Abstract
Reviewed by: Stephen J. Randall (srandall@ucalgary.ca ), University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Thomas O’Keefe’s study tests a range of international relations theories explaining the United States hegemony and its decline in the Western hemisphere, from realist to the neo-Marxist theories of Antonio Gramsci. His approach is to provide a series of case studies: the evolution of the Inter-American System under US hegemony; the system post-hegemony; the development and failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas; the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas; and China in Latin America and the Caribbean. He follows these more thematic chapters with a short account of “other major United States foreign policy initiatives in the Western hemisphere under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.” This final chapter is the only one that justifies the title of the book. The chapter provides good snapshots of economic, political, immigration, and energy initiatives in the region, including reminders of the extent to which successive administrations have sought to address gang violence, corruption, narcotics, and arms trafficking in Central America and Mexico. Nonetheless, the treatment of major issues in the Bush and Obama years, from Plan Colombia to the Mérida Initiative, among other policy developments, tends to be rather superficial. Only four pages are devoted to Plan Colombia, one of the most important and controversial policies in the region from the end of the Clinton administration through the Obama presidency. Cuban relations receive a limited analysis. There is a one-sentence reference to the highly controversial free trade agreement with Colombia, a debate that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations. The volume does provide insightful discussion of the Central American Regional Security Initiative and its Caribbean counterpart, as well as the Pathways to Prosperity program.
That said, the volume provides an insightful analysis of the factors which have reduced the extent to which the United States has been able to drive the policy agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean. For a short period following the debt crisis of the 1980s—the Lost Decade in Latin America—the United States appeared able to focus the hemispheric trade policy agenda along private-enterprise, neo-liberal lines (the Washington Consensus), but it soon ran up against the more statist models preferred by many of the Latin American countries. There was also still some legacy of hostility toward the United States in the region, derived in part from the US role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the US-backed Contras in Central America in the 1980s. The heavy-handed US War on Drugs, beginning in the 1970s and escalating through the 1980s and 1990s, was often perceived in Latin America as more the failure of the United States to deal with narcotics’ consumption than the policies of the producing countries. With the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Bush administration’s focus was on terrorism and the Middle East, with attention to Latin America marginal at best—save for the extent to which Plan Colombia addressed terrorism. The weakening of US influence in the Organization of American States; the formation of such alternative trade and security organizations under Latin American leadership such as Mercosur and the Union of South American Nations; the South American Council to Combat Drug Trafficking; and ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, including Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia) are all illustrative of the extent to which Latin American nations have sought to develop institutions to advance their own agendas. Cuba’s ability to survive US opposition and interference, and the close relationship which developed between Cuba and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, reinforced the notion that US power has its limitations. Challenges posed by the economic power and hemispheric interests of Japan in the 1970s, and more recently by China, were further reminders that the United States by the 21st century was no longer hegemonic in Latin America and the Caribbean, although some distinction needed to be made between relative influence in South versus Central America.
One of the strongest and possibly most original chapters deals with the energy and climate partnership of the Americas, and unlike some of the other chapters, it also deals more extensively with the policies of the Obama administration. The notion of a partnership on energy initially emerged at the First Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994, but as O’Keefe shows, it was not until the Obama administration that the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) was realized. Obama administration officials viewed the initiative as a true partnership with the region, and as such, it fit the liberal international relations model. The ECPA sought to address collaboration on energy efficiency, renewable energy, energy infrastructure, and sustainable assistance to developing countries impacted by climate change, among other initiatives. More hegemonic in nature was the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative, launched in 2014 in an effort to counter the effectiveness of Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program and to encourage private investment. None of these US initiatives were well funded. That, added to the preference for more statist economic models in a number of Latin American governments, weakened the effectiveness of such programs. Nonetheless, as O’Keefe argues, what was important about the programs was the explicitly non-hegemonic approach taken by the Obama administration.
O’Keefe’s conclusions are convincing. He notes that each of the case studies demonstrates the increasing inability of the United States to control the hemispheric policy agenda. To some extent, he suggests, that failure derives from a failure of leadership. In other instances, the lack of adequate funding made success unlikely, as did Latin American preferences for alternative approaches. Nonetheless, O’Keefe is correct to argue that even if US hegemony in the region is a thing of the past, the “political values and economic principles long championed by the United States remain predominant throughout the Western Hemisphere” (187).