Donald Trump will welcome the leaders of at least 10 Latin American countries to a palm-dotted golf resort in Miami on Saturday as the president continues his quest to transform the US’s standing in the region and outmuscle China.

Since returning to power last year, Trump has launched a dramatic – and at times deadly – crusade to, as the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, put it, “reclaim our back yard”.

Vows to “take back” the Panama canal were followed by airstrikes on alleged narco boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, overt meddling in Brazil’s judicial system, threats of military intervention in Mexico and Colombia, and, most startlingly, the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and the use of Predator drones to help kill one of the world’s most wanted drug bosses, El Mencho, in Mexico.

Trump has also rescued Argentina’s president, the radical libertarian Javier Milei, with a multibillion-dollar bailout, and interfered in Honduras’s recent election in support of the eventual rightwing winner. He recently suggested a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, as his administration seeks to strangle the country’s struggling communist regime into submission by cutting off its oil supply, despite UN warnings of a humanitarian “collapse”.

“As a critic of him, I’m the first to admit there has not been a presidency since perhaps Kennedy that has had such a profound effect on Latin America, in so many spheres of activity. The effects are real,” said a former US ambassador to Panama, John Feeley, who has likened Trump’s behaviour to that of the ruthless fictional mob boss Tony Soprano.

Trump officials describe his “Don-roe Doctrine” – a revamp of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine by which President James Monroe sought to keep European powers out of the Americas – as an attempt to reduce Beijing’s regional footprint and impose Washington’s will through economic and military pressure.

On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that Saturday’s invitation-only Shield of the Americas summit was designed “to promote freedom, security and prosperity in our region”.

Trump’s guest list includes the rightwing presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador and Paraguay but excludes the leftist leaders of three of Latin America’s biggest economies: Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.

“This is the VIP level of the Latin America Trump Club – and this meeting really does seem to be conceived as a way to add a clear benefit to membership at that level,” said Brian Winter, the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly magazine.

Winter said the conclave would be attended by “ideological fellow travellers Trump likes to take photos with”. “There doesn’t appear to be anything really earth-shattering or momentous on the agenda [although] it will surely include security, migration [and] the questions of Venezuela and Cuba.”

Trump’s Latin American aficionados have been celebrating their trip to Florida. “Paraguay will be present at this important meeting that will strengthen cooperation and joint work in favour of the security and stability of our nations,” its president, Santiago Peña, wrote on Instagram alongside an image of his invitation.

Chile’s ultra-conservative president-elect, José Antonio Kast, who has promised a Trump-style immigration crackdown after he takes power next week, will also attend, as will Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, who this week trumpeted joint anti-drugs operations with the US.

On Thursday, one of Trump’s most powerful officials, Stephen Miller, hinted at more such collaboration, claiming the region’s drug traffickers could only be defeated with military force.

“Not a single one of your nations should tolerate the existence of a single square mile of territory that is under the control of any entity other than the sovereign governments of your country,” Miller told Latin American military heads, calling drug cartels “the Islamic State and the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.

Winter said rubbing shoulders with Trump made sense for rightwing politicians keen to show voters they were tough on crime. “Security is the number one issue in Latin America today and the Trump administration is in a unique position to help in a way that produces domestic political benefits for these leaders. Nobody has the intelligence, much less the firepower, that the US does … Virtually every government in the region is eager to have access to the intelligence that only Washington can provide,” he said, noting how Mexico’s leftwing president, Claudia Sheinbaum, accepted the CIA’s help in tracking down El Mencho.

But Trump’s Latin America strategy has also caused alarm and outrage in capitals such as Brasília and Bogotá, where officials view Maduro’s capture and US attempts to suffocate Cuba as a flagrant violation of international law.

“Cuba isn’t going hungry because it doesn’t know how to produce [food] … Cuba is going hungry because they don’t want Cuba to have access to the things that everyone has a right to,” Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said this week.

For now, however, such criticism has – like Europe’s response to Trump’s Iran attacks – been cautious, with politicians reluctant to offend the US president. Even Colombia’s outspoken leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, has toned down his anti-Trump rhetoric, and held a friendly meeting with the US president in the White House last month.

“What’s interesting – and somewhat surprising – is that at least so far, many countries are going along with this, whether out of convenience or fear,” Winter said. “Even some of the governments that are deeply uncomfortable with the Don-roe Doctrine are keeping their protests to themselves [and] seeking constructive relationships with Trump while quietly scrambling to diversify their relationships so that they depend less on the US.”

Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Stimson Center Latin America programme, said the summit’s “ideological guest list” exposed the failure of Trump’s “theatrical” doctrine, and the White House’s inability to work with Latin America’s key countries.

“Brazil and Mexico comprise together more than half of the population in the region [and] more than a half of all economic activity … Throw in Colombia and you’ve got the two biggest South American countries. All [of them] completely on the outside of a US hemispheric policy – and this is the hemisphere the US supposedly dominates and [where it] demands pre-eminence,” Gedan said.