSIS since 2000, was Under Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997 and chaired the Defense Policy Board under four different Secretaries of Defense. Matthew Kroenig, vice president of the Atlantic Council, serves on the Congressional Commission on America’s Strategic Posture and worked at the Department of Defense and in the intelligence community under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Jason Matheny, president of the RAND since 2022, previously directed technology and national security policy at the White House National Security Council. This circulation of personnel is completed by experts who combine their role in think tanks with academic positions and direct advising to the armed forces: Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at CSIS, is a professor at the Catholic University of America and the US Foreign Service Institute, and regularly testifies before the Senate and the House of Representatives; Robert Evan Ellis, a senior associate at CSIS, is also a professor at the US Army War College; Leland Lazarus, linked to both the Atlantic Council and Florida International University, served as special assistant and speechwriter to the commander of Southern Command herself between 2021 and 2022.
This network is sustained by concrete and verifiable connections between government agencies (the Department of Defense, Southern Command, the US Congress), think tanks, universities and academic centers (Georgetown, Florida International University, Catholic University of America, US Army War College), and international and regional media outlets. The graphic reconstruction of this network—available in the article by Lajtman and Romano (2026)—allows us to visualize how a relatively small number of people and institutions concentrate the production and circulation of the “dual-use” narrative throughout the entire period analyzed.
“Dual use” in port infrastructure
The consensus on “dual use” unfolds in two specific areas: port infrastructure and space and satellite stations. In the first case, the premise shared by the think tanks analyzed is that the region’s commercial ports could, when the time comes, support military operations of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), restricting US naval access or facilitating the resupply and logistics of Chinese vessels. As early as 2021, before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a CSIS researcher warned of “several dozen agreements” signed by China to build or expand deep-water ports in the region, specifically mentioning the ports of Paranaguá (Brazil), Buenos Aires (Argentina), La Brea (Trinidad and Tobago), and Santiago de Cuba on the Atlantic coast, and the Panama Canal, Chancay (Peru), and Punta Arenas (Chile) on the Pacific coast.
The CSIS furthered this assessment by identifying 37 port projects with Chinese participation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), for which it conducted a relative risk evaluation for U.S. national security, considering two variables: the degree of U.S. dependence on each port and China's capacity to gain operational advantages during a potential crisis or armed conflict. The port of Kingston, Jamaica, operated by a Chinese state-owned company and located just 274 kilometers from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, was categorized as posing the greatest relative risk. The CFR, for its part, in its report Tracking China's Control of Overseas Ports, identified nine ports in the region with "physical potential for naval use" —that is, with berths deep enough to receive military vessels—, including Kingston, Paranaguá and Chancay (the latter, repeatedly pointed out by the CSIS as the most emblematic case of the strategic risks associated with Chinese port investment in the region), in addition to six other ports categorized with "military potential" in Mexico, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador and Chile.
Within this framework, the analyzed corpus reveals three recurring and mutually reinforcing narratives. The first is the potential for military vessel berthing: in February 2025, before the House Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Affairs, the vice president of the Atlantic Council warned that, in the event of a crisis or war, China could obstruct the passage of US warships and use deep-water ports to house PLA Navy units. The second variant is espionage capabilities: it is noted that port ownership or operation by companies like COSCO or China Merchants Port Holdings would grant detailed access to cargo manifests and inspection records, and specifically points to Chinese-made port equipment—cranes from Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry, scanners from Nuctech, and security cameras from Huawei—as potential vectors for collecting sensitive data, highlighting the case of Panama, where three hundred Huawei cameras were installed in one of the hemisphere's most strategic ports. The third variant is the risk of sabotage of trade routes: since 2021 the Panama Canal has been identified as one of the most vulnerable targets, insofar as a temporary disruption would hinder the transfer of military assets between the Atlantic and the Pacific; the same reasoning extends to the Strait of Magellan, the Beagle Channel and the ports of Chancay and Manzanillo.
