#184 The United States and Latin America after the Cold War

By Thomas Carothers

From the Introduction

The Bush administration's Latin America policy to date has been most notable for its lack of strategic vision. A few high-profile actions have been taken--the invasion of Panama, the achievement of a bipartisan Nicaragua policy, a new debt plan, and a heightened war on drugs in South America--but they were reactive and disparate, aimed largely at winning points with the U.S. domestic audience rather than advancing a coherent policy framework. The Bush administration has conveyed no sense of where US.-Latin American relations are heading or what place Latin America has in the changing global posture of the United States. This exemplifies a lack not only of an organizing framework but also of any sustained high-level interest in Latin America. President Bush and his top advisers engage themselves in Latin America when an issue rises to such a level of visibility that it simply cannot be ignored; most of the time, however, they pay little attention to the region.

The current drift of U.S. policy toward Latin America is the result of something much more far reaching and long term than the inattention of a new administration. It is the result of a generational shift of political attitudes and conditions in Latin America, the United States, and the world generally. This shift can be summarized in bare terms as follows: first, U.S. policy toward Latin America since World War I has been based on anticommunism, the desire to prevent the emergence of leftist or perceived Communist governments from coming to power; second, the threat of communism in Latin America, as well as the perceived connection between the Soviet Union and Latin American leftist movements, has declined significantly in recent years; the result is that the traditional basis of U.S. policy toward Latin America is gone and the United States has found no replacement. The Bush administration is an actor without a script on the Latin American policy stage, improvising as crises arise, hoping only to avoid serious embarrassments before the curtain falls.