We finally have a sense of President Trump’s strategy for Latin America.

This month, the national security adviser, John Bolton, gave what was billed as a major policy speech on Latin America policy that focused on tightening the screws on leftist autocrats in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In the weeks that followed, the White House put sanctions on state-owned companies in Cuba and on public officials in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Mr. Bolton didn’t discuss Mexico, where the leftist populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be sworn in as president on Saturday. He had very little to say about most of the region’s other main countries and instead harped on punishing Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, whom he called the “troika of tyranny,” “the triangle of terror” and “the three stooges” of socialism.

This Manichaean view — a misguided rehash of the Cold War policies of Ronald Reagan — threatens to polarize the region. While punitive measures against the regimes in these three countries may be overdue, this strategy ignores, at Washington’s peril, the domestic concerns of elected leaders in Latin America’s democracies. And we already see troubling signs that in pursuing this narrow focus on leftist autocrats, the Trump administration is embracing far-right-wing populist leaders.

Squeezing regional dictators is simply not a priority for Latin America’s democratically elected leaders. Nor should it be.