The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change

Preface

The Obama administration has inherited a daunting set of domestic and international policy challenges. It is coping with a cascading and interconnected series of financial and economic problems on a greater scale than any faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the same time, it must handle a large accumulated legacy of other tough problems: two wars, the continuing threat of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global climate change, an impasse in international trade negotiations and rising protectionist pressures, energy and food insecurity, and the ever more complex management of relations with the Middle East, Europe, Russia, China, the South Asian subcontinent, and sub-Saharan Africa. It is unlikely, therefore, that the new U.S. administration will find much time to think about the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. These Western Hemisphere nations do not pose an imminent security threat to the United States, nor are they likely to be the cause or target of significant international terrorism.At first blush, the countries of the Americas do not appear to be critical to resolving the most immediately pressing problems of U.S. foreign policy. Latin American nations, meanwhile, are undergoing their own important changes. They are increasingly diversifying their international economic relations by weaving closer cooperation among themselves as well as deepening xi Preface trade ties with China, India, Russia, and Europe, making many of them less reliant on the United States. But this growing confidence and autonomy, in addition to regional progress in governance and economic development, suggest that some of Latin America’s governments would likely be stable and effective partners if the United States could engage them in cooperative efforts to confront shared problems. We believe that it would be very smart for the Obama administration to focus early and strategically on U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. The new administration should not promise to pay more attention to the region than it can deliver, nor should it offer soaring rhetoric about pan-American partnership that would inevitably fall short of expectations . Rather, the Obama administration should aim to improve the quality of the limited attention it can devote to the Americas. It should work with key Latin American nations to achieve progress on a few select and crucial issues that can be addressed soon, without investing enormous resources. We make this central argument because we believe that Latin America’s course will have a profound impact on the daily lives of U.S. citizens, on issues ranging from energy to narcotics, immigration to public health, global warming to trade and jobs. On all these issues, sustained and intimate cooperation from Latin American and Caribbean neighbors could make a critical difference to the United States, because of the high degree of interdependence that already exists in the Americas, especially between the United States and its closest neighbors to the south.We also believe that the countries of the Americas , to a high degree, share profound values, deep culture, and major core interests. Common commitments to democratic governance, market economies, social justice, and the rule of law establish the potential for genuine cooperation. We urge the Obama administration to recognize and seize upon this opportunity, understanding the diversity within the region but also its underlying shared aspirations and concerns. This book began as a series of papers and memoranda commissioned for the Partnership for the Americas Commission, convened by the Brookings Institution and co-chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, and Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former U.S. under secretary of state. First drafts of the chapters by Abraham Lowenthal, Daniel Zovatto, and Laurence Whitehead (chapters 1, 2, and 13, respectively) were prepared for and discussed at the commission’s first meeting, in May 2008. They were intended to provide broad perspectives by specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe on how the commission might approach its mandate to formulate recommendations for building a genuine partnership between the xii Preface United States and its southern neighbors. We are very pleased that the commission took our analyses and recommendations into account in developing the intellectual framework of its report, Rethinking U.S.–Latin American Relations : A Hemispheric Partnership for a Turbulent World. The commission chose to focus on five topics we emphasized as central: energy, migration, narcotics and crime, economic growth and trade, and the opportunity for a new approach to...