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Trump Delivers Remarks to the Shield of the Americas Summit, Mar. 7, 2026

March 7, 2026 · The White House · 0:43:00

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump opened the first Shield of the Americas Summit in Miami, Florida on March 7, 2026, welcoming heads of state from across the Western Hemisphere — among them, as he introduced them, the presidents of Argentina, El Salvador, Paraguay, Ecuador, Panama, Honduras, Guyana, and Bolivia, and the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He said he would leave directly afterward for Dover, to greet the families of the fallen coming home from Iran.

The announcement was a military coalition. “We come together to announce a brand new military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region,” the President said, naming it the America’s Counter Cartel Coalition. Representatives of 17 different nations, he said, had formally entered the alliance earlier that week in Miami alongside Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and “the heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all.” Drugs coming in by sea, he said, were down 96 percent. On Iran, he put the campaign’s first days as he stated them: 42 Navy ships knocked out in three days, the air force and telecommunications knocked out, and an enemy that had been “very close to a nuclear weapon.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the assembled leaders as allies who “are not just allies, they are friends,” and addressed the hall in Spanish. Secretary Hegseth put the signatory count at 18 countries, launched two days earlier, and described the coalition as an action alliance under the “Trump Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine” — American-led, built to “go on offense against the cartels,” whether drug boats or on land.

Why it matters

The Miami summit is the founding public event of the administration’s hemisphere security doctrine — a named coalition, a stated lethal-force commitment against cartels, and the War Department tasked with implementing it. It is recorded on the Foreign Policy & Defense hub, where the coalition’s subsequent operations will be tracked.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the launch of the America’s Counter Cartel Coalition — 17 nations formally entered as stated by the President, 18 signatory countries as stated by Secretary Hegseth — and the stated 96 percent drop in drugs arriving by sea. The scoreboard entry itself remains review-gated.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Delivers Remarks to the Shield of Americas Summit,” The White House, March 7, 2026 (official upload, embedded above; Miami, FL, per the official description). All figures and characterizations as stated by President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and Secretary Hegseth at the summit.