Word crossed the wire this week that El Salvador is throwing two thousand of its soldiers into the smoking ruins of Port-au-Prince. The mission, on paper, is simple enough: four Salvadoran troops vanished into the lawless labyrinth of the Haitian capital following a gang ambush, and San Salvador wants its boys back. You can understand the instinct. No commander wants to abandon his own in the dark. But make no mistake about what is happening here. Another sovereign nation is wading knee-deep into the Caribbean graveyard of good intentions, sucked into a vacuum created by decades of bipartisan American hubris.
Haiti has long been the crown jewel of internationalist failure. For thirty years, the bipartisan syndicate in Washington—stretching from the elder Bush through the Clinton apparatus and beyond—treated that battered island as a playground for global social engineering. They dispatched the Marines, parachuted in legions of tax-exempt nongovernmental organizations, dumped billions of hard-earned American tax dollars into bottomless pits of graft, and promised the world a shining Caribbean democracy. What did that meddling produce? Not a single stable factory. Not a solitary self-sufficient town. It produced a Hobbesian nightmare where warlords with nicknames pulled from bad cinema dictate who eats and who starves, while foreign peacekeepers end up running for their lives.
From the break rooms of the Mahoning Valley to the machine shops along the Monongahela, working men and women watch this circus with a grim, familiar weariness. The American working class knows precisely what happens when political elites start talking about humanitarian missions and regional stabilization. It always begins with a handful of advisers and a pious speech about regional order. It always ends with young men from working-class postal codes being shipped home under flags, while the corporate class in capital cities calculates how to profit off the downstream refugee crises.
President Nayib Bukele earned his spurs down in El Salvador by doing what Washington’s soft-headed consultants said was impossible. He locked up the domestic predators, reclaimed his country’s streets, and gave his working citizens their neighborhoods back. That was an act of raw, unapologetic national sovereignty. But this pivot to foreign expeditionary policing is a dangerous departure from that hard-won realism. Marching two thousand troops into an anarchic abyss like Port-au-Prince is the first step onto the slippery slope of foreign quagmires. The gangs of Haiti do not respect sovereign borders, and they will not yield to foreign uniforms simply because those uniforms bear the patch of a popular Central American president.
The deeper tragedy is that Washington’s foreign policy establishment is cheering this on. The neoconservatives and the neoliberal humanitarians love nothing more than outsourcing imperial police work to regional coalitions. It allows them to maintain the illusion that the global order is functioning, all while ignoring the rotting foundation beneath their own feet. Every dollar our own government funnels into these peripheral security pacts is a dollar diverted from securing our own sovereign southern border, from rebuilding the domestic supply chains that left our industrial towns hollow shells, and from protecting the wages of the men who still sweat for a living.
When a Caribbean state totally disintegrates, the working man in Ohio pays the freight. It is not the boardrooms of Manhattan or the think tanks along K Street that absorb the shockwaves of regional collapse. It is the factory floor. Total chaos in the hemisphere generates an unstoppable surge of desperate migrants, providing corporate boardrooms with an endless supply of cheap, exploitable labor that undercuts domestic blue-collar wages and breaks the back of local communities. The establishment considers this a manageable externality; to the American tradesman, it is an economic eviction notice.
We have arrived at a moment where governments of every stripe seem possessed by the urge to fix every house except their own. El Salvador would do well to remember the hard lessons of the American century: you cannot export stability to a people who have lost the will or the capacity for civil order, and you cannot police your neighbors without bleeding your own strength dry. A nation’s primary, unyielding duty begins and ends at its own borders, in the security of its own streets, and in the prosperity of its own citizens. When our leaders forget that simple, iron law of statecraft, the working class always ends up footing the bill.