In the spring of 1940, John Steinbeck and his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed a sardine boat from Monterey to the Gulf of California, where they spent several weeks floating around collecting and cataloging marine specimens. Near Guaymas, they encountered a Japanese fishing fleet—eleven trawlers and a huge mother ship—working the seafloor for shrimp. Pulling up alongside one of the trawlers, Steinbeck and Ricketts managed to get themselves invited on board to see the shrimp trawling operation up close.
“They were doing a very systematic job, not only of taking every shrimp from the bottom, but every other living thing as well. They cruised slowly along in an echelon with overlapping dredges, literally scraping the bottom clean.”
The waste, Steinbeck wrote, “was appalling.” Everything that was not shrimp—sharks, pompano, tuna—was shoveled back into the water to die. Accompanying their deaths was the ruination of the marine ecosystem that had given life to the fish and the shrimp. The trawlers left a wake of despoliation; of the marine life, the marine environment, and the livelihoods of the local fishermen, their families, and their communities, who all depended on the sea’s bounty for their living.
Twenty months later, bombs fell across the Pacific. Pearl Harbor, The Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Alaska. A coordinated assault on America’s territory in the Pacific.
Eighty-five years later, history rhymes.
The December 2025 National Security Strategy announced the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States will “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” The Chinese Distant Water Fishing fleet is precisely such a capability—a dual-use grey-zone instrument of extraction, presence, and espionage.
China’s fleet numbers not twelve vessels but seventeen thousand—at least five times larger than Beijing officially claims. Where the Japanese worked a single gulf, the Chinese work the entire Western Hemisphere: from the squid grounds off the Humboldt Current to the shrimp fisheries of the Gulf of America, from the Galápagos to the Falklands.
The operation is year-round and hemispheric in scope. Chinese vessels concentrate on the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay from January to April, then shift to Ecuador, Peru, and Chile from May to September, following the squid. The Hai Feng 718, a state-owned refrigerated cargo vessel operated by the China National Fisheries Corporation, exemplifies the system. In August 2021, the mothership arrived in waters off the Galápagos, where it serviced dozens of smaller fishing vessels. A month later, it moved to Peru, sidling up to more than two dozen squid jiggers. Loaded with catch, it returned to China—then headed back to Argentina for the start of the next squid season. The vessel has over 500,000 cubic feet of cargo space. It is, in effect, a floating Chinese territory that allows the fleet to operate indefinitely without returning to port.
The squid jiggers themselves are visible from space. At night, they deploy lights so bright they can be tracked by satellite—banks of LEDs that lure squid to the surface, turning patches of the South Pacific into artificial daylight. Between 1990 and 2019, the number of Chinese deep-water squid boats soared from six to 528, while the annual reported catch rose from 5,000 tons to 278,000 tons. By 2019, China accounted for nearly all the squid boats operating in the South Pacific. From 2022 to 2024, according to Oceana, Chinese vessels conducted 44 percent of global fishing activity—110 million hours of fishing by 57,000 vessels.
Beyond its commercial function, the fleet operates as a forward intelligence and surveillance network. According to Ryan Martinson of the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, “collecting and reporting maritime intelligence is a core mission of China’s maritime militia,” which helps “fill in ‘blind spots’ for the People’s Liberation Army and enhance its situational awareness.” PLA experts have publicly argued for embarking intelligence personnel on distant-water fishing vessels, and Martinson concludes “it is likely that this is already happening.”
The fleet’s military function is not theoretical. In December 2025 and January 2026, the New York Times documented two massive coordinated formations in the East China Sea— 2,000 vessels on Christmas Day and 1,400 in January—assembling into L-shaped and rectangular patterns stretching hundreds of miles. Analysts identified these as maritime militia blockade rehearsals, potentially in preparation for a Taiwan contingency. The formations were so dense they forced commercial cargo ships to divert.
