AMERIPEC

Hemispheric Coordination and the Trump Corollary

Energy has always been a pillar of state power, yet the United States has long failed to appreciate the strategic advantages embedded in her own hemisphere. While Washington spent the post-Cold War decades subsidizing allied weakness in Europe and Asia, prosecuting protracted Middle Eastern wars, and underwriting maritime security the world over, it allowed the Western Hemisphere to languish as an afterthought. This neglect was not born of ignorance, but of an enduring globalist instinct that prioritized the preservation of a liberal world order over the concrete interests of Americans. In practice, this meant forfeiting opportunities to leverage the hemisphere’s extraordinary natural resource endowments and natural logistical advantages. The Western Hemisphere contains the raw materials for genuine economic sovereignty yet no administration before 2025 treated the hemisphere as the primary source of U.S. power.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy breaks decisively from this pattern of neglect. Instead of dispersing American strategic capital across the Old World, it re-centers the Western Hemisphere as the natural geopolitical perimeter of the United States and the gravitational core of its future prosperity. The Strategy revives the Monroe Doctrine as a framework for resource security and extends it through the Trump Corollary, which asserts that exohemispheric powers must not control critical resources or infrastructure in the Americas.¹ This represents more than rhetorical nostalgia; it signals a structural realignment toward regionalism as the operating logic of U.S. grand strategy under conditions of multipolarity. Coupled with renewed engagement in Latin America and a sober appraisal of global supply chain fragility, the Trump Corollary creates the conceptual foundation for hemispheric cooperation that previous administrations could not imagine, let alone attempt.

Energy in a New Reality

Recent actions in Venezuela may be the clearest early application of the Trump administration’s interest in restoring U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere, particularly when it comes to critical resources. While the operation to remove Maduro may in part be motivated by his regime’s purported role in the drug trade or the desire among some to reinvigorate Venezuelan democracy, few can deny that the President himself seems preoccupied by Venezuela’s vast oil wealth, and for good reason. The global oil market relies on a handful of maritime choke points such as the Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, and the South China Sea, all of which are increasingly exposed to piracy, state conflict, drone warfare, and great-power competition.² Some 20% of all maritime oil shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz alone.³ When these strategic pressure points are pressed, even states which do not directly rely on imports via these routes face dramatic fluctuations in global oil prices, sparking unrest and instability the world over.⁴ These trends will only continue as the age of U.S. primacy wanes at the waxing of a new multipolar epoch. Without the might of U.S. naval and air power patrolling the global commons, risk premiums will rise dramatically, and with them prices for all globally traded goods, oil included. Costs associated not just with transportation of goods, but also in investment could balloon like never before, forcing us to adopt an entirely new economic perspective. U.S. adversaries are already catching on to this emergent reality, with China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s North-South Corridor set to reduce vulnerabilities by bypassing these troublesome maritime trade corridors.⁵

At the same time, there is tremendous natural resource wealth already lying in wait under our feet here in the Western Hemisphere. The United States, Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, and Guyana together sit atop oil reserves that rival or exceed those of the Persian Gulf.⁶ And in recent years, the nations of the Americas have emerged as major oil producers. The shale revolution turned the United States into a top-tier producer and net exporter.⁷ Canadian oil sands and offshore fields have become among the most stable in the world.⁸ Mexico retains significant offshore potential. Guyana has emerged as one of the fastest-growing oil producers in history. Brazil’s deepwater pre-salt fields rival Middle Eastern megafields. And Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves, despite a precipitous decline in net production as of late.⁹ Even besides raw extraction, the United States produces some of the world’s top petroleum engineering talent and U.S. firms are among the top producers of petroleum related research and development. In short, there is immense potential for energy security in our own backyard just waiting to be tapped.

Within this context, the American Petroleum Exporting Consortium (AMERIPEC) emerges as an institutional realization of tremendous latent opportunity: the integration of Western Hemisphere petroleum producers into a coordinated bloc capable of ensuring energy sovereignty, underwriting regional development, and securing geopolitical leverage. Where past U.S. policy treated hemispheric producers as little more than market actors, AMERIPEC treats them as components of an integrated strategic system. Such coordination could transform the Western Hemisphere from an undercapitalized resource basin into the world’s most reliable zone of energy production and consumption, converting raw abundance into an enduring geopolitical advantage.

