The "Forgotten Relationship" Updated and Reconsidered

In December 1989, when George H. W. Bush sent 20,000 U.S. troops into Panama to overthrow General Manuel Noriega, few noticed the timing, barely more than a month after the Berlin Wall fell. Most international bodies condemned the intervention as illegal; and, while polls suggested that Panamanians were grateful for being rid of the cruel strongman, many in Latin America and the United States saw in the invasion a continuation of Cold War–era U.S. hegemony. As Russell Crandall reminds us, however, Bush took down his erstwhile informer not because he was a communist or flirted with any, but because he was a drug- and arms-dealer, not to mention a growing embarrassment as a suppressor of democracy. Panama in 1989 may just come to symbolize a segue from the Cold War to the post–Cold War era in U.S.–Latin American relations.

Crandall's study can almost be called the first historical monograph on its topic. Despite its recent focus, it is history because it is the first attempt to analyze the Bush-Clinton-Bush policies toward Latin America as an era separate and distinct from the Cold War. Yet it is only almost history because the sources are simply not there yet for a thorough investigation. Despite that limitation, the book is a welcome addition to the literature as an in-depth identification of salient themes in a bilateral relationship that suffered relative neglect in the 1990s and 2000s.

Looking back, that neglect seems understandable—events in Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, and South Asia were far more compelling in the 1990s; and since 2001 global terrorism has monopolized much of the attention and resources of U.S. policymakers. But in the early 1990s it seemed likely that Latin America would maintain some prominence in the U.S. worldview. The U.S. commitment to wars in Central America ended, but democracy was spreading in the hemisphere. The United States and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the "Washington Consensus" on neoliberalism seemed as if it would soon make of the region a major ally of the United States.

In keeping with this optimism, much of the early 1990s literature was forward looking. Scholars sought to put the Cold War behind them and wrote about the future of inter-American affairs, it would seem, as much as about the past.¹ Others delved into distinct topics such as immigration, human rights, religion, judicial reform, and trade.² Former diplomat Robert Pastor tackled the 1990s as a whole, but within a larger narrative of U.S.–Latin American relations.³ Perhaps the only other recent look back that focuses uniquely on the post–Cold War years of this relationship is David Scott Palmer's U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Clinton Years: Opportunities Lost or Opportunities Squandered? (2006). It is a short overview of a narrower time frame than Crandall's—1993 to 2001 rather than 1989 to 2007. Palmer's study faced the same challenge of relying almost uniquely on press accounts.

Crandall's study aims to identify the trends of the post-1989 period that distinguish it from the Cold War, to see whether "Big Stick" diplomacy of an overwhelming power concerned primarily with security issues (read: anti-communism) was still relevant. Not surprisingly, he finds that a much more complex set of themes has framed the relationship in the last two decades. Paradoxically, in a unipolar world, U.S. policy toward Latin America is no longer singular but has fractured into various interests: democracy; trade; drugs; the environment; human rights; and, to be sure, security.

The organization of the book likewise reflects the lack of a meta-narrative. The author follows his explanation of concepts in the first chapter with only one brief chronological chapter. The rest of the book then assigns each chapter a theme (democracy, security, economics) and case studies (financial meltdowns, Colombia...