The vessels are equipped with the BeiDou satellite navigation system—China’s military-grade alternative to GPS—which, as James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy notes, “gives these fleets the capability to provide real-time data regarding the location of other nations’ military, coast guard, and fishing fleet disposition and operating areas.” The fishing fleet is not merely fishing. It is mapping patterns of naval activity, probing the responsiveness of coast guards, and habituating regional governments to a permanent Chinese presence off their shores. What appears on satellite imagery as a commercial squid fleet is, in strategic terms, a distributed sensor grid with extractive side benefits.
The waste remains appalling. Chinese vessels report only one-twelfth of their actual catch. At least 183 vessels in the fleet have been implicated in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; China ranks as the worst-performing nation on the global IUU Fishing Index. The bycatch now includes not only sharks and rays but human beings—the fleet is documented as a vector for forced labor, human trafficking, and transnational crime. In 2017, the vessel Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 was caught inside the Galápagos Marine Reserve with 300 tons of illegally harvested fish, including endangered hammerhead sharks. Its crew received prison sentences. The fleet kept coming.
When confronted, the fleet behaves like a hostile force. In 2019, after the Argentine Navy repeatedly warned the Chinese squid boat Hua Xiang 801 to leave its territorial waters, the crew attempted to ram the coast guard vessel and then escaped into international waters. In 2022, when the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter James approached a Chinese fishing fleet near the Galápagos to conduct an inspection, one of the vessels veered aggressively toward the cutter and attempted to ram it; the James took evasive action as the boats sped away. These are not the actions of fishermen worried about a fine. They are the actions of a paramilitary force testing the limits of enforcement.
And once again, local fishermen watch their livelihoods stripped away by industrial extraction they cannot match. “Our sea can’t handle this pressure anymore,” said Alberto Andrade, a fisherman from the Galápagos who has organized fellow fishermen to call for expanded protections. “The industrial fleets are razing the stocks, and we are afraid that in the future there will be no more fishery.” The poor small boats of Peru and Ecuador, like the poor small boats of Guaymas in 1940, have not much of a catch. From January to May 2022, Chinese fishing activity near the EEZs of Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina was four times greater than that of all other countries combined.
This paper proposes a Blue Shield for the Western Hemisphere: the assertion of American maritime enforcement authority to interdict, sanction, and expel the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet from hemispheric waters. The legal architecture for such enforcement already exists, scattered across a half-dozen statutes that have never been wielded with strategic intent. What has been lacking is the will to treat the industrial-scale pillaging of the fisheries of the Americas as the hostile forward edge of a rising enemy power bent on undermining the preeminence of the United States in our own hemisphere. Instead, it has been treated as an annoyance to be managed through ineffective and unenforceable environmental conventions.
The Trump Corollary provides the doctrine. This paper provides the operational concept: kinetic conservation.
II. Existing Legal Architecture
The United States already possesses extensive legal authority to interdict, sanction, seize, and punish vessels engaged in the activities the Chinese DWF routinely conducts. The relevant statutes have simply never been wielded with strategic intent.
The Lacey Act makes it a federal crime to import, export, or traffic in fish taken in violation of any foreign law. The Act’s extraterritorial reach means that fish harvested in violation of Peruvian or Ecuadorian law becomes contraband the moment it enters U.S. commerce—whether as direct seafood imports or as fishmeal in animal feed. Felony violations carry penalties up to five years imprisonment. Critically, the defendant need only know that the fish was taken illegally; they need not know which specific law was violated.
The High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act establishes a biennial process for identifying nations whose vessels engage in IUU fishing. Identified nations enter a consultation period; if they fail to demonstrate corrective action, they receive a “negative certification” that triggers import prohibitions and denial of port privileges. China received its first negative certification in 2021—the first major fishing nation ever so designated. Yet the statutory sanctions have been underutilized.
The IUU Fishing Enforcement Act of 2015 implements the Port State Measures Agreement, authorizing denial of port entry, inspection, and seizure of vessels reasonably believed to have engaged in IUU fishing. It extends the lookback period for pattern identification to three years, enabling enforcement against chronic offenders.
