[R-G] Grandin: Is the Monroe Doctrine Really Dead?

[Anthony Fenton]

posted June 08, 2008 4:39 pm
Tomgram: Greg Grandin, Is the Monroe Doctrine Really Dead?
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174941

[Note for Tomdispatch Readers: As you'll see from its striking cover  
(at the left of the main screen of the Tomdispatch website), The World  
According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, has just  
been published. This new TD book focuses on subjects uncovered or  
poorly covered in the mainstream these last mad years -- you know the  
ones -- and is filled with Tomdispatch classics from your favorite  
site authors. I'll officially launch the book with Tuesday's post. In  
the meantime, I wanted to let those of you in New York City know that  
Book Culture (536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam) is  
hosting an event at 7pm on Wednesday June 11th -- to be covered by C- 
SPAN -- in honor of the book's publication. (Check it out by clicking  
here.) Tomdispatch regular Michael Schwartz and I will talk about the  
book, what the mainstream media doesn't cover, and the situation in  
Iraq. I hope some of you -- certainly, anyone interested in a signed  
copy of The World According to TomDispatch -- will consider coming.]

At least once a week -- I've long suspected -- the Chinese leadership  
must file into the streets of Beijing's Forbidden City to sing, dance,  
and pray to the (geo)political gods who drew the Bush administration  
into the black (gold) hole of Iraq. Without Iraq, we would undoubtedly  
have heard a great deal more these last years about the "China threat"  
from the neocons. Without Iraq, Latin America, too, would undoubtedly  
be a very different place.

Some years ago, it was evident that both former Cold War superpowers  
were losing control over what the Russians liked to term their "near  
abroad" (the Baltic states, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia) and  
Americans preferred to call their "backyard" (Latin America). Despite  
mutterings about, and a coup attempt against, Hugo Chávez (and another  
against Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide), Latin America has, since  
2001, experienced as close to benign neglect from Washington as might  
be imaginable. In those years, new regional blocs have begun to form,  
the most surprising of which may be a growing set of left-leaning  
democracies in Latin America determined to pursue their own collective  
interests whatever the Bush administration has in mind.

As Russia rose from the ashes as an energy superpower and began to use  
its control over natural gas to put renewed pressure on parts of its  
former "near abroad," a distracted U.S. has remained somewhat laggard  
about the state of its backyard. It's worth noting, however, that the  
Pentagon has just officially reconstituted the "U.S. Fourth Fleet" --  
for the Caribbean and the coasts of Central and South America --  
"after nearly a 60-year slumber." As of now, it remains a symbolic  
gesture meant, as Rear Admiral James Stevenson has said, to send "the  
right signal, even to the people that you know aren't necessarily our  
greatest supporters."

As for just whose backyard, if anyone's, Latin America will prove to  
be in the years to come, let Greg Grandin, author of that  
indispensable book on the American imperial role in Latin America,  
Empire's Workshop, take up the topic with his usual intelligence. Tom

     Losing Latin America
     What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
     By Greg Grandin

     Google "neglect," "Washington," and "Latin America," and you will  
be led to thousands of hand-wringing calls from politicians and  
pundits for Washington to "pay more attention" to the region. True,  
Richard Nixon once said that "people don't give one shit" about the  
place. And his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger quipped that  
Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica." But  
Kissinger also made that same joke about Chile, Argentina, and New  
Zealand -- and, of the three countries, only the latter didn't suffer  
widespread political murder as a result of his policies, a high price  
to pay for such a reportedly inconsequential place.

     Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in the evolution  
of U.S. diplomacy. The region is often referred to as America's  
"backyard," but a better metaphor might be Washington's "strategic  
reserve," the place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup  
and redraw the outlines of U.S. power, following moments of global  
crisis.

     When the Great Depression had the U.S. on the ropes, for example,  
it was in Latin America that New Deal diplomats worked out the  
foundations of liberal multilateralism, a diplomatic framework that  
Washington would put into place with much success elsewhere after  
World War II.

     In the 1980s, the first generation of neocons turned to Latin  
America to play out their "rollback" fantasies -- not just against  
Communism, but against a tottering multilateralist foreign-policy. It  
was largely in a Central America roiled by left-wing insurgencies that  
the New Right first worked out the foundational principles of what,  
after 9/11, came to be known as the Bush Doctrine: the right to wage  
war unilaterally in highly moralistic terms.

     We are once again at a historic crossroads. An ebbing of U.S.  
power -- this time caused, in part, by military overreach -- faces a  
mobilized Latin America; and, on the eve of regime change at home,  
with George W. Bush's neoconservative coalition in ruins after eight  
years of disastrous rule, would-be foreign policy makers are once  
again looking south.

     Goodbye to All That

     "The era of the United States as the dominant influence in Latin  
America is over," says the Council on Foreign Relations, in a new  
report filled with sober policy suggestions for ways the U.S. can  
recoup its waning influence in a region it has long claimed as its own.

