The announced redeployment this summer of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet, a World War II–era flotilla, to patrol the Caribbean and Latin American coastline represents a major new projection of North American military power in the region. This development, on the cusp of a new U.S. administration, prompts us to ask: Will Washington continue its imperial temptation in Latin America? Will Latin America be a focus of renewed attention after the November presidential election? Will there be changes in U.S. international military deployment in the region?
Over the decades, Washington has noticeably varied its international strategy, its broader global doctrine, and the diplomatic instruments that sustain it (see chart above). During the Cold War, U.S. grand strategy had different components: The strategy of containment predominated; underpinned by a network of strong and decisive alliances, it attempted to limit the expansion of the Soviet Union and, to the extent possible, roll back the consolidation of its sphere of influence. Containment was backed up by the doctrine of deterrence; Washington made it known that the effects of retaliation would be devastating if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. In the Americas, U.S. grand strategy was complemented by a subordinate logic: Washington did not give the armed forces of the region a fundamental role in combating the Soviet Union. Instead, it put forth the so-called National Security Doctrine to combat the “internal enemy”: local Communism.
After September 11, 2001, and especially after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States transformed its foreign and defense policy, pursuing a new strategy oriented toward maintaining U.S. primacy. Washington would not tolerate any international competitor, be it a current friend (the European Union) or incipient opponent (China). According to the new doctrine of preventive war, Washington reserved for itself the right to use its military might against any country, whether or not that country intended to attack immediately and whether or not the United States could verify that the attack was indeed planned: Imminence and evidence did not seem to matter. The solid alliances of the past were reformulated and replaced by ad hoc coalitions (e.g., the Coalition of the Willing); Washington alone would determine the mission, and only later would the appropriate coalition be formed to carry it out.
Even though the subordinate hemispheric logic that accompanies this redefinition of grand strategy—what we could call a “doctine of national insecurity”—is still not wholly consented to or implemented, there are evident signs that Washington may nonetheless establish such a logic in the region. Worryingly, many facts point in this direction.
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In Latin America, though with different levels of acceptance in each country, Washington has successfully implanted the omnipresent idea of “new threats” and the proliferation of all kinds of dangers, including global terrorism, transnational organized crime, and international drug trafficking, all of which operate in “empty spaces” where the state has vanished or is markedly disappearing.
The Pentagon has insisted, and continues to insist, that these threats demand that the division between internal security and external defense be done away with, and thus the work of police, security forces, and the armed forces must overlap. They must exchange information, erasing the borders between police and military activities. This year’s “Plan Mexico” (known officially as the Merida Initiative), which reproduces the same punitive drug-war logic of Plan Colombia, and the new participation of the Brazilian military in combating the drug trade in the favelas suggest that the strict separation of defense and security is progressively diminishing.
Latin America has in turn accepted, though not unanimously, the thesis of the new coalitions of the willing. The Pentagon garnered direct military support from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as explicit initial political support from Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica, in the coalition that attacked Iraq in 2003. It also successfully recruited 12 countries in the region to commit to the military-police mission in Haiti beginning in 2004. There is no doubt a big difference between the war waged by Washington and its allies in Iraq and the deployment of forces in Haiti, endorsed by the United Nations. However, quite apart from the humanitarian sentiment behind Latin American involvement in the Haitian contingent, many countries in the region assign a growing value to their armed forces in processes of pacification, stabilization, and reconstruction beyond their borders. The kinds of intra-military linkages that are being made in the hemisphere, the internal training that foreign military missions require, and the impact in the medium term on civic-military relations and domestic democratic evolution are questions worth some careful examination.
In this context, the Colombian military’s March 1 attack on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Ecuadoran territory is of great significance. First, it presents the risk of the “war on terror” being Latin Americanized—even though the only place where this modality of terrorism has not yet manifested itself is Latin America. Second, the Colombian operation justifies the violation of international law to combat alleged terrorists, and the deployment of preventive force could be established as a standard practice. This, in turn, may give rise to the distortion of legitimate defense and to the further militarization of responses to the region’s long list of socio-political problems.
For this reason, the Organization of American States’ March 17 resolution on the Colombian operation is of great importance. It reaffirms, among other things, the validity of the principle of territorial sovereignty; rejects the Colombian incursion into Ecuadoran territory without Quito’s “knowledge or consent”; registers the apologies offered by Colombia and its decision not to repeat such an action “under any circumstance”; reiterates the region’s commitment to confronting the threats from “irregular groups and criminal organizations”; and provides for mediation to reestablish “good relations between the two countries.” The ratification of principles of coexistence and respect among nations, like Colombia’s willingness to abide by the regional consensus, is an encouraging sign that an inappropriate mode of action can be prevented from becoming a valid, standard, and permanent strategy. The U.S. interpretation of the Colombian attack as legitimate “self-defense,” on the other hand, seems to justify any and all methods in the fight against U.S.-defined terrorists.