The Maritime SAFE Act is perhaps the most significant and least utilized authority. It established a 21-agency Interagency Working Group on IUU fishing and includes crucial language that properly frames the core issue: IUU fishing is to be prevented as a “financing source for transnational organized groups that undermine U.S. security interests.” This is an explicit statutory finding that illegal fishing funds hostile actors and should be treated accordingly.
Coast Guard Authority grants plenary power to board, inspect, search, and seize vessels on the high seas and in waters subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Unlike other federal law enforcement agencies, the Coast Guard requires no warrant and no probable cause for routine inspections. This authority, rooted in the Revenue Service Act of 1790, has been consistently upheld by federal courts. The only real constraint on Coast Guard interdiction is operational capacity; in terms of legal authority the Coast Guard essentially has carte blanche.
IEEPA provides the most potent tool. Upon declaration of a national emergency, the President may freeze assets, prohibit transactions, and sanction entities threatening U.S. national security. In December 2022, the Treasury Department sanctioned two Chinese fishing companies—Dalian Ocean Fishing Co. and Pingtan Marine Enterprise—under IEEPA authority for IUU fishing and forced labor. Pingtan became the first NASDAQ-listed company ever sanctioned for fishing violations. The action identified 157 PRC-flagged vessels associated with the sanctioned entities.
One further legal point deserves emphasis: the United States has never ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS). The conventional wisdom treats this as a diplomatic embarrassment—a failure to join the “international community.” For decades, the foreign policy establishment urged ratification on the theory that being “inside the system” would give the United States greater influence over maritime governance. The opposite has proven true. Non-ratification preserved American freedom of action at precisely the moment when the UNCLOS framework has been revealed as inadequate—exploited by the Chinese DWF as a license to strip-mine the hemisphere’s fisheries under the banner of “high-seas freedoms.”
Under the Trump Corollary, the U.S. non-ratification of UNCLOS becomes an asset. While the U.S. treats certain UNCLOS provisions as reflecting customary international law, it is under no treaty obligation to accept the Convention’s framework for high-seas fisheries governance. The Monroe Doctrine predates UNCLOS by 160 years. The Trump Corollary revives a framework of unilateral hemispheric assertion.
III. Transnational Criminal Activity
The Chinese DWF fleet is a grey zone threat, subsidized by Beijing, directed toward strategic ends, yet maintaining the legal fiction of civilian commercial activity. This ambiguity is a feature. But the fleet’s activities also intersect with unambiguously criminal networks in ways that provide additional legal hooks for enforcement.
Investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation, the Outlaw Ocean Project, and multiple governments have documented systematic forced labor and human trafficking aboard Chinese distant-water vessels. Workers—often from Indonesia, the Philippines, and African nations—are recruited through deceptive practices, held aboard vessels for years without shore leave, subjected to violence, and paid little or nothing. The vessel Fu Yuan Yu 7872 was sanctioned by the Treasury specifically for these practices.
The same vessels and routes used for illegal fishing serve as vectors for narcotics smuggling. JIATF-South has documented fishing vessels transferring cocaine from South American producers to Central American and Caribbean distribution networks. The fleet’s routine practice of “going dark”—disabling AIS transponders—facilitates these transfers.
Chinese fishing vessels have been implicated in smuggling protected species (shark fins, sea cucumbers) and in transshipment operations that obscure the origin of illegally caught fish. The seizure of the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 in 2017 is emblematic: 7,639 sharks across 12 species, including endangered hammerheads, transshipped through waters of the Galápagos Marine Reserve. The vessel has since been repurposed by Ecuador as a patrol ship. The fleet kept coming.
This crime nexus provides the basis for treating elements of the Chinese DWF as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). Such designation would unlock additional authorities under the Kingpin Act, RICO statutes, and international cooperation frameworks designed for organized crime rather than fisheries management. The Maritime SAFE Act’s language about “transnational organized groups” anticipated exactly this framing.
IV. Why Hasn’t the United States Addressed This Already?
If the legal authorities exist and the threat is manifest, why has the United States not already acted?
