Scott A. McGregor is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and managing partner of Close Hold Intelligence Consulting Ltd.North America’s control over its own future hinges on protecting the infrastructure, trade routes, and financial networks that keep the continent running. When criminal enterprises and hostile powers gain leverage over those systems, security erodes quietly but steadily.Power once meant territory. Countries fought for land, borders, and physical access. Control meant occupying space and defending it.But look at what holds a country together today. Ports. Pipelines. Power grids. Telecom lines. Undersea cables. Payment systems. Supply chains. These systems determine power. If you control them, you can shape outcomes without ever firing a shot.That reality is what many people still miss. The struggle for control of these systems does not always look like conflict. It often appears legal and commercial. It moves through contracts, investment, corruption, and digital narratives at the speed of shipping, banking, and bandwidth.Look south, and you see one part of the problem in plain view. The cartel world is not just criminals with guns. It is an enterprise model. It has logistics and finance. It has recruiters and specialists. It adapts fast. It exploits gaps between agencies and between countries. It uses the border the way any smart business uses a distribution corridor..Fentanyl is the brutal symbol of this era. Thousands of opioid-related deaths occur annually in Canada. Precursors can be sourced globally, processed through networks that thrive on weak governance, and delivered into communities in a form that is cheap, compact, and deadly.This is not only a crime story or a health story. It is a sovereignty story. When a criminal system can move goods, money, and people across borders more efficiently than governments can stop it, the state is outperformed on its own territory.But that is only part of the story. Across Latin America, there is also an opening for external powers to build footholds that appear to be commercial but can later become leverage. Port deals. Telecom projects. Energy infrastructure. Mining. Strategic loans. None of this is automatically sinister. Countries need investment. They need development. But naïveté is expensive. When governance is weak and transparency is thin, investment can harden into control that is rarely easy to unwind.This is where an old American idea comes back into focus. Continentalism.For most of US history, the instinct has been to keep external rivals from gaining serious positions in the hemisphere. The logic is straightforward. You do not want distant powers shaping your near neighbourhood, including your trade routes, energy lifelines, and democratic stability..Continentalism today is not about empire. It is about denying rivals the ability to anchor themselves inside the infrastructure that North America depends on.It is about keeping North America strong enough, economically, industrially, and institutionally, that it cannot be easily coerced. It is about treating the continent as an integrated base in a competitive world, where trade, energy, and security policy reinforce each other.USMCA, the trade agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, fits that logic. So does nearshoring and hardening supply chains. Building more within North America and with trusted partners reduces vulnerability created by dependency.But while the southern border gets most of the attention, the Arctic is changing quickly too. Ice is thinning. Routes are opening. The region is becoming more navigable and more contested. Russia has expanded its Arctic posture for years, and China brands itself as a near-Arctic state while investing in polar research and infrastructure.The Arctic is about more than shipping. It affects how North America is approached by sea and air, including surveillance, early warning, and physical access. As ice thins and routes open, both commercial traffic and military movement become easier. If others can move through the region freely and we are unprepared, we fall behind. Without the ability to track ships and aircraft in the Arctic and without satellites, icebreakers, and allied coordination, we risk losing control of the north..Here is the blunt truth. Our hemisphere does not stay secure by default. It stays secure when governments can see what is happening, enforce rules, follow the money, and keep the economic base resilient. It is a call to get serious about protecting the systems that keep North America safe.Border security has to align with trade efficiency. Illicit finance must be treated as a national security threat. Critical infrastructure needs scrutiny based on strategic risk, not just quarterly return. Partnerships across the Americas matter because vacuums attract predators, criminals, and geopolitical rivals.Times are changing. The contest is over the infrastructure that keeps the continent running. If North America fails to protect it, key decisions will be shaped elsewhere.Scott A. McGregor is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and managing partner of Close Hold Intelligence Consulting Ltd. He is co-author of The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard.