Yet the OAS resolution leaves the doctrine of confronting “new threats” at an impasse. Indeed, there are two interpretations of the resolution. In the optimistic version, Latin America has successfully confronted the United States and rejected interventionism; in the pessimistic version, Washington was nonetheless able to break inter-American unanimity. An alternative view, which attempts to discern the nuances of the resolution, leads one to conclude that the “war on terror” in the region is beginning to acquire some uncertain contours that are as dangerous as any to be found within the international system. The U.S. military’s view of Latin America therefore merits a detailed evaluation.
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We can divide U.S. engagement with the region into three areas: First, there are trade relations that operate within commercial treaties, both multilateral and bilateral (NAFTA, CAFTA-DR, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Panama). Second, there is a military dimension that emanates, basically, from the Pentagon, is articulated by the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), and occupies an ever more central place in Washington’s regional strategy. Third, there are political exchanges that have been weakened and are lacking a positive agenda, now concentrating only on “problem cases” like Venezuela and Colombia.
Southcom’s “Command Strategy 2016: Partnership for the Americas” (available at www.southcom.mil), released in 2007, reveals the most ambitious strategic plan by a U.S. agency regarding the region that has been conceived in years. Conspicuous in their absence from the report are policy instruments like the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and the Inter-American Defense Board, as well as multilateral institutions like the OAS and the UN. The hemispheric relations maintained by other parts of the U.S. government bureaucracy, like the Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury, have also disappeared in the document: They seem irrelevant or unnecessary. Southcom thus announces its role in protecting the region for the next 10 years as if it were a continental proconsul.
The text begins by reviewing the principal challenges facing the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. It turns that none of the major threats to the United States (totalitarian states armed with weapons of mass destruction or forms of transnational terrorism with a global reach) appear in the region. The document only indicates that ungoverned spaces in the region could “potentially” be used to harm vital U.S. interests; nowhere in the text is the existence in the region of radical Islamic groups bent on attacking U.S. targets confirmed. Meanwhile, poverty, inequality, corruption, and criminality are all identified as significant menaces.
But the mission of the Southern Command is excessive. In the document, Southcom establishes itself as the leading organization among existing agencies to guarantee “security, stability, and prosperity in the Americas.” To the usual military activities are added the establishment and support of regional and global coalitions—that is, the above-mentioned coalitions of the willing. These coalitions are meant to be available for peace operations both in the region and elsewhere. They are also meant to help in the identification of “third party nation alternatives to accept migrants,” and to establish programs to deal with the problem of large-scale migration.
With the goal of increasing stability, Southcom intends to actively link with various state agencies, NGOs, and public and private institutions; propose negotiating “security agreements throughout the hemisphere”; designate new countries as new “major non-NATO allies” (only Argentina has this status now); and stimulate joint efforts among government and non-state actors in humanitarian tasks. In order to “enable prosperity,” the document emphasizes the importance of developing programs of training in the area of “internal security” in Latin American nations; of increasing the number of so-called cooperative security locations (in reality, small military bases like the ones at Manta in Ecuador, Reina Beatrix in Aruba, Hato Rey in Curaçao, and Comalpa in El Salvador); supporting the proposal for a joint Central American battalion; and improving the definition of the Defense Department’s role in the region’s “socio-economic and political development processes.”
The Southern Command’s new strategy comes in the context of a growing role for the Defense Department in Latin America. Between 1997 and 2007, total U.S. military and police assistance to the region was about $7.3 billion. In 2005–07, four countries in the region were among the top 15 recipients of U.S. military assistance: Colombia, fifth; Bolivia, eighth; Peru, 10th; and Mexico, 12th. In the last five years, annual arms sales to the region have been an average $1.1 billion. Between 2001 and 2005, 85,820 Latin American soldiers were trained in the United States. (Compare this with the 61,000 soldiers and police trained by the infamous School of the Americas from 1946 to 2000.)
Southcom’s near decade-long strategy (ending in 2016) will continue to demand more material resources and greater autonomy for the U.S. military. This is an extensive and comprehensive undertaking, whose execution, it appears, is independent of the political-military future of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the next U.S. presidential election. The underlying assumption is that no government led by a dovish Democrat or a hawkish Republican will change the course of military diplomacy toward the region in the next decade.