Bureaucratic stasis for one. The Maritime SAFE Act’s 21-agency Interagency Working Group reflects the problem rather than solving it. NOAA owns the science; the Coast Guard owns enforcement; the State Department owns diplomacy; DOD avoids “militarizing” what it considers a law enforcement matter. No single agency has primacy. The working group operates by consensus, which means it doesn’t operate. The chair rotates among NOAA, State, and the Coast Guard, which ensures that no institutional culture dominates but also that no institutional culture drives.
The default posture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has long favored multilateral consultation over unilateral action. IUU fishing has been addressed through Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs), bilateral consultations, capacity-building programs, and patient diplomatic engagement. This approach carries with it an old and naive belief that China is a good-faith partner that will respond to naming-and-shaming and incremental pressure. China received its negative certification in 2021 and the fleet has only grown since then.
The current model treats IUU fishing as a law enforcement problem to be addressed through boardings, inspections, arrests, and prosecutions. This model imposes a “hull-for-hull” cost ratio that heavily favors the adversary. The United States cannot build enough cutters to police seventeen thousand Chinese trawlers; it cannot divert Arleigh Burke-class destroyers from the Taiwan Strait to chase squid jiggers in the South Atlantic. The policing model is fiscally and operationally unsustainable.
The Trump Corollary provides the doctrinal cure for these institutional pathologies. It declares that hemispheric security is not a secondary consideration to be balanced against diplomatic niceties. It reasserts the legitimacy of unilateral action in defense of American interests. It provides permission at the highest level of national strategy to treat the Chinese DWF as what it is: a hostile enemy fleet.
There is a further obstacle, less discussed but equally significant: the degree to which Latin American governments have been captured by Chinese economic influence—and in some cases, have become active collaborators.
The most sophisticated Chinese tactic is “flagging in.” Rather than operate exclusively under the Chinese flag, Beijing has arranged for Chinese-owned companies to register vessels under Latin American flags, giving them legal access to territorial waters reserved for domestic fleets. Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial squid-fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag—constituting the majority of Argentina’s squid fleet. Many of these companies have been tied to crimes including dumping fish at sea, disabling transponders, tax evasion, and fraud. Globally, China operates nearly 250 such flagged-in vessels. The catch is often shipped back to China, though some enters U.S., Canadian, and European markets. “We have the enemy inside and out,” observed Pablo Isasa, captain of an Argentine hake trawler.
Peru presents an even starker case of subversive influence. Investigations have documented that Chinese fishing vessels routinely enter the shipyards of SIMA, the Industrial Services of the Peruvian Navy, for maintenance and repair. The Peruvian Navy is not merely failing to enforce its own maritime boundaries; it is servicing the fleet that violates them. When the Peruvian Congress considered imposing additional requirements on Chinese vessels, Navy representatives appeared to argue against “bureaucratic barriers.” The Peruvian Navy and the Chinese Embassy have jointly attributed declining squid stocks to El Niño rather than overfishing—a claim local fishermen find implausible given that other species like anchovy remain healthy.
China is now the leading trade partner of every country in South America except Colombia. This economic leverage translates into political protection for the DWF. Governments that depend on Chinese investment, Chinese markets, and Chinese loans are reluctant to confront Chinese fishing vessels—even when those vessels are strip-mining their own waters and impoverishing their own fishermen. The result is a protection racket at hemispheric scale: China extracts resources, shares a fraction of the proceeds with compliant elites, and the local population bears the cost.
This dynamic has implications for enforcement strategy. The United States cannot assume that all Latin American governments will be willing partners in a Blue Shield campaign. Some will resist. Some will actively obstruct. Governments that shelter Chinese predation should face consequences: reduced access to U.S. markets, diminished security cooperation, exclusion from hemispheric initiatives, and more. Governments that cooperate should receive tangible benefits: enhanced coast guard capacity, favorable trade terms, investment in port infrastructure. The goal is to make alignment with the Blue Shield more attractive than alignment with Beijing.
In some cases, the United States may need to act unilaterally in waters where the littoral state is unwilling to act. This is precisely the situation the Trump Corollary contemplates. The Monroe Doctrine was never premised on the consent of every government in the hemisphere; it was premised on American power and American interests. If Peru will not police its own EEZ, and if Chinese vessels operating from Peruvian ports are degrading the biosecurity of the hemisphere, the United States retains the option of acting where Peru will not.