     Latin America is now mostly governed by left or center-left  
governments that differ in policy and style -- from the populism of  
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the reformism of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva  
in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Yet all share a common goal:  
asserting greater autonomy from the United States.

     Latin Americans are now courting investment from China, opening  
markets in Europe, dissenting from Bush's War on Terror, stalling the  
Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and sidelining the International  
Monetary Fund which, over the last couple of decades, has served as a  
stalking horse for Wall Street and the Treasury Department.

     And they are electing presidents like Ecuador's Rafael Correa,  
who recently announced that his government would not renew the soon-to- 
expire lease on Manta Air Field, the most prominent U.S. military base  
in South America. Correa had previously suggested that, if Ecuador  
could set up its own base in Florida, he would consider extending the  
lease. When Washington balked, he offered Manta to a Chinese  
concession, suggesting that the airfield be turned into "China's  
gateway to Latin America."

     In the past, such cheek would have been taken as a clear  
violation of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823 by President  
James Monroe, who declared that Washington would not permit Europe to  
recolonize any part of the Americas. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt  
updated the doctrine to justify a series of Caribbean invasions and  
occupations. And Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan  
invoked it to validate Cold War CIA-orchestrated coups and other  
covert operations.

     But things have changed. "Latin America is not Washington's to  
lose," the Council on Foreign Relations report says, "nor is it  
Washington's to save." The Monroe Doctrine, it declares, is "obsolete."

     Good news for Latin America, one would think. But the last time  
someone from the Council on Foreign Relations, which since its  
founding in 1921 has represented mainstream foreign-policy opinion,  
declared the Monroe Doctrine defunct, the result was genocide.

     Enter the Liberal Establishment

     That would be Sol Linowitz who, in 1975, as chair of the  
Commission on United States-Latin American Relations, said that the  
Monroe Doctrine was "inappropriate and irrelevant to the changed  
realities and trends of the future."

     The little-remembered Linowitz Commission was made up of  
respected scholars and businessmen from what was then called the  
"liberal establishment." It was but one part of a broader attempt by  
America's foreign-policy elite to respond to the cascading crises of  
the 1970s -- defeat in Vietnam, rising third-world nationalism, Asian  
and European competition, skyrocketing energy prices, a falling  
dollar, the Watergate scandal, and domestic dissent. Confronted with a  
precipitous collapse of America's global legitimacy, the Council on  
Foreign Relations, along with other mainline think tanks like the  
Brookings Institute and the newly formed Trilateral Commission,  
offered a series of proposals that might help the U.S. stabilize its  
authority, while allowing for "a smooth and peaceful evolution of the  
global system."

     There was widespread consensus among the intellectuals and  
corporate leaders affiliated with these institutions that the kind of  
anticommunist zeal that had marched the U.S. into the disaster in  
Vietnam needed to be tamped down, and that "new forms of common  
management" between Washington, Europe, and Japan had to be worked  
out. Advocates for a calmer world order came from the same corporate  
bloc that underwrote the Democratic Party and the Rockefeller-wing of  
the Republican Party.

     They hoped that a normalization of global politics would halt, if  
not reverse, the erosion of the U.S. economic position. Military de- 
escalation would free up public revenue for productive investment,  
while containing inflationary pressures (which scared the bond  
managers of multinational banks). Improved relations with the  
Communist bloc would open the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China to trade  
and investment. There was also general agreement that Washington  
should stop viewing Third World socialism through the prism of the  
Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

     At that moment throughout Latin America, leftists and  
nationalists were -- as they are now -- demanding a more equitable  
distribution of global wealth. Lest radicalization spread, the  
Trilateral Commission's executive director Zbignew Brzezinski, soon to  
be President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, argued that it  
would be "wise for the United States to make an explicit move to  
abandon the Monroe Doctrine." The Linowitz Commission agreed and  
offered a series of recommendations to that effect -- including the  
return of the Panama Canal to Panama and a decrease in U.S. military  
aid to the region -- that would largely define Carter's Latin American  
policy.

     Exit the Liberal Establishment

     Of course, it was not corporate liberalism but rather a resurgent  
and revanchist militarism from the Right that turned out to offer the  
most cohesive and, for a time, successful solution to the crises of  
the 1970s.

     Uniting a gathering coalition of old-school law-and-order  
anticommunists, first generation neoconservatives, and newly empowered  
evangelicals, the New Right organized an ever metastasizing set of  
committees, foundations, institutes, and magazines that focused on  
specific issues -- the SALT II nuclear disarmament negotiations, the  
Panama Canal Treaty, and the proposed MX missile system, as well as  
U.S. policy in Cuba, South Africa, Rhodesia, Israel, Taiwan,  
Afghanistan, and Central America. All of them were broadly committed  
to avenging defeat in Vietnam (and the "stab in the back" by the  
liberal media and the public at home). They were also intent on  
restoring righteous purpose to American diplomacy.