What is AMERIPEC?

AMERIPEC would be a U.S.-led regional energy security alliance based on reciprocity and sovereign cooperation among the oil-producing nations of the Western Hemisphere. Unlike OPEC, which constrains output to keep oil dependant economies afloat, AMERIPEC serves both an economic purpose, stabilizing oil prices as structural pressures and supply shocks push prices upward in an increasingly volatile international environment, and a security purpose, ensuring that the states of the Western Hemisphere have readily available oil regardless of happenings on the Eurasian landmass or its surrounding seas. AMERIPEC will accomplish these overarching goals through three strategic priorities: development through strategic integration, hemispheric energy security, and energy as a tool of statecraft.

Development Through Strategic Integration

The first priority of AMERIPEC would be developmental: unlocking underutilized oil reserves by pairing U.S. and Canadian capital, technology, and managerial expertise with the resource endowments of less-developed producer states in our near abroad.

The United States has a clear interest in seeing the Western Hemisphere both broadly aligned with U.S. interests, but also politically stable and economically prosperous. For far too long, we have focused on regional development by way of humanitarian aid, values promotion, and other such nonsense, with little to show for our trouble. Development of infrastructure and natural resource extraction, on the other hand, are necessary building blocks of a healthy economy, and oil industry development promises a stronger value proposition for Americans, providing permanent access to vast oil reserves and a stable regional environment. Despite the Western Hemisphere’s vast natural resource endowments, few states in the region have realized their potential as energy producers. Venezuela offers a clear example.

Despite holding the world’s largest proven reserves, decades of political mismanagement, underinvestment, and sanctions have left her production infrastructure in decay.¹⁰ Venezuela was once among the most important oil producers in the world, producing nearly 3.5 million bpd at her peak.¹¹ But now, her pipelines leak, her refineries operate far below capacity, and her skilled engineers have emigrated in large numbers.¹² Yet her underlying geology remains exceptional. As a matter of principle, the United States cannot tolerate such mismanagement of vital strategic resources in her own near abroad. Under AMERIPEC, Venezuela would have access to the world’s top energy production talent, extensive capital pools, and cutting edge technology transforming the Venezuelan oil industry from an aging relic of better days long past, into a major strategic resource and veritable pot of gold. The United States is already well equipped to integrate with the Venezuelan oil industry. Venezuelan Heavy Sour crude is chemically very similar to the kind produced in Canada’s Athabascan oil sands, so talent trained in Albertan petrochemical programs could easily be exported to PDVSA, and U.S. refining facilities are perfectly tuned to handle this kind of product. At the same time, access to U.S. and Canadian technology, refining equipment, and finance would be tied to technical audits, production transparency standards, and revenue reporting standards established by the United States or conforming to international standards such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), in order to mitigate concerns of freeriding and corruption.

Guyana represents a different but similar problem set. Since 2015, she has rapidly emerged as a significant producer through offshore developments in the Stabroek Block, with output approaching nearly 800,000 bpd and projected to grow further.¹³ While her recent oil discoveries have propelled her into global relevance almost overnight, her institutional capacity lags behind her geological fortune. Without structured development, she risks dependency on a narrow set of multinational firms like ExxonMobil, Hess, or China’s CNOOC and exposure to the classic “resource curse” risks observed elsewhere: elite capture, institutional weakness, and dependence on external firms. Such conditions will leave her ripe for exploitation by outside powers and vulnerable to nationalist backlash and political disruption.¹⁴ AMERIPEC would embed Guyana’s development inside a US-led hemispheric cooperation framework. Training exchanges, shared safety standards, and regional infrastructure planning would help prevent the kind of predatory mercantilism that has historically plagued small resource-rich states and shield Guyana from potential Chinese or Russian influence, ensuring that Guyana’s oil remains her own, while also protecting long-term U.S. access to said oil, and ensuring that she remains broadly aligned with U.S. interests and priorities.