V. The “Mile 201” Problem
The entire enforcement architecture described in this paper rests on a legal fiction that the Chinese DWF has already exploited to the point of absurdity: that the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone represents a meaningful boundary for biological resources.
It does not. Fish do not respect surveyor’s lines.
The Chinese fleet has understood this from the beginning. Its standard operating posture is to park just beyond the EEZ of a Latin American nation and harvest the straddling stocks—fish populations that migrate between sovereign and international waters. By overfishing the commons at Mile 201, the fleet collapses fisheries inside the EEZs of our allies. And the fleet does not respect the line itself. Chinese vessels routinely disable their Automatic Identification System transponders—”going dark”—and penetrate directly into sovereign EEZs to fish illegally. With transponders off, these incursions are invisible to the shore-based monitoring systems that most Latin American nations rely on. The nations that lack blue-water patrol capacity–which is most of them–have no way to detect, intercept, or document the violations. The Mile 201 problem is therefore not merely a matter of legal arbitrage at the boundary; it is compounded by systematic, deliberate violation of the boundary itself, conducted under electronic concealment and with near-total impunity.
This is the structural flaw that no amount of policing can fix. You can sanction fleet operators, fuse intelligence, expand shiprider agreements, and deny port access—and you should do all of these things. But as long as the legal architecture treats Mile 201 as a line between sovereignty and anarchy, the predatory fleet will simply adjust its GPS coordinates and continue operations.
Solving this requires a diplomatic initiative of the first order—one that redefines not just enforcement posture but the legal framework of hemispheric maritime sovereignty itself.
VI. The Pan-American Resource Pact
The United States should sponsor a Pan-American Resource Pact establishing a new legal norm: that the biological resources of the Western Hemisphere–from the seabed to the surface–are the collective patrimony of the American nations. While the surface of the ocean remains free for the navigation of global commerce (Mare Liberum), the extraction of living resources from the water column is reserved exclusively for vessels flagged and owned within the Hemisphere (Mare Clausum).
This is the Closed Sea doctrine applied at hemispheric scale. It revives a concept from the foundational era of international law and aligns with a Neo-Vattelian framework of the Trump Corollary. Vattel understood that the law of nations must serve the survival and prosperity of sovereign states; a legal order that permits a hostile foreign power to strip-mine the hemisphere’s resources from Mile 201 serves no American interest.
The Pact would mandate that all commercial fishing activity west of the 30th Meridian and east of the International Date Line must be conducted by “Hemispheric Bottoms”–vessels built, flagged, and majority-owned by nations of the Americas.
The Pact creates a binary sorting mechanism that transforms enforcement. Currently, a Coast Guard boarding team or drone pilot must determine whether a Chinese vessel is fishing illegally inside an EEZ or “legally” just outside it–a distinction difficult to make from 20,000 feet or a pitching deck. Under the Pact, the mere presence of a non-Hemispheric fishing vessel deploying nets in Western Hemisphere waters is a violation. Chinese flag plus fishing activity equals hostile actor, regardless of whether the vessel is 12 miles or 1,200 miles offshore. No ambiguity.
This is the completion of what Latin America started. The 1952 Santiago Declaration, in which Chile, Ecuador, and Peru claimed 200-mile maritime zones, preceded UNCLOS by decades. Those nations were ahead of the international community then; the Pact positions them at the vanguard again. Ecuador’s navy has confronted Chinese vessels. Argentina sank a Chinese trawler in 2016. Peru has publicly protested fleet incursions near its waters. These nations have been fighting this battle alone and losing. The Pact collectivizes what they have been attempting individually, and backs it with American power.
The “Hemispheric Bottoms” requirement also functions as industrial policy. If only vessels built, flagged, and majority-owned in the Americas can fish these waters, the Pact creates enormous incentives for shipbuilding, port modernization, and fleet development across Latin America.