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It is against this backdrop of Washington’s projection of power into Latin America that the U.S. electoral process is taking place. In this sense, there will probably be more continuity than change. Since September 11, civil society has been so sensitized that any president will have to be “tough” on terror. Politicians have been restricted by that trauma, the military has become addicted to the new “war on terror,” and both are hypnotized by the notion of global U.S. primacy. In sum, the country is locked inside the logic of 9/11—both captive and captivated. With fear in the air, an economic recession, and the threat of a larger financial crisis, it is difficult to suppose there will be a substantive and definite change of course for the United States in terms of foreign relations. No candidate or political force appears disposed to propose a new role for the military in U.S. foreign strategy. The hyper-militarization of foreign policy is more and more telling. All the quantitative and qualitative indicators—budget, doctrine, deployment, reach, corporate weight, institutional pressures, civic-military balance—point in this direction. Democrats and Republicans, neoconservatives and liberals, all have an excessive faith in the use of force in world politics and appear not to respect international law and global regimes. The dilemma is not whether the United States is on its way to becoming a new or stronger empire; it is whether the “Prussian” route to primacy has really been embraced by its leadership.
The economic deterioration and its spread beyond the United States will no doubt occupy the next president’s agenda. The executive will have to put the country’s house in order before trying to deal with the “houses” of others. The principal source of the United States’s eventual imperial decline is to be found in its domestic scene, and is much more socioeconomic than political-military. That is why there is a tactical consensus on certain strategic issues: curb China, co-opt India, deter Russia, control Europe, quarantine Pakistan, contain Iran, sustain Saudi Arabia, defend Israel, isolate Venezuela, assist Colombia, among others. On these questions we see, in general terms, a relative convergence between the two main candidates: They speak little about those matters, and when they make their differences known, those differences are more about style and form rather than substance or content.
Finally, significant changes in defense and foreign policy do not depend on individuals. Predicting a major transformation based on a candidate’s profile is imprudent, even more so when Washington shows no signs of abandoning its bid to secure and maintain military, economic, and political predominance. Democrats and Republicans show at most carefully differentiated modes of a calibrated primacy. Obama and McCain do have distinct personalities and respond to different party imperatives. This, however, does not imply that there will be a turning point in U.S. global grand strategy. A number of forces, factors, and phenomena, both internal and external, seem to impose fundamental continuity with minor tactical changes.
Faced with this panorama, Latin America shows its fragmentation. In the most noted case in South America, Andean conflicts have flared up, attracting more and more attention from Washington. Paradoxically, this is occurring at a rare conjuncture: There have been few other times that presented such concurrent conditions to reduce Latin America’s subordination to the United States and widen its autonomy in world affairs. The opportunity is ripe; whether it is taken advantage of or not depends essentially on the countries of South America.
The inattention paid by the United States to the region after 9/11 and its loss of credibility after the Iraq invasion, combined with its bad economic management in the last few years, offer the region rare leeway. The so-called left turn in South America is the natural consequence of a democratizing movement that, with the crisis of dictatorships during the 1980s, counted on active support from the United States. The current reassessment of the state in South America is a consequence of the costs produced by policies established under the so-called Washington Consensus through the 1990s. Its exhaustion is visible throughout the region. This fact, together with the executive’s inability to put its own country’s economy in order has meant that neither the White House nor Wall Street have been able to seriously question or deter the testing of heterodox economic measures in the hemisphere. Washington’s obsession with the Middle East and Central Asia and its loss of international and hemispheric prestige has allowed for a proliferation of initiatives conceived without U.S. participation.
In this context, three issues that revolve around Brazil will be the key to whether South America wastes this opportunity, attempts a simple dependent re-accommodation, or devises a more emancipatory response. First, the important discovery of oil along the Brazilian coast will change the regional energy equation and oblige Brazil to design a more consistent grand strategy of its own if it wants to become an important emerging power. Second, the February agreements between Brazil and Argentina on nuclear power and defense are of great importance. Uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes, designing a nuclear power reactor, and commitments for the joint production of arms constitute the core of the agreement. Finally, Brazil’s call for the founding of a South American Defense Board shows, on the one hand, the obsolescence of Washington’s Inter-American Defense Board and, on the other hand, the South American desire to prevent and reduce conflicts in the region by its own design.
Taken together, these regional trends indicate a growing realism toward the United States: It is neither an inexorable enemy nor an indispensable ally. But its geopolitical projection and military deployment in South America constitute a growing problem.
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian is professor of international relations at the Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires. This article was originally published as “El militarismo estadounidense en América del Sur: La configuración de un problema,” in the June issue of Le Monde diplomatique’s Southern Cone edition (www.eldiplo.org). Reproduced with permission. Translation by NACLA.