With the recent re-authorization of the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) alongside its expanded authorities and capital pools, much of the financing work could be done using DFC mechanisms and private investment facilitated and tied to AMERIPEC regulations compliance. With U.S. technology, capital, and talent, the nations of the New World could quickly become world class oil producers capable of supplying more than enough energy for sustained regional growth and broader regional economic development for decades to come.

Hemispheric Energy Sovereignty

The second strategic priority of AMERIPEC would be defensive: insulating the Western Hemisphere from potential energy insecurity in Eurasia. To achieve this end, AMERIPEC would shift the operating logic of regional energy production toward resilience maximization. The organization would coordinate spare production capacity, unify emergency reserve protocols, and develop surge-production plans that can be activated collectively, allowing AMERIPEC member states to pre-position themselves to absorb disruptions as a matter of design.

The strategic logic is straightforward: the more energy consumed in the Americas that is also produced in the Americas, the less vulnerable we are to external shocks and geopolitical blackmail. At current rates, the US imports around 1 million bpd from outside the Western Hemisphere, but AMERIPEC’s production would exceed 35 million bpd.¹⁵ Even a 10% coordinated surge from the North American core could supply nearly 2 million bpd to the hemisphere during a crisis, roughly offsetting current U.S. imports from non-hemispheric sources.¹⁶ This disparity would only grow with greater regional development meaning AMERIPEC would be largely self-sufficient in oil production and therefore physically insulated from foreign supply crises.¹⁷ This does not mean severing global markets; AMERIPEC would still participate in international trade and price formation, and would therefore face some vulnerability exposure. But the organization could employ a variety of mechanisms such as pre-negotiated long-term contracts, swap arrangements, and coordinated reserve releases to ensure priority access and delivery assurance for AMERIPEC member states, preventing speculative panic and stabilizing prices before markets fully react to a supply shock. AMERIPEC could also maintain a pooled spare capacity buffer and strategic petroleum reserves could be restructured into a shared system. All of these mechanisms would contribute to ensuring that the hemisphere is largely insulated from supply shocks in Eurasia, while also reducing the frequency and amplitude of extreme price volatility that disrupts long-term investment planning.

Such a system would resemble NATO’s integrated air-defense systems during the Cold War: national assets, owned and operated by sovereign states and their private firms, but linked into a single strategic architecture. Just as NATO harmonized radar networks, interceptor coverage, and command protocols, AMERIPEC would harmonize production coordination, petroleum transportation infrastructure, reserve management, and crisis-response procedures to ensure hemispheric security. In such an environment, external actors would find it far more difficult to use supply leverage, pricing manipulation, or political conditionality to influence hemispheric states. AMERIPEC’s defensive posture would thus be a kind of geopolitical insurance: an institutionalized guarantee that foreign crises cannot become destabilizing domestic emergencies.

Energy as a Tool of Statecraft

The third priority of AMERIPEC would be offensive—not in a military sense, but in a geo-economic sense. Oil exports would become an instrument of alliance management and strategic influence. Today, Europe’s energy system remains structurally exposed with oil imports reliant on treacherous routes through the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz. At present, Japan and South Korea import upwards of 90% of their current energy supply, with nearly all of their domestic oil demand coming from middle eastern imports through the South China Sea.¹⁸ These routes are subject to all manner of potential disruptions from accidents such as the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction which paused Suez canal trade for almost a week, to geopolitical blackmail in the form of a potential blockade of the Persian Gulf or Malacca Strait.¹⁹ This is made all the more concerning when one considers that several of these key nodes lie along generational political flash points, such as the Taiwan Strait or Red Sea. Conflict at any point in the supply chain would seriously disrupt allied economies, and increase the necessity of U.S. military intervention in conflict overseas.

Rather than treating oil exports as another market commodity, AMERIPEC would treat them as a tool of offensive statecraft, expanding the suite of economic levers which we can use to manage alliances and balance potential rivals. Export priority would be given to other states in the Western Hemisphere, followed closely by key allied economies in Western Europe and East Asia, particularly those most vulnerable to coercive supply disruptions. AMERIPEC would substitute middle eastern oil exporters in the Asian and European markets with Western hemisphere exporters traveling along trade routes designed to minimize exposure to contested chokepoints by relying on North Atlantic and Pacific pathways. At the same time, reliance on AMERIPEC oil imports would strengthen interdependence such that the United States would possess latent leverage over allies and rivals.