It is significant that even these same think tanks acknowledge that China does not maintain a permanent military presence in the region, and that an overt military use of this civilian infrastructure in a conflict scenario would be, in the words of their own reports, “risky and unlikely.” The narrative, then, rests on an unverified potential—a future possibility—rather than on actual events or direct evidence of militarization.
Space and satellite stations
The second key area of consensus on “dual use” is space. The Deep Space Station, operated by China in the province of Neuquén (Argentina) since 2017, is repeatedly presented as the paradigmatic case of a facility officially designated for scientific purposes that nevertheless harbors the potential for dual use as a tool for espionage. The concern is articulated in two dimensions. The first is limited control and the threat to sovereignty: reports from the CSIS and RAND emphasize that the bilateral agreement signed in 2012 between Argentina and China prevents the Argentine state from interfering with or inspecting the activities carried out at the station, which—they argue—enables covert military functions, given that the facility is managed by an entity subordinate to the PLA Strategic Support Force. This discourse goes so far as to portray the station as a kind of “sovereign portion of Chinese territory in Patagonia,” beyond the reach of local inspection. The second dimension links these stations to China's global military architecture, particularly the PLA's C5ISRT (command, control, computing, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting) system. According to this interpretation, the Deep Space technical infrastructure—antennas compatible with early warning and airborne interception systems—could eventually be used for counterspace operations, hypersonic missile guidance, or the deployment of anti-satellite capabilities, given the absence of domestic hypersonic defenses in the southern United States. Similar concerns have been raised about other ground stations in the region: the El Sombrero station in Venezuela, the Santiago station in Chile—formerly linked to the Swedish Space Corporation—and, more recently, a joint astronomical observatory project between the National Astronomical Observatory of China and a Chilean university in the Atacama Desert, whose development was halted by the Chilean government in April 2025 following diplomatic pressure from the United States. As in the port case, a predominant feature of this narrative is that it articulates the fear of a future and potential use —under a scientific guise— with the absence, to date, of public evidence of active military use or formal complaints by host governments.
The evolution of the Southern Command's discourse
Systematic monitoring of the Southern Command's annual testimony before the U.S. Congress between 2010 and 2025 allows us to precisely trace the trajectory of this narrative and its increasing securitization. In 2010, under Commander Fraser, the only explicit concern was China's commercial weight as the second-largest user of the Panama Canal. In 2014, with Kelly in command, concerns arose regarding infrastructure investments—including a potential alternative canal in Nicaragua—and satellite projects. From 2017 onward, under Commander Tidd, the discourse became noticeably more acute, coinciding with Panama's adherence to China's Belt and Road Initiative and the opening of the Neuquén station: it was warned that activities in space, cyberspace, and telecommunications could represent direct risks to U.S. security, and that Chinese investment in ports on both sides of the Panama Canal could allow Chinese forces to threaten vital maritime routes.
Between 2019 and 2021, under Commander Faller, the narrative became more systematic: strategically valuable Chinese infrastructure was identified in 25 countries of the region, ports and surveillance technologies were categorized as threats for military and counterintelligence use, and it was argued that the People's Republic of China sought to establish logistical infrastructure in the hemisphere to project and sustain its military power over greater distances. The point of greatest consolidation occurred between 2022 and 2024, under Commander General Laura Richardson, who explicitly and consistently introduced the term "dual use" applied to ports, the Neuquén station, and telecommunications networks, and who in public interviews even stated that most of China's space infrastructure worldwide was located "in my hemisphere," within the area of operations of Southern Command itself. Already at the beginning of Trump's second term, in 2025, Admiral Alvin Holsey reinforced the warnings about the Panama Canal and the Strait of Magellan, presented as concrete threats to the US capacity for naval withdrawal to the Indo-Pacific in case of conflict.
This process of progressive securitization is not merely rhetorical: it coincides with a sustained increase in requests for funding for security programs and military assistance in the region. For fiscal year 2025, $584,9 million—26,5% of the total—was requested for the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) program, 24,4% more than in fiscal year 2023; and $16,2 million for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, 29,5% more than in 2023.
