Geopolitics of the Americas

In International Relations (IR), geopolitics is generally conceptualised as the interaction between geography and foreign policy in which the material aspect of power (especially military) retains a considerable amount of importance over other aspects of power.

A regional power is a leading country in a region which is able to project its power through the provision of public goods.

In the late nineteenth century, the newly independent US entered into a rivalry with the colonial powers from Europe in an effort to minimise their power in the continent and establish its own influence in the region. These two intertwined goals constituted the main thrust of the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers not to interfere in the region, and declared the Western Hemisphere to be a zone of US influence.

In the years just after the Second World War, the US policy toward the region resembled the Good Neighbour Policy. The US orchestrated the signing of a regional security agreement on the basis of non-interventionism, the Rio Pact of 1947, which was inspired by Article 51 of the United Nations (UN) Charter.

The Truman administration initiated the policy of containment of the Soviet Union and its communist ideology (enshrined in the Truman Doctrine in 1947), which served two purposes: it was designed to prevent the SU from exerting influence in the alleged “backyard” of the US, and it also became the main instrument to solidify the US’s power in the Americas.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959, led by Marxist-Leninist Fidel Castro, ignited the US’s fears of an expansion of communist regimes in the region. In response, the John F. Kennedy administration initiated a generous economic aid programme, the Alliance for Progress, which was underpinned by the idea that economic development would gradually lead to democracy. The programme would thus contribute to a process of evolutionary change, referred to as “peaceful revolution”, in contrary to the communist idea of revolution.

In the early 1990s, the Andean–Amazon region gained importance in the US’s strategic thinking, thanks to the emergent drug trafficking problem in these areas.

The Bill Clinton (1993-2001) administration initiated two schemes that aimed to create a single-hemispheric economic and security agenda under the aegis of US leadership: the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in December 1994 and the Cooperation for Hemispheric Security in July 1995.

The diffusion of neoliberal ideas and transitions from authoritarian regimes temporarily created a sense of optimism among the leaders in the Latin American region. The region had also demonstrated advances in the management of the debt crisis and the wars in Central America, reinforcing the expectations about regional harmony and prosperity.

It is crucial to highlight five defining processes that have been shaping the new geopolitical scenario in the Western Hemisphere:
• Declining of the US power in the Americas
• Latin American governments’ enhanced autonomy in regional and global affairs
• The resurgence of the left and post-hegemonic regionalism
• Emergence of regional leaders to fill the void left by the US (Brazil and Venezuela)
• China’s rise and global multipolarity
• Commodity boom

In September 2002, the US government initiated a doctrine of “preemptive strike” (restated in March 2006) that would allow the US Army to intervene unilaterally against terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda and “rogue states” that support terrorism. This new direction in the US’s foreign policy was subjected to severe criticism from Latin American governments, which invoked their historical concerns about military intervention as a threat to their sovereignty.

As opposed to ALBA and MERCOSUR, the Pacific Alliance adopts neither post-hegemonic nor post-liberal strategies. Instead, these countries mainly focus on integration strategies based on the open regionalism of the 1990s. Hence, the Pacific Alliance rests on the idea of the primacy of the markets and focuses heavily on the advancement of free trade. The Pacific Alliance also seeks to strengthen trade ties with the Asia-Pacific region (excluding China) through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and furthering the hemispheric free trade agenda with North America.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a free trade agreement created in 1994 by Canada, Mexico and the United States.

The election of president Donald Trump in 2017 marked the beginning of a new era in inter-American affairs. Adopting a fierce anti-free-trade, anti-immigration discourse, president Trump did not visit Latin America in his first year. He did not manage to appoint a Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Although Trump’s administration has had little interest in Latin America, he developed a “negative agenda” against Latin America, having proposed to build a wall along the US’s southern border and criticising the The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The foreign policies of the Lula da Silva and Rousseff administrations were guided by the traditional Brazilian principles of national autonomy and multilateral diplomacy that sought consensus rather than conflict.

Scholars have pointed out that Argentina held substantial economic and political capacity (along with Mexico) to challenge Brazil’s regional leadership. Both Argentina and Mexico enjoy a relatively large economy with vast natural resources, a history of activism in international politics and a considerable degree of industrialisation.

Although the members of the Pacific Alliance, Chile, Colombia and Peru, maintained cordial relations with Brazil, they signed bilateral free trade agreements with Washington. As Briceño -Ruiz (2018) put it, the Pacific Alliance emerged during the post-hegemonic era in the region, but it did not pursue post-liberal regionalist strategies. Since its launch, the member countries formulated the Alliance in ideological opposition to the post-liberal regional integration models. Hence, it faced strong resentment from ALBA members by reflecting US ambitions in the region.

President Chávez had a clear agenda to propagate a multipolar hemispheric and international order, and developed an ideological, military and geopolitical view of regional and international politics. The Venezuelan leader aspired to strengthen Venezuela’s stature as a regional leader, as well as a significant international actor, by building strategic ties with its neighbours and extra-hemispheric actors. On the domestic front, he aimed to establish and fortify power vis-à-vis the opposition groups, which later initiated a coup against Chávez in 2002. Chávez’s domestic and foreign policy goals were intertwined, crystallising as the Bolivarian Revolution, which was inspired by Simon Bolivar’s ambition to unite Spanish America in the nineteenth century.

The Chávez government’s assertive anti-US foreign policy and regional activism led to important shifts in the region. The Venezuelan president helped the region reduce its excessive economic and political dependence on the US and international financial institutions, thereby reinforcing a multipolar regional order. The Venezuelan leader inspired new interpretations of concepts such as sovereignty and development, presenting alternatives to the Washington-led free market model and liberal (or representative) democracy. He encouraged bringing state interventionism and issues of inequality back into the regional agenda, departing from the excessive elitism and market fundamentalism of the 1990s