This is not unprecedented. The United States has long used LNG export approvals as informal diplomatic tools. Because U.S. LNG exports require approval from the Department of Energy for destinations lacking a Free Trade Agreement, Washington has repeatedly used this authority to shape geopolitical outcomes. During the mid-2010s, the Obama administration granted expedited approvals to European states in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, framing U.S. LNG as part of a broader strategy to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian pipeline gas. In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration signaled it would accelerate approvals for projects oriented toward European allies following the disruption of Nord Stream and Europe’s scramble for non-Russian supply. Even when not used overtly, the mere existence of this licensing system gives the U.S. government a quiet but powerful lever over global gas flows. A similar process could unfold under an AMERIPEC framework, but with petroleum exports instead of LNG.

Institutional Design and Structure

The success of AMERIPEC will hinge on its institutional design, governance structure, and member composition. Implementation should proceed in phased, deliberate steps, beginning with executive-led agenda setting and informal alignment among core Western Hemisphere producers. The initiative could start with a North American core forming a “Hemispheric Transmission Organization” modeled on Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) but adapted to oil production and distribution. These three states dominate production, refining, capital, and technology, making them ideal anchors for harmonizing regulatory standards, safety protocols, and compliance mechanisms. Early reforms targeting PEMEX’s institutional weaknesses could serve as a test case for broader regional expansion.

The United States can leverage existing authorities and infrastructure to coordinate governance, crisis protocols, and technical standards through memoranda of understanding and working groups. As coordination matures, formal institutional scaffolding could take shape via a framework agreement supported by targeted congressional authorizations for financing and export flexibility. This would allow AMERIPEC to function strategically without triggering premature treaty obligations. Once operational, Congress could formalize the arrangement, solidifying AMERIPEC’s institutional legitimacy and strategic utility.

Once the North American core is established, Phase Two would expand AMERIPEC to new producers beginning with Venezuela and Guyana. Given the heavily politicized and corrupt nature of PDVSA, this integration would be done under strict but stabilizing anti-corruption conditions tied to transparency, safety, and production benchmarks. But success in this area would dramatically increase AMERIPEC’s output and reserves. Phase Three would bring in Brazil, Argentina, and other states on a case-by-case basis, integrating their distinct capabilities into AMERIPEC. Brazil’s deepwater pre-salt fields, and Argentina’s expanding Vaca Muerta shale production would collectively broaden technical depth and output. This enhanced production base would enable long-term supply arrangements and help reorient global energy flows toward secure Atlantic and Pacific corridors.

In terms of institutional design, AMERIPEC would be structured similarly to NATO, with the United States serving in a strategic leadership position. U.S. leadership would be justified not by hegemonic ambition but by the realities of disproportionate contribution and basic fairness. Washington would supply most of the capital for infrastructure buildout, the bulk of technological capacity, and the essential security guarantees that undergird any multilateral institution. Much of the organization’s physical and legal infrastructure would be housed in or closely tied to U.S. jurisdiction. Such a structure would only function if the United States retains decisive influence and has an effective veto over any major decisions, and this would need to be built into AMERIPEC’s institutional DNA if not codified explicitly. At the same time, the organization should enable a collaborative hemispheric energy order which seriously takes member states concerns and preferences into consideration while ensuring that its institutional center of gravity remains stable, functional, and anchored in North America.

Barriers to Implementation

Something like AMERIPEC has never been tried before, and this is because the economic and political incentives have long pointed in the opposite direction.

Historically, Western Hemisphere petroleum investments were viewed as marginal because abundant alternative sources and unstable conditions deterred capital. In a more fragmented, multipolar world with higher risk premiums abroad, nearshoring to the Americas offers firms a lower-risk strategic alternative. AMERIPEC would enhance this by strengthening governance, transparency, and regulatory predictability across Latin America, making the region more investment-friendly. While regional heterogeneity might seem to complicate coordination, AMERIPEC turns diversity into an asset: states specialize by comparative advantage in capital, technology, reserves, refining, and shipping, increasing overall resilience and preventing direct competition among U.S., Mexican, or Venezuelan oil workers by allocating distinct functional roles within the consortium.

