Chapter 7: Geopolitics of the Americas

From The Monroe Doctrine to Unipolarity in The Americas

From the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 up to the late 1990s, the US exerted a substantial degree of hegemony (and dominance, in the case of Central America) throughout the Americas. This regional role allowed the US to project its power at the global level. 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 this effort, the US supported Spanish-American colonies’ struggles for independence, acquired territory from Mexico and created protectorates in Central America. More importantly, in 1903, it seized control of the Panama Canal, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and established a protectorate in Panama. Finally, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine reinforced the US’s position as the sole hegemon of the region. In 1902, when the German and British naval forces initiated a military intervention against Venezuela to collect debts, the Roosevelt administration responded by announcing its intention to use military means to prevent interference by of European powers.

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 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.

Although the US’s aggressive foreign policies and the Cold War put a constraint on policy options available to Latin American states, it did not prevent them from developing substantial strategies to seek autonomy from the US. Aside from establishing socialist parties, building guerrilla movements (like the The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or Che Guevara’s guerrilla movement in Bolivia) or seeking revolution (as exemplified in Cuba and Nicaragua), Latin American states pursued Third-Worldism, which emerged as an alternative to allying with the communist East or liberal West.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, global politics witnessed a series of dramatic changes. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe all marked an end to the Cold War, ushering in a power shift in the international arena from bipolarity to a “unipolar moment”. By the mid1990s, the US found itself to be a single hegemon in the Western Hemisphere as well as on a global scale. According to Francis Fukuyama, the “battle of ideas” brought an end to the Cold War and resulted in the triumph of Western political and economic liberalism over communism. The US officials saw “the end of history” as a reflection of the supremacy of the US’s power, combined with the support for the diffusion of Western ideals of liberal democracy and the free-market model worldwide.

Declining of the US Power in the Americas

During the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century, a series of events led to a strong backlash to the US-led hemispheric integration agenda, which implied a sea change in the geopolitical thinking and practice of the Americas. By the mid-2000s, polarisation dominated inter-American relations, and the US’s capacity to exert hegemony in the region significantly decreased. Latin American governments increasingly made use of softbalancing strategies through blocking US initiatives in multilateral institutions in order to reduce the US’s influence in the region.

They also started to develop relations with Middle Eastern and African nations. Furthermore, the region witnessed growing international activism by Latin American governments (especially Brazil) as they pursued a reformist, dynamic stance in global governance mechanisms, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and cooperated with developing countries at bilateral and multilateral levels on the basis of South– South Cooperation.

In this context, 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

Transformations in Latin America

The drivers of change in the region have been diverse. First, the new geopolitical and geo-economic environment is a reflection of the profound political, economic and ideological transformations in Latin America. In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, many left-leaning leaders took office in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. Leftwing leaders were elected amidst social and economic crises and a growing popular anti-neoliberal sentiment. Financial crises in Mexico (1994–95), Brazil (1999) and Argentina (2001–2002) and increasing unemployment had overshadowed the early optimism about the promises of neoliberalism to reduce poverty and deliver economic growth in the region. In the early 2000s, New Left governments halted or departed from free market policies, which they viewed as a mirror of US-led globalisation, and cemented alliances with social groups who were marginalised under neoliberalism. They reaffirmed the state’s centrality in economic management and used state resources to promote industrial growth and welfare.

The US Reaction

After the FTAA negotiations in Miami in 2003, it became clear that the US possessed neither the capacity nor the willingness to persuade the use of a single free trade agreement for the entire region. As explained above, the US government’s last ef fort to restart the FTAA discussions in November 2005 saw an intense backlash from MERCOSUR countries and Venezuela. The suspension of the negotiations did not entail a total breakdown of the hemispheric free trade agenda, either, as Chile, Colombia, the Caribbean and the Central American states still aspired to proceed with the agreement.

Both the Bush and Barack Obama (2009– 2017) administrations sought to develop ways to exert influence – of varying degrees and natures – in the Americas. Washington adjusted its national defence and strategy priorities in the region amidst the post-Cold-War and postSeptember-11 context whilst meddling in the old and new security concepts and issues. In 2003, according to a declaration by the chief of the US Southern Command, the US strategic vision emphasised the non-traditional character of the security threats in the Americas, calling for regional states to act in a collective manner.

