While the Trump administration is working to decrease U.S. dependency on Chinese goods by bolstering U.S. manufacturing, one of America’s trading partners and neighbors to the south appears to be growing increasingly friendly with the Chinese Communist Party, posing a threat to U.S. interests.
“The Dominican Republic is key to China’s strategy to isolate the U.S. in the Caribbean,” Connie Mack IV, a former Republican congressman from Florida, tells The Daily Signal.
The Dominican Republic established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China in 2018, and under then-Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina, the Caribbean nation signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative and no longer recognizes Taiwan’s independence from China.
“The Medina government committed to collaboration with the PRC in numerous fields, including PRC training of Dominican Foreign Ministry personnel, the establishment of a Confucius Institute, accepting a gift of 148 Chinese military and police vehicles … plus agreement in principle to PRC construction of a major new port facility in Manzanillo, electricity generation, and other infrastructure,” according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
While Medina deepened ties with China, even allowing China to have an office in the Presidential Palace, he did not visit the U.S. during his eight years in office from 2012 to 2020.
When Luis Abinader became president in 2020, he pledged to strengthen relations with the U.S. and limit Chinese investment.
“If China wants to invest in nonstrategic areas of the Dominican government, its investment is welcome, but the Dominican government’s decision is to have a strategic alliance with the United States,” Abinader said publicly shortly after taking office.
While “China’s advance under the Abinader government has proceeded slowly,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the relationship between the two nations remains strong.
During a meeting between Abinader and the Dominican Republic’s foreign minister with Chinese officials in 2022, Dominican officials expressed a readiness to “deepen practical cooperation with China and Chinese companies,” according to a report from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“The Dominican Republic highly appreciates the important contributions made by President Xi Jinping and the Chinese government to maintaining world peace and stability,” according to the Chinese report.
In 2023, top Dominican officials met with Chinese counterparts in talks focused on political and economic coordination. The same year, the Dominican Republic also sent soldiers to China to participate in a military exercise in Xinjiang, where the CCP is reported to have imprisoned an unknown number of Uyghur Muslims.
The Dominican Republic is one of China’s largest trading partners in the Caribbean, and in 2024, bilateral trade between the two countries reached over $5 billion, according to Trading Economics. And most recently, the Dominican Republic sent its trade officials in May to a forum aimed at strengthening ties between Latin America, the Caribbean, and the People’s Republic of China.
America’s relationship with the Dominican Republic is “solid, but complex,” according to the U.S. State Department.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the Dominican Republic during his first international trip as Trump’s top diplomat and spoke with Abinader as recently as May.
“Under Joe Biden, the U.S. turned a blind eye to the Dominican Republic’s slouch towards Beijing,” Mack, the former Florida lawmaker, said. “The Rubio State Department cannot make the same mistake. They must remove the blinders they have about the current Dominican government. They do not support the America First agenda.”
Given the Dominican Republic’s robust economy and proximity to the U.S., separated only by about 800 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, it is in America’s interest that the Dominican Republic’s “interactions with the PRC are conducted within the framework of transparency, strong institutions, and a level playing field, and that PRC activities in the country … [do] not undermine U.S.-Dominican security,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote.
