A Critical View of U.S.–Latin American Relations

Making a new and original contribution to the study of U.S.–Latin American relations is a serious challenge. Especially since the 1960s, when the Cuban revolution heightened concern and awareness in the United States about the importance of those relations, the topic has been studied in innumerable ways, from different angles, with diverse goals in mind, and with widely varying degrees of analytical rigor. Library shelves overflow with such monographs, many gathering a thick layer of dust. It is therefore uncommon to find a book that requires the reader to view the issue in a new light. Brian Loveman’s No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776 asks us to reconsider critically the political history of the relationships between the United States and Latin America, and it does so with an impressive depth of historical knowledge and detail.

One foundation of the book is the notion that, in the United States, we tend to conflate unilateralism with isolationism. Reluctance to join alliances, which has been a common theme in U.S. foreign policy, is not the same as unwillingness to extend the reach of U.S. power abroad. Further, when President George W. Bush brought the term “pre-emptive warfare” into vogue, it was popularly framed as something new, when in fact it had been the norm for U.S. policy toward Latin America since independence.

Americans have been taught to think, and like to think, that the country did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, that in its dealings with other peoples the United States has been magnanimous, that, unlike other great powers, the United States has usually followed the moral high ground and resorted to force only in self-defense. Americans like to believe that the wars they have fought were provoked by other nations and that the United States has promoted freedom and liberty around the world, fighting against tyranny from the early nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first

(pp. 10–11).

The very fact that such myths have been so widely believed constitutes a serious obstacle to policy success, in terms of the ability to achieve stated policy goals. Chronic myopia leads to all manner of backlash. The United States government has repeatedly invaded and intervened to achieve, as Theodore Roosevelt once put it with regard to Panama, “well-nigh incalculable possibilities for the good of this country and the nations of mankind” (p. 184). Over and over, policymakers and the general public alike in the United States have wondered why the people we were trying to uplift seemed so ungrateful for it.

That puzzlement replays over the decades, and even the centuries, oddly untouched by self-reflection. As Loveman notes, the Republican Party platform during Herbert Hoover’s campaign asserted that intervention in Nicaragua, which included occupation, “in no way infringe[s] upon sovereign rights” (p. 238). As such, Augusto Sandino’s popularity was fairly perplexing. Elihu Root noted the lack of Cuban gratitude in 1901; in 1926 the State Department lamented the same in Central America. During a 2007 trip to Latin America, President George W. Bush said that he wanted Latin Americans to give the United States more credit for its actions. A serious issue, then, is that “Americans often failed to understand the impacts of what Europeans and Latin Americans perceived as their hypocrisy and self-serving idealism” (p. 225).

Another central element of the book is that U.S. policy toward Latin America must be placed in a global context. Far from being isolationist, policymakers in the United States have always remained keenly aware of the connections between Latin America and the rest of the world. Latin America became a laboratory to see how certain strategies worked and whether they could be fruitfully exported to other parts of the world. This is a point previously raised by Greg Grandin, but Loveman gives...