Toward Improved U.S. Policies in the Americas

By Abraham F. Lowenthal
February 14, 2008

In less than a year, a new U.S. President and Congress will take office. Many issues will require their prompt attention: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan’s potential implosion, possible conflict with Iran, growing evidence of climate change and its effects, the economic prowess of China and India and the global implications of their rise, the Israel-Palestine quandary—not to mention a deepening economic recession, turmoil over unauthorized immigration, a growing health care crisis, major decisions on tax policy and the evident need to focus on education and other domestic challenges.

            In this context, no one should expect the new U.S. Administration to give priority to Latin America and the Caribbean. None of the Latin American countries presents an immediate threat to U.S. national security, none is likely to be the source or focus of significant international terrorism and none will be critical to resolving the most immediately pressing problems of U.S. foreign policy.

Although the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean pose no urgent issues for Washington, they are increasingly important to the future of the United States, not as areas of crisis but in a quotidian way. This is true for four main reasons:

• Shared issues that neither the United States nor any Latin American nation can successfully handle by itself without sustained cooperation from regional partners. These include migration, energy security, global warming and other environmental issues, narcotics, crime, public health and international terrorism. Since 9/11 U.S. government officials often mention the last of these issues first, but the others are more important from a Latin American perspective and ultimately perhaps for the United States.

• Demographic interdependence, arising from massive migration that is blurring the borders between the United States and its closest neighbors and giving rise to “intermestic” issues—those with both international and domestic facets, ranging from education to health care, remittances to drivers’ licenses, youth gangs to portable retirement pensions.

• The region’s importance to the United States as a priority market for the export of U.S. goods and services, and as a prime source of energy and other key resources vital for the US economy.

• And shared values, particularly fundamental human rights, including the rights of free political expression and effective democratic governance. The American people intuits that these core values cannot prevail internationally if they do not succeed in the Western Hemisphere.

Focusing on these four interests underlines how much we in the United States would gain if the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean could reduce grinding poverty, gross inequities and ethnic exclusion. These conditions fuel polarization, lend themselves to demagogic exploitation, and undermine democratic governance, stability and sustainable policies of economic development. If the United States could help Latin America and the Caribbean countries tackle these tough issues, we would have more stable neighbors, expanded markets, more attractive investment opportunities, more congenial tourist destinations, more secure sources of energy and more willing partners in tackling a broad agenda of global concerns, including climate change as well as drugs and migration.

Available U.S. resources today are too limited to make a dramatic impact on poverty, inequity and exclusion; this is not the time for another “Alliance for Progress.” But the United States can certainly do more along these lines than the pale imitations of the Venezuela-Cuban programs announced on President Bush’s 2007 trip to Latin America: visits by a US hospital ship to various Latin American ports and increased scholarships for study in the United States.

The United States could enhance the social impact of remittances; support micro-finance programs; establish a region-wide social development fund to target poverty reduction efforts and engage especially vulnerable populations; provide multilateral credit to help energy-importing countries adjust during a period of very high costs; support innovative educational reforms; combat small arms trafficking; and deal with youth gangs as a transnational problem. Many of these programs already are in place on a modest scale, but the next Administration should give them more emphasis and support; this would not be very expensive and could make a big difference in many cases. And Washington should mobilize both public and private sector efforts, in tandem, to strengthen infrastructure in Latin America and to expand energy production—major ways of accelerating the region’s growth that are very much in the interest of the United States.