What Partner Nations Do Under the Pact
Latin American signatories would undertake specific, concrete obligations:
- Contribute to a hemispheric registry of authorized fishing vessels, with transparent beneficial-ownership disclosure. Chinese-owned vessels flying flags of convenience would be identified and excluded.
- Deny fuel, provisions, transshipment, and repair services to any vessel not registered under the Pact. This converts every commercial port in the Western Hemisphere into an enforcement checkpoint.
- Participate in expanded shiprider programs and intelligence-sharing arrangements, building on existing bilateral agreements into a multilateral enforcement architecture. The near-term shiprider agreements described below become the pilot program for the Pact’s operational framework.
- Signatories would receive preferential access to U.S. seafood markets for sustainably harvested fish, replacing the Chinese-origin product excluded by import sanctions. The carrot matches the stick.
The liberal internationalist establishment will object that this violates high-seas freedoms. The answer is simple: the United States never signed UNCLOS. The Monroe Doctrine predates the “rules-based international order” by 160 years. And the freedom of the high seas was never intended to mean freedom for a hostile power to conduct industrial-scale resource extraction in America’s backyard while local fishermen starve.
VII. Near-Term Enforcement Actions
The Pan-American Resource Pact is the strategic architecture. But architecture takes time, and the fleet is fishing now. The following enforcement actions use existing legal authorities, require no new legislation, and can be implemented within the first year of a serious campaign. They serve a dual purpose: imposing immediate costs on the Chinese DWF and building the institutional scaffolding on which the Pact’s enforcement regime will eventually rest.
These are listed in priority order. If an administration can only act on two, it should be the first two.
Priority 1: Designate and Sanction the Fleet
Who acts: The President, Treasury/OFAC, with NSC coordination.
Designate the Chinese DWF as a hemispheric security threat under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, expanding the precedent established by the December 2022 sanctions against Dalian Ocean Fishing and Pingtan Marine Enterprise. The expanded designation should cover major fleet operators whose vessels have been identified in IUU fishing, forced labor, or AIS manipulation—triggering asset freezes, transaction prohibitions, and vessel blacklisting.
Where evidence supports it, designate specific fleet operators and their beneficial owners as transnational criminal organizations under Executive Order 13581. The crime-nexus case is strong: forced labor, document fraud, at-sea transshipment to evade customs controls, and documented coordination with narcotics trafficking routes. TCO designation unlocks additional enforcement authorities and international cooperation mechanisms that fisheries law alone cannot provide.
This is the sharpest tool available. It imposes immediate, tangible costs on fleet operators and their financial networks. It generates headlines that signal seriousness to both Beijing and Latin American capitals. And it creates the legal architecture on which everything else builds. The president can direct this.
Priority 2: Fuse Intelligence and Extend Enforcement at Sea
Who acts: SOUTHCOM, JIATF-South, U.S. Coast Guard, with DOD authorization.
Integrate fishing fleet tracking–AIS data, synthetic aperture radar, dark-vessel detection algorithms–into the existing SOUTHCOM and JIATF-South counter-narcotics intelligence architecture. The operational logic is straightforward: the same vessels that go dark for illegal fishing go dark for drug transfers. They should be treated as a unified target set, not as separate problems managed by separate bureaucracies.
Simultaneously, expand Coast Guard deployments through shiprider agreements with Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina–all of which have expressed frustration with Chinese fishing activity near their EEZs. Place Coast Guard law enforcement detachments aboard partner-nation patrol vessels to conduct joint patrols and boardings. This extends enforcement reach without requiring additional U.S. hulls and builds the bilateral relationships that will form the operational backbone of the Pact.
Without this, you are issuing paper sanctions against vessels no one is watching. The surveillance picture is the precondition for credible enforcement of any kind.
Priority 3: Enforce Existing Import and Port Sanctions
Who acts: NOAA, Commerce Department, Customs and Border Protection.
China received a negative certification under the Moratorium Protection Act in 2021. The statutory consequences–import prohibitions and port denials–have not been meaningfully implemented. Implement them. Ban imports of Chinese-origin squid and squid products pending demonstrated corrective action by the PRC.