Regional Leaders: Brazil and Venezuela

Over the last two decades, Brazil and Venezuela have increased their prominence as emergent regional powers, partly filling the vacuum created by the decline of US influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Brazil’s regional leadership has especially attracted a great deal of attention in the scholarly debates. Although there is still uncertainty about the effects of Brazil’s regional hegemony, an analysis of Brazil’s increasing influence as a regional leader is essential for comprehending the new power dynamics in the Americas. Brazil is the eighthlargest economy in the world.

Brazil’s Consensual Hegemony

In Central America, Brazil did not exert much power where it faced substantial competition from Mexico. In contrast to the Latin American identity, the idea of a distinct South America was a recent creation. During the mid-1990s, Brazilian president F. H. Cardoso (1995– 2002) promoted a South American regional identity with its separate geopolitical agenda. Later president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2011) prioritised the achievement of prosperity and stability in the sub-region as a primary foreign policy goal. Brazil views Argentina as its main partner in deepening the South American integration project.

Their leaders crafted regional institutions (MERCOSUR and UNASUR) and participated actively in extra-regional alliances (BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa; IBSA – with India and South Africa; and the G20 for trade) in an effort to enhance regional autonomy, reform global governance and counterbalance the US hegemony.

Venezuela and Oil Diplomacy

Hugo Chávez came to power by gaining victory in the 1998 elections, after his failed military coup attempt against Carlos Andres Perez in 1992. In contrast to Brazil’s moderate stance, the Chávez government (1999– 2013) in Venezuela pursued a much more radical foreign and domestic policy agenda with an explicit antineoliberal, anti-US outlook. On many occasions, the Venezuelan leader defined the US as an imperialistic power and built a hostile attitude toward Washington during his presidency. Hence, Chávez ushered in a dramatic change to the traditional Venezuelan foreign policy framework, which had generally been pro-US and pro-West. 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.

China’s Rise in Latin America

As the second-largest economy in the world, China’s engagement with the Latin American region over the last two decades has had important implications for the region and its relations with the US. China recently expanded its trade, military and investment ties with the region, fuelled by its commodity demand, in order to expand its own industrialisation.

China’s Rise in Latin America

Scholarly debates in IR have produced two competing views about China’s rise in Latin America and across the world. According to the realist perspective in IR, China’s engagement with the region poses a hegemonic challenge to US interests in the Western Hemisphere. Some scholars have even argued that Washington made use of the Monroe Doctrine in order to minimise the Chinese influence in the Americas. China’s enormous quest to have access to natural resources in Latin America was also seen as a potential source of conflict between two great powers. The opposite view has argued that the US could alleviate the Chinese threat by promoting China’s insertion into Western-led global multilateral institutions (Ikenberry, 2008). Ellis (2013; 2016), Piccone (2016) and Myers (2015) developed a more nuanced argument, claiming that, guided by its “peaceful rise” in the global economy, China’s presence in Latin America was primarily shaped by its economic interests.

Limitations in the Region

China’s policy activism in the Latin American region has had some limitations. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Venezuela made large gains from their enhanced commercial ties with China. However, as a NAFTA member, Mexico was threatened by the Chinese competition, since China gradually increased its exports of manufacturing goods toward the US markets (Myers, 2015). Although Chinese aid – mainly via loans for oil production – surpassed the international financial institutions’ lending in 2015, it was concentrated in Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela (Long, 2016: 19). With regard to the composition of trade between China and Latin America, scholars have pointed out that its asymmetrical nature poses challenges to the region’s industrial competitiveness, leading to concerns about ‘reprimarisation’ in the region, including in Argentina and Brazil. This was evident as the region exports few raw materials to China, whereas industrial goods with high technology content have increased their share in China’s exports to the region (Jenkins, 2012). Sectors that took advantage of China’s economic expansion were largely oriented toward the production of primary goods, such as agricultural goods, hydrocarbons and minerals (Myers, 2015).