There have also been political barriers to implementation of something like AMERIPEC. U.S. policymakers have long assumed that formal multilateral institutions would constrain unilateral freedom of action and reign in U.S. sovereignty unnecessarily. But so long as the U.S. maintains a decisive influence in AMERIPEC and the military supremacy necessary to secure her interests, the organization would actually expand U.S. freedom of action by means of creating new instruments of statecraft for dealing with allies and adversaries. There is also the potential for pushback from the states of Latin America, many of which have complicated feelings about perceived U.S. meddling in their internal affairs. Their concerns are legitimate, and the implementation of AMERIPEC should be done with these tendencies in mind. It is key that the organization actually does deliver positive results for all member states. In doing so, AMERIPEC actually becomes much harder to dislodge. Historically, if an anti-American president wins elections in Latin America they often immediately begin coordinating with likeminded partners inside and outside of the hemisphere to undermine U.S. interests.²⁰ If on the other hand, AMERIPEC becomes an asset for regional development, it engenders dependency, and even relatively more anti-American administrations in Latin America will seriously think twice before taking steps to undermine the organization or their place in it. In this way, AMERIPEC could serve as a stabilizing factor for U.S. relations with our Latin neighbors overall.

AMERIPEC implementation would inevitably collide with an array of U.S. legal and regulatory constraints, but none are structurally prohibitive. Antitrust and competition laws like the Sherman Act could challenge coordinated production, export prioritization, or market allocation if construed as price manipulation, though statutory exemptions or national security carve-outs similar to those employed for defense procurement could mitigate the risk. Trade rules under the WTO and USMCA could complicate preferential export access within the hemisphere, yet here too, Article XXI security exemptions are broad, under-enforced, and historically tolerated for alliance-driven coordination.²¹ Existing export control authorities for LNG and oil under the Natural Gas Act, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, and the Defense Production Act are structured for unilateral U.S. discretion rather than multilateral allocation, but they also provide the legal scaffolding for a proto-AMERIPEC that could later be formalized through statute or treaty.²² Environmental permitting through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), sanctions law, and Article II treaty ratification requirements present additional friction points; however, each has a clear workaround through phased accession, executive agreements, tailored licensing, or narrowly tailored congressional authorization. In aggregate, the legal landscape determines form and sequence, but not feasibility. AMERIPEC is viable once the United States treats hemispheric energy coordination as a security function that enhances strategic leverage, rather than as a commercial arrangement subject to standard market regulation.

Forward Together

The 2025 NSS and the Trump Corollary recognize the geopolitical reality of multipolarity, and what’s more, they recognize the United States’ unique role in the Western Hemisphere as a steward of both the region’s vast natural resource endowment and her civilizational future. AMERIPEC seeks to consolidate the Western Hemisphere’s energy strength in order to insulate it from Eurasian volatility and project that strength outward in ways that reinforce regional security and prosperity for all in an increasingly uncertain global environment. If implemented successfully, AMERIPEC’s long term consequences would transcend even energy geopolitics by quietly redrawing the strategic map of global trade. The Persian Gulf would decline in relative importance for allied economies, while chokepoints like the Taiwan Strait, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Strait of Hormuz would lose much of their leverage. Atlantic and trans-Pacific routes linking North and South America would become the central arteries of world trade with the Caribbean Rim and Gulf of America serving as hubs of stable maritime traffic. Competitors are already pursuing similar logic: China, Russia, and India are investing in Eurasian overland and alternative transport corridors to bypass vulnerable sea lanes and as the Arctic ice continues to melt, great power rivals will increasingly utilize far northern trading routes.²³ It is therefore essential that the United States and her regional allies take action to seize the first mover advantage. AMERIPEC is a key first step to developing a Western centric global trading system, placing the New World at the center of her own secure energy system and catalyzing sustained regional development for centuries to come.

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