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Soft Power, Leverage, and the Obama Doctrine in Cuba
- The Latin Americanist
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 60, Number 4, December 2016
- pp. 525-239
- 10.1353/tla.2016.a705798
- Article
- Additional Information
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SOFT POWER, LEVERAGE, AND THE OBAMA DOCTRINE IN CUBA Gregory Weeks University of North Carolina at Charlotte Introduction Assessing President Barack Obama’s foreign policy achievements in Latin America requires walking through a minefield. Some analysts cautiously suggest he had some success, so for example he is “leaving a solid platform from which to take advantage of new developments in Latin America’s economics and politics” (Reid 2015, 46). More common is the refrain that the president “lost” Latin America, suggesting that inattention reduced U.S. influence in the region. The more charitable version is that an “auspicious start” was followed by “disappointment” (Lowenthal 2011, 11). Under that logic, crises in Europe, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe dominated the president’s attention and kept Latin America very low on the list of foreign policy priorities. The less charitable argument is that he simply “caves to Castro” (Noriega 2015). The assertion that the United States under Obama has lost influence in Latin America has been widespread. This was because his policies seemed the same as President Bush’s (Randall 2013); because extrahemispheric actors have become more active in pursuing relations, to the point that “Latin America feels less of the predominance of the United States” (Russell and Tokatlian (2011) while others are ascendant (Carpenter 2016); or because opportunities are routinely lost (Whitehead and Nolte 2012). The nature of “influence” itself tends not to be examined too closely. This paper challenges the assumption about loss of influence, arguing that it ignores soft power and the concrete advances it fostered. The Obama administration represented a policy shift that, though gradual, has paved the way to achieve stated policy goals. Using the case of Cuba, it will argue that the United States is increasingly its influence in ways that are typically not taken into consideration. Even the single case of Cuba has regional implications. Leverage and Soft Power Leverage in foreign policy “involves using resources and/or relationships in a creative way to bring about certain effects in the world” (Anderson 2010). In bilateral relations, it involves creating incentives for other governments to behave in ways that are favorable to your own policy goals. The term is underdeveloped in the foreign policy C 2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12096 525 The Latin Americanist, December 2016 literature, often used in passing but rarely examined on its own in detail. Leverage is important for understanding U.S.-Latin American relations after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Two concurrent processes were taking place. First, under the administration of George W. Bush the United States pursued an aggressive global policy against its perceived enemies. The so-called “war on terror” lens alienated many Latin American leaders (Emerson 2010) because the U.S. government placed considerable pressure on them to support policies they disagreed with. Second, conservative , pro-free market governments across Latin America were replaced by left or center-left governments suspicious of U.S. motives and sometimes hostile to U.S. policy (including what President Bush called the “war on terror”). These two processes clashed for most of the eight years of the administration, to the point that polls showed Latin American confidence in President Bush as lower than anywhere else in the world (Pew Research Center 2008). This paper links leverage to soft power, a concept developed by Joseph Nye. He defines it as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” (p. x). With regard to U.S. policy, in the post-9/11 era numerous studies have argued that U.S. soft power has been on the decline. Some argue that the United States had a more difficult time gaining support for UN votes (Datta 2009); others that China is wielding soft power more effectively (Kurlantzick 2007); or that U.S. policy engendered “soft balancing” that countered U.S. policy (Pape 2005). Hard power entails using force (which could be military or economic) or the threat of such force to compel certain policy decisions. This kind of power has been the norm in U.S. policy. In the history of U.S.-Latin American relations, examples...