International and regional media coverage
The geopolitical consensus on “dual use” is not confined to technical reports or legislative hearings: it is actively projected in hegemonic media outlets, which act as amplifiers of the narrative. In the context of tensions surrounding the Panama Canal in early 2025, experts from the think tanks analyzed received widespread attention: The Washington Post expressed concern about Chinese influence over one of the strategic routes for deploying US warships in contingency situations related to Taiwan; The New York Times asserted that China had used its operations in the canal to gather intelligence and conduct espionage; The Wall Street Journal celebrated the purchase, by the US investment fund BlackRock, of the ports operated by the Hong Kong firm CK Hutchison, presented as a “return of US leadership in the isthmus”; and Reuters described the same transaction as a “major victory” that would put an end to the debate on the canal’s security. Researchers from RAND and the Atlantic Council were quoted in France24 and Swissinfo to contextualize Secretary of State Marco Rubio's tour of Central America in January 2025 as part of a diplomatic offensive aimed at curbing Chinese advances in strategic infrastructure.
This same narrative was amplified by Latin American media, particularly in countries with infrastructure linked to Chinese investments, reproducing and reinforcing the security-focused interpretation produced in Washington. In Argentina, coverage of the Neuquén space base intensified in April 2024, coinciding with General Richardson's visit to the country and the announcement of a possible technical inspection of the site by Javier Milei's government; various media outlets echoed the idea that Chinese space technology had dual-use potential for military interception and guidance. In Peru, several media outlets repeated Richardson's statements about the possible use of the port of Chancay by Chinese warships, even describing it as "by its very nature, a dual-use facility." In Panama, in early 2025, regional media disseminated the idea that, even without uniformed Chinese troops, it was "almost certain" that Chinese military personnel in civilian clothing would be present at facilities related to the canal. In Chile, the suspension of the observatory project at Cerro Ventarrones was covered under the same framework of “dual use”, linking the government's halt to direct pressure from Washington.
The most alarmist claims in this media circuit tend to come from outlets linked to conservative sectors of the Cuban exile community in Florida—such as Diario de Cuba and Diario Las Américas—which have promoted the idea that Beijing is consolidating a “hemispheric espionage network” from Cuba to gather intelligence against the United States and facilitate a potential future military deployment. A significant milestone in this projection was the Hemispheric Security Conference held in Miami in May 2025, which brought together the U.S. defense establishment with political and academic consultants from the region to discuss the geopolitical challenges posed by a Chinese presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. This circulation of suspicion does not require constant media presence: it suffices for targeted interventions during highly sensitive geopolitical moments—budgetary disputes, election cycles, diplomatic tensions—to reactivate and renew the prevailing public perception of the Chinese threat, given that it is the concentrated media that sets the public agenda.
In closing: a performative threat
The main contribution of this work is to show that the narrative of the “dual use” of Chinese infrastructure functions as a versatile political tool, rather than as a verified description of facts. By transforming civilian infrastructure into potential threats—even without conclusive empirical evidence—this narrative converts speculative indications and interpretations, viewed through a security lens, into legitimate and actionable premises for foreign policy. Its function is twofold: externally, it legitimizes the United States' preventive projection of power over Latin America and the Caribbean and revives security frameworks inherited from the Cold War, presenting Washington as an indispensable guarantor of hemispheric order without the need for a constant media presence, since targeted interventions at key junctures suffice; internally, it helps justify budget increases and sustain the continuity and expansion of the U.S. Intergovernmental Communications Center (ICC).
Ultimately, this is a new grammar of threat that updates previous interpretive frameworks – anti-communism during the Cold War, the terrorist threat and drug trafficking in the post-Cold War era, and, currently, the Chinese threat – but with the same strategic objective of maintaining Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”.
The “dual-use” consensus also demonstrates remarkable versatility: it serves both to justify military assistance and cooperation, and to promote restrictions on Chinese foreign investment, or to underpin new forms of “strategic competition” in the specific field of critical infrastructure. The resurgence of rhetoric evoking a new Cold War, and the insistence on still hypothetical conflict scenarios, place Latin America and the Caribbean in an ambiguous position: between the risk of becoming a new theater of confrontation between powers and the—always contested—opportunity to negotiate greater margins of regional autonomy.