Use the Lacey Act’s extraterritorial reach to pursue enforcement against Chinese-owned vessels regardless of flag state. Chinese-controlled vessels flying Latin American flags of convenience should not receive immunity from enforcement where those vessels are implicated in IUU activity, forced labor, or sanctions evasion. The Lacey Act applies to fish taken in violation of any nation’s law–including the laws of the flag state itself.
These measures hit the supply chain rather than the fleet directly, so they are slower to bite. But they impose costs that compound over time and establish the import-control framework the Pact will eventually formalize.
Priority 4: Build the Hemispheric Enforcement Framework
Who acts: State Department, NSC, with interagency support.
Coordinate with Latin American partners to establish regional port-denial protocols–cutting off fuel, provisions, and transshipment services to vessels on IUU blacklists. Work with willing governments to audit beneficial ownership of their flagged fishing fleets. Where Chinese-controlled vessels are identified, pursue joint enforcement actions.
Condition U.S. security assistance, trade preferences, and investment access on partner willingness to participate in hemispheric enforcement. Governments that shelter Chinese predation–or worse, actively service the predatory fleet–should face reduced access to U.S. partnership benefits. Governments that enforce should be rewarded with expanded cooperation and market access.
This is the most diplomatically complex of the four priorities and depends on sequencing the first three correctly. But it is also the bridge between near-term enforcement and the Pact itself. Every bilateral agreement, every joint patrol, every port-denial protocol established now becomes a building block of the multilateral architecture to come.
These measures represent the minimum threshold of seriousness. Together with the Pan-American Resource Pact, they would impose significant costs on the Chinese DWF, provide Latin American partners with both the incentive and the institutional framework to participate, and signal that the era of consequence-free predation in the Western Hemisphere has ended.
But they remain, fundamentally, within the policing paradigm. They are necessary but not sufficient.
VIII. The Maximalist Horizon
The Trump Corollary—and the DARC call for papers—invites thinking beyond the conventional. The NSS explicitly revives “the prescient work of Emer de Vattel.” What would a Neo-Vattelian approach to hemispheric security look like?
Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) was the foundational text of American foreign policy through the 19th century. Unlike the universalist frameworks that followed, Vattel grounded international law in the survival and self-preservation of the sovereign state. A nation has the right to secure itself against everything that threatens its safety—and to treat those who systematically violate the natural rights of others as having forfeited the protections of the law of nations. Historically, this designation was applied to pirates: hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.
The Chinese DWF meets the standard. It operates as a state-subsidized paramilitary fleet under commercial cover. It systematically violates sovereign boundaries. It employs forced labor. It destroys the biological commons on which entire nations depend. It rams coast guard vessels and flees. It goes dark to evade detection. It is accountable to no legal regime and responsive to no diplomatic pressure. And as we saw in the recent displays in the East China Sea, it is engaging in military exercises as part of its dual-use function. Seventeen thousand vessels strip-mining the hemisphere’s fisheries while their crews are held in conditions of servitude is not a legitimate commercial enterprise but organized predation at industrial scale, and Vattel would have recognized it as such.
The precedent for kinetic interdiction already exists in U.S. counter-narcotics operations. In the 1990s, the United States recognized that it could not arrest every aircraft flying cocaine out of the Andes. The Air Bridge Denial program, conducted in partnership with Colombia and Peru, established that unidentified aircraft refusing to comply with warnings could be engaged with lethal force. The program did not attempt to prosecute every pilot. It changed the cost calculus. It made the activity uneconomical by making it unsurvivable.
Kinetic conservation applies the same logic to maritime targets. The operational concept has three elements.
First, establish Ecological Security Zones in cooperation with willing Latin American partners—defined areas of high biological value where unauthorized foreign extraction is treated as a hostile act, not a regulatory infraction. The Pact provides the legal framework; the Zones define the operational geography.
