If Rubio Doesn’t Act, He Risks Giving the CCP Dominance over South American Shipping
“We often say that to get rich, we must first build roads; but in coastal areas, to get rich, we must also first build ports.” – Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the China Central Committee
The Chinese Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop CopiaPort-E, Chile’s deep-water port on the Pacific, raises national security questions given that Todd Callender, Esq., the CEO of the insurance conglomerate Cotswold Group in Barbados, would prefer to sell to the United States the rights to develop the port.* Is the Trump administration serious about protecting U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere?
As reported in American Thinker, China covets ownership of CopiePort-E to serve as the Pacific Ocean landing pad for China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” in South America. The status quo is that the Trump administration is taking active steps to wrest control of the Panama Canal from China, even as China’s state-owned shipping giant, China Ocean Shipping Group (Cosco), in November 2024, purchased a 60 percent stake in Chancay, Peru, for $1.6 billion.
The proposed CopiaPort-E location. YouTube screen grab.
That purchase means that China stands to gain a commanding position on Pacific shipping from South America should the Trump administration fail to act promptly to negotiate with Callender’s on a U.S. offer to develop CopiaPort-E. China’s military ambitions in South America also remain clear, given China’s resentment that Argentina’s President Javier Milei reversed his predecessors’ decision to establish a naval base near the Strait of Magellan. Milei decided, instead, to coordinate closely with the Trump administration to develop the base.
President Trump has brought the Monroe Doctrine into the 21st Century by suggesting that Canada can become the 51st state, Greenland must become a US protectorate, and the US must take back military control over the Panama Canal. Trump’s vision stretches across the Western Hemisphere, from the Arctic of Canada and Greenland to the Antarctic of Argentina.
CopiaPort-E has the natural advantage of two low-gradient mountain passes through the Andes that give Argentina’s growing agribusiness direct access to the Pacific. The alternative is leaving from the Rosario-Buenos Aires ports on the Atlantic Ocean side of South America and passing through the Panama Canal to reach Asia—a journey that adds 15 days at a minimum to the Pacific transit to Asia.
Rubio’s apparent failure to pay attention to Todd Callender’s offer gives China the ability to prevent President Trump from fulfilling the Antarctic leg of his strategy, even as Russia hopes to militarize the North and South Poles, and Russia-China Arctic cooperation has intensified. This pairs with the fact that Rubio seemingly hasn’t acted to root out the State Department globalists who saw no danger to national sovereignty when President Biden implemented his “open borders” policy.
Instead of moving with determination to secure a firm lock on the future of Chile’s deep-water port for the United States, the State Department’s current inaction risks conceding to China an Antarctica-accessible port. As Todd Callender affirmed in a podcast with me, if the State Department were paying attention, a U.S. bid to secure the rights to develop CopiaPort-E should be central to Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine ambitions to secure U.S. sovereignty by extending our Western Hemisphere influence from the North Pole to the South Pole.
Leland Lazarus, Director of National Security at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy, has expressed the plausible concern that “the Chinese navy and intelligence services could also use the ports to spy on U.S. naval and commercial ships, and even potentially keep them from using ports and waterways.”
Currently holding varied equity interests in 129 ports worldwide, China has become the world’s largest trading country and second-largest economy. China conducts about 95 percent of its international trade through sea lanes. Thus, its “Belt and Road Initiative,” launched in 2013, has morphed into China’s “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR).”
China’s port acquisitions have concentrated on what has become known as the “Global South,” with concentrations in Africa, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba, India, Southeast Asia, and, now, South America. The “Global South,” a term Carl Ogelsby coined in 1969, encompasses some 77 countries grouped into a “G77.” These same nations were once termed the “Third World,” a designation originating from 1980’s “Brand Report, named after the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
If Rubio is serious about steering the State Department away from the “New World Order” globalism that has crept into U.S. foreign policy since at least the days of President George H. W. Bush, he must take China’s port ambitions seriously. China understands that, by controlling ports in South America, South America’s resources are open to global trade.
To cash in on Biden’s “green energy transition,” China made significant investments in South American lithium mining, creating a “a pivotal battleground” for the “Lithium Triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—a region estimated to hold between 60 to 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves.
Greenland and Canada’s abundance of rare earth minerals are likely economic considerations driving President Trump’s interest in both countries. By capturing the rights to develop CopiaPort-E in Chile, China will open the more efficient Pacific route to Asia that China requires to get Argentina’s agricultural products delivered to Beijing not only fresher but also more cheaply.
Trump’s return to reestablish tariffs as a cornerstone of U.S. international trade policy stems from an “America First” deviation from the free trade policies that opened our borders to the export of jobs and capital facilitated by the creation of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization’s expansion to include China.
When Nixon and Kissinger went to China in 1972, they may have hoped that an economically developed China would not become a Soviet Union-like foe. But today, with China’s move to leverage cheap labor into global economic dominance, those hopes have vastly diminished. In 1970, more than a quarter of American workers were employed in manufacturing, while today, only 8 percent of Americans are so employed. White House senior counselor Peter Navarro claims the “endgame” of Trump’s tariff policy is “to fill up all the half-empty factories that now are operating at low capacities around Detroit and the greater Midwest area.”
If “America First” is to be applied equally in matters of domestic control of the borders and U.S. control of international trade in the Western Hemisphere, Secretary of State Rubio has no choice but to get into a bidding war for the rights to develop Chile’s CopiaPort-E.
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*Disclosure: Todd Callender, Esq., the Chief Executive Officer of the Cotswold Group, is the lead author of Dr. Corsi’s newest book, published on April 4, Disease X and Military Martial Law: Defeating the Globalist Plan to Depopulate the World and Enslave the Remnant.
GodsFiveStones.com is a tax-deductible 501(c)3 foundation created by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., and Karladine Graves, M.D., managed by Capstone Legacy Foundation. As reported on GodsFiveStones.com, Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., has discovered cryptographic algorithms in the State Board of Elections voter registration databases in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, and Oklahoma.
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