Key points for discussion
- What are the implications, for the sovereignty and decision-making of Latin American and Caribbean countries, that
Much of the diagnosis regarding their own critical infrastructure is prepared by actors
external parties linked to the CIM of another State? - How to distinguish, in the regional public and academic debate, between security risks
effectively based on evidence and pre-constructed narratives that operate
such as “performative threats”? - How does the uncritical circulation of these narratives in local media condition the
bilateral negotiations between countries in the region and China, and what margins of autonomy they have
Are there any resources available to cope with that pressure? - What can be learned from the analysis of consensus manufacturing—as a dynamic of
production of common sense favorable to certain structural interests—to think
What are other contemporary geopolitical disputes in the region, beyond the Chinese case? - How could Latin American and Caribbean countries develop their own geopolitical analysis capabilities and
critical infrastructure risk assessment, which does not depend exclusively on the
diagnoses produced by American think tanks?
Highlighted
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. 2000. The Guardians of Liberty. Barcelona: Crítica. Estenssoro, F. (2026). Two reasons for US pressure on Latin America during the hegemonic interregnum: Natural resources and access to Antarctica. Encrucijada Americana, 18(1), 113–134. https://doi.org/10.53689/ea.v18i1.319
Lajtman, Tamara; Lorenzo, Cristian; and Estenssoro, Fernando. 2026. “Strategic suspicion: US think tanks and the geopolitical consensus on Chinese infrastructure in Latin America.” Si Somos Americanos. Revista de Estudios Transfronterizos 26: 1–22. https://doi.org/10.61303/07190948.v26i.1270
Lajtman, Tamara and Romano, Silvina. 2026. “The United States and the Manufacturing of Geopolitical Consensus on Chinese Infrastructure in Latin America.” URVIO, Latin American Journal of Security Studies 44: 70-89. https://doi.org/10.17141/urvio.44.2026.6620
Mastrini, Guillermo, and Becerra, Martín. 2011. Structure, concentration and transformations in the media of the Southern Cone of Latin America. Revista Comunicar, XVIII (36), 51-59. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid and Agnew, John. 1992. “Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy”. Political Geography 11 (2): 190-204.
*This work was carried out with the support of the CNPq, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Scientific and Technological – Brazil
- Tamara Lajtman: University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Cristian Lorenzo: Austral Center for Scientific Research (CADIC) – (CONICET), Argentina. Silvina Romano: National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Fernando Estenssoro: University of Santiago, Chile (USACH). All four are members of the CLACSO Working Group “Geopolitics, Regional Integration and the World System”. ↩︎
- This Notebook synthesizes and brings into dialogue the results of two co-authored research projects: Lajtman, Tamara; Lorenzo, Cristian and Estenssoro, Fernando (2026), “Strategic suspicion: US think tanks and the geopolitical consensus on Chinese infrastructure in Latin America”, Si Somos Americanos. Revista de Estudios Transfronterizos, 26, 1-22, https://doi.org/10.61303/07190948.v26i.1270; and Lajtman, Tamara and Romano, Silvina (2026), “The United States and the manufacture of the geopolitical consensus on Chinese infrastructure in Latin America”, URVIO, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios de Seguridad, 44, 70-89, https://doi.org/10.17141/urvio.44.2026.6620. It is recommended to read it to delve deeper into the empirical evidence, methodology and the complete citation apparatus, as well as Figure 1 by Lajtman and Romano (2026), which graphically reconstructs the power network analyzed in this text. ↩︎
- The hegemonic interregnum refers to a period of decline of the United States as hegemon of the international system and the pre-configuration of a new, likely multipolar, order guided by the rise of China as a great power. The concept is inspired by Antonio Gramsci, who points out that the crisis of hegemony consists of the fact that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (as cited in Estenssoro, 2026: 116). ↩︎
