Unfortunately, the United States — with a concerned eye on China — seems itching to start one.

Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

Perhaps SouthCom’s alarmism should be taken with a grain of salt. Rebecca Bill Chavez, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs during the Obama administration and now heads the Inter-American Dialogue in D.C., told me that raising the alarm about existential threats in the region has been a standard ploy to draw attention and resources from Washington.

Still, Richardson’s opinion matters. She has become one of the most visible U.S. officials in Latin America, often on tour to meet top-ranking civilian and military leaders in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina.

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What’s more, her mistrust of China’s intentions is by now broadly shared beyond the U.S. military. Civilians in Washington are not happy about the deepwater megaport that China’s Cosco Shipping is building in Peru. They are getting antsy about Chinese exports to and investments in Mexico, claiming they are designed to circumvent U.S. tariffs.

A few years ago, the Chilean government annulled a contract with a Chinese company to manufacture Chilean passports and IDs after officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned it would be difficult for Chile to remain in the visa waiver program if China had access to Chileans’ passport data.

The United States also leaned on Chile to nix a bid by Huawei to build a trans-Pacific undersea cable connecting Valparaiso to Shanghai. It also tried to block a 2022 deal for China to build Argentina’s fourth power plant, Atucha III. It stopped Mexico from deploying Chinese-made scanners at its border checkpoints.

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Altogether, Washington’s not-too-subtle message is that it wants Latin America to get on board against its new global rival. As Joshua Meltzer of the Brookings Institution noted about Washington’s concerns over China’s growing links with Mexico, “Failure to cooperate more deeply on how to respond to China risks the U.S. adopting a more go-it-alone approach.”

Latin American leaders, however, see little upside to Washington’s proposition. They might not endorse China’s craving for Taiwan or share its desire to displace the United States as global hegemon, but neither do they love Washington’s ambition to box China out. Especially for the big commodity producers in South America, China has been a godsend.

The Cold War model is something the region would rather avoid. From the Alliance for Progress proposed in the wake of the Cuban Revolution through support of the military coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 and the funding of contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s, Washington’s sole objective in Latin America was to prevent it from falling into the embrace of the Soviet Union.

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The demise of the U.S.S.R. offered a brief moment when other paths could be pursued. The United States signed on to the North American Free Trade Agreement and even proposed a Free Trade Area of the Americas to glue the continent together with ties of trade and investment. But the terrorist attacks on 9/11 slammed that door shut. Washington lost interest in the region — until China started poking........

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