MUNICH – This weekend, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) attended the Munich Security Conference, where he met with foreign defense ministers and outlined a comprehensive North–South economic and security strategy to strengthen the Western Hemisphere and counter China’s expanding global leverage.

During the conference, Gallego met with Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, the European Union’s High Representative Kaja Kallas, Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, and British Defense Secretary John Healey.

Today, Gallego spoke on a panel titled “Western Hemisfever: Security in the Americas,” moderated by NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, alongside Arnoldo André Tinoco, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship, Republic of Costa Rica, San José; Paulo Rangel, Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Portuguese Republic; and Daiana Fernández Molero, Member of the Commission on Foreign Relations and Worship, Chamber of Deputies, Parliament of the Argentine Republic.

Watch the full panel discussion HERE and read excerpts below:

By invading Venezuela, Trump gave authoritarian leaders across the world the permission to follow suit.

“Let’s not look at what happened in Venezuela, let’s look what happened just after Venezuela. So right after that happened, what did President Trump say? Colombia. A country that is rich in democracy, one of our closest alliances in the world, [Trump] accused the President of Colombia of being involved with the drug trade, ostensibly setting up the reason for why they went after Maduro.  

“When you are allowing this type of escapism of the rules-based order, you create this adventurism for potential leaders like Donald Trump. And sometimes it will be in your favor, and then sometimes it will not. But then what happens when China decides that [..] the president Taiwan suddenly a criminal? Would that be their justification for them to actually send in their special forces to regime change? We wouldn’t like that. So again, glad [Maduro’s] gone, but the violation of rules-based order is something should really concern everyone that actually lives, dies, and prospers by the rules-based order.”

China is commanding massive market leverage across the globe. If we want to compete, we need a North-South security strategy build on economic collaboration.

“Our relationship with Latin America does not have to be one of a defensive posture. We have aligned interests, obviously, in terms of keeping China out in critical infrastructure, and Huawei is a good example. […] But because we don’t have to necessarily have that intense defensive posture and real issue that we had with Europe, we need to actually look at our relationship with the Western Hemisphere from a different prism, and that prism is economic collaboration.  

“The best thing that can happen to the United States is that we need to have another entity, another region, that is just as powerful as European Union, to help us really counterbalance the market that China gets to command going into the future. If we don’t have a prosperous Latin America, and a prosperous European Union, and a prosperous United States, we’re not going to be able to meet the demands of China. This is our opportunity to do that.

“It pains me talking to […] our Wall Street guys, our private equity guys. They’re more comfortable building in Chengdu, China than they are in Cali, Colombia. […] In terms of what is in our best national interest as a country, our capital should be flowing where our interests are, and it’s not a country that is trying to rise against us.”

If we want to counter China, we need to invest in Latin America — just like we did in Europe post WWII.

“We may be the first country in the history of the world that actually ends up arming and financing our opponent. Wall Street money is going to end up causing American dominance to wane because of their greed and how much they’ve invested in China. When you have perfect alignment with countries that are aligned with the United States, we have cultural connections that we could be doing in Latin America. So on the trade front, yes, increase trade, increase collaboration, investment.  

“We should invest as much as we can in terms of the cultural side of things too. We should have a lot more worker visas coming in from Latin America, legal worker visas, student visas, every type of visa that will actually connect us and binds us, not just at the lowest low of workers, but even to the to the to the policymakers, the journalists, everything else like that. It’s what we did in the post-WWII world, and that’s a winning strategy. For some reason, we just look at Latin America and say “well, it worked in Europe, but I guess we can’t do it here.”