Second, shift the enforcement mechanism from hulls to airframes. The policing model requires a Coast Guard cutter for every boarding—a cost ratio that favors a fleet of seventeen thousand. A single MQ-9 Reaper drone can surveil thousands of square miles and enforce compliance with precision munitions at a fraction of the cost of a destroyer’s fuel bill. The United States does not need to occupy the water to control it. It needs to make unauthorized presence in these waters a risk no fleet operator is willing to accept.
Third, target the logistics chain rather than the swarm. The Chinese DWF’s hemispheric endurance depends on a relatively small number of motherships—refrigerated cargo vessels and floating fuel bunkers that allow the fleet to operate for months without returning to port. The Hai Feng 718, with its 500,000 cubic feet of cargo space, is the archetype. Disable ten motherships and five hundred trawlers lose their ability to refuel, resupply, and offload catch. The fleet’s operational model collapses. Preventive action against the logistics backbone achieves more than a decade of individual boardings.
The Chinese DWF poses a threat rivaling that of the cartels. It is destroying the biosecurity of the hemisphere and eroding the sovereignty of our allies. Kinetic conservation would apply the Air Bridge Denial logic to maritime targets. Establish “Ecological Security Zones” in cooperation with willing Latin American partners. Any foreign DWF vessel entering these zones without authorization is declared a hostile actor. A warning is issued. If ignored, the vessel is not boarded—it is engaged.
IX. Conclusion: Conservation as Strategy
The proposals in Part VII show what serious hemispheric enforcement could look like. But even the more modest proposals in Part VI represent a dramatic departure from the status quo.
The Blue Shield concept is fundamentally about whether the United States will permit a hostile power to establish permanent strategic presence in the Western Hemisphere under commercial cover.
Kinetic conservation is the assertion that American interests in the Western Hemisphere are not negotiable, that the Monroe Doctrine is not a historical artifact, and that the Trump Corollary will be more than words on paper.
Clear the waters.
In the spring of 1940, Steinbeck watched a Japanese fleet scrape the Gulf of California clean and understood what he was seeing. “It was not a matter of fish,” he wrote. It was a matter of what kind of power would operate in these waters, under what rules, and at whose expense. Twenty months later, the question answered itself.
Eighty-five years on, the question has returned—larger in scale, more sophisticated in method, but identical in structure. A hostile foreign power is conducting industrial-scale resource extraction across the Western Hemisphere under commercial cover, destroying the biological commons on which millions of people depend, and habituating regional governments to a permanent presence that serves strategic ends far beyond fishing. The United States has the legal authorities, the intelligence capabilities, the military assets, and the alliance relationships to stop it. What it has lacked is a doctrine that treats the threat as what it is.
The Trump Corollary provides that doctrine. This paper has proposed the operational framework to give it meaning.
The Pan-American Resource Pact redefines the legal architecture—closing the Mile 201 loophole, establishing hemispheric resource sovereignty, and giving Latin American partners both the incentive and the institutional framework to participate in collective enforcement. It transforms an unenforceable patchwork of EEZ boundaries into a simple, binary rule: Hemispheric vessels fish; non-Hemispheric vessels do not.
The near-term enforcement actions–IEEPA designations, intelligence fusion, import sanctions, and hemispheric partnership–impose immediate costs on the Chinese DWF using authorities that already exist, while building the institutional scaffolding on which the Pact’s permanent enforcement regime will rest. Every shiprider agreement, every joint patrol, every port-denial protocol established now becomes a building block of the hemispheric security architecture to come.
The maximalist horizon–Ecological Security Zones, kinetic interdiction, logistics targeting–describes what enforcement looks like when a nation decides that the systematic destruction of its hemisphere’s biological patrimony is not a regulatory matter to be managed but a strategic threat to be defeated.
These three tiers are not alternatives, but phases. The enforcement actions create the operational reality. The Pact creates the legal legitimacy. The maximalist horizon creates the deterrent. Without all three, the Chinese DWF will adapt, as it has adapted to every previous attempt at constraint.
Kinetic conservation is the assertion that American interests in the Western Hemisphere are not negotiable, that the Monroe Doctrine is not a historical artifact, and that the Trump Corollary will be more than words on paper.
Clear the waters.