     As had corporate liberals, so, now, neoconservative intellectuals  
looked to Latin America to hone their ideas. President Ronald Reagan's  
ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, focused mainly  
on Latin America in laying out the foundational principles of modern  
neoconservative thought. She was particularly hard on Linowitz, who,  
she said, represented the "disinterested internationalist spirit" of  
"appeasement" -- a word back with us again. His report, she insisted,  
meant "abandoning the strategic perspective which has shaped U.S.  
policy from the Monroe Doctrine down to the eve of the Carter  
administration, at the center of which was a conception of the  
national interest and a belief in the moral legitimacy of its defense."

     At first, Brookings, the Council on Foreign Affairs, and the  
Trilateral Commission, as well as the Business Roundtable, founded in  
1972 by the crème de la CEO crème, opposed the push to remilitarize  
American society; but, by the late 1970s, it was clear that  
"normalization" had failed to solve the global economic crisis. Europe  
and Japan were not cooperating in stabilizing the dollar, and the  
economies of Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China were too anemic to  
absorb sufficient amounts of U.S. capital or serve as profitable  
trading partners. Throughout the 1970s, financial houses like the  
Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank had become engorged with  
petrodollars deposited by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other oil- 
exporting nations. They needed to do something with all that money,  
yet the U.S. economy remained sluggish, and much of the Third World  
off limits.

     So, after Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential victory, mainstream  
policymakers and intellectuals, many of them self-described liberals,  
increasingly came to back the Reagan Revolution's domestic and foreign  
agenda: gutting the welfare state, ramping up defense spending,  
opening up the Third World to U.S. capital, and jumpstarting the Cold  
War.

     A decade after the Linowitz Commission proclaimed the Monroe  
Doctrine no longer viable, Ronald Reagan invoked it to justify his  
administration's patronage of murderous anti-communists in Nicaragua,  
Guatemala, and El Salvador. A few years after Jimmy Carter announced  
that the U.S. had broken "free of that inordinate fear of communism,"  
Reagan quoted John F. Kennedy saying, "Communist domination in this  
hemisphere can never be negotiated."

     Reagan's illegal patronage of the Contras -- those murderers he  
hailed as the "moral equivalent of America's founding fathers" and  
deployed to destabilize Nicaragua's Sandinista government -- and his  
administration's funding of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala  
brought together, for the first time, the New Right's two main  
constituencies. Neoconservatives provided Reagan's revival of the  
imperial presidency with legal and intellectual justification, while  
the religious Right backed up the new militarism with grassroots energy.

     This partnership was first built -- just as it has more recently  
been continued in Iraq -- on a mountain of mutilated corpses: 40,000  
Nicaraguans and 70,000 El Salvadorans killed by U.S. allies; 200,000  
Guatemalans, many of them Mayan peasants, victimized in a scorched- 
earth campaign the UN would rule to be genocidal.

     The End of the Neocon Holiday from History

     The recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Latin America,  
arriving as it does in another moment of imperial decline, seems once  
again to signal a new emerging consensus, one similar in tone to that  
of the post-Vietnam 1970s. In every dimension other than military,  
Newsweek editor Fareed Zacharia argues in his new book, The Post- 
American World, "the distribution of power is shifting, moving away  
from American dominance." (Never mind that, just five years ago, on  
the eve of the invasion of Iraq, he was insisting on the exact  
opposite -- that we now lived in a "unipolar world" where America's  
position was, and would be, "unprecedented.")

     To borrow a phrase from their own lexicon, the neocons' "holiday  
from history" is over. The fiasco in Iraq, the fall in the value of  
the dollar, the rise of India and China as new industrial and  
commercial powerhouses, and of Russia as an energy superpower, the  
failure to secure the Middle East, soaring oil and gas prices (as well  
as skyrocketing prices for other key raw materials and basic  
foodstuffs), and the consolidation of a prosperous Europe have all  
brought their dreams of global supremacy crashing down.

     Barack Obama is obviously the candidate best positioned to walk  
the U.S. back from the edge of irrelevance. Though no one hoping for a  
job in his White House would put it in such defeatist terms, the  
historic task of the next president will not be to win this  
president's Global War on Terror, but to negotiate America's reentry  
into a community of nations.

     Parag Khanna, an Obama advisor, recently argued that, by  
maximizing its cultural and technological advantage, the U.S. can,  
with a little luck, perhaps secure a position as third partner in a  
new tripartite global order in which Europe and Asia would have equal  
shares, a distinct echo of the trilateralist position of the 1970s.  
(Forget those Munich analogies, if the U.S. electorate were more  
historically literate, Republicans would get better mileage out of  
branding Obama not Neville Chamberlain, but Spain's Fernando VII or  
Britain's Clement Richard Attlee, each of whom presided over his  
country's imperial decline.)

     So it has to be asked: If Obama wins in November and tries to  
implement a more rational, less ideologically incandescent deployment  
of American power -- perhaps using Latin America as a staging ground  
for a new policy -- would it once again provoke the kind of  
nationalist backlash that purged Rockefellerism from the Republican  
Party, swept Jimmy Carter out of the White House, and armed the death  
squads in Central America?

     Certainly, there are already plenty of feverish conservative  
think tanks, from the Hudson Institute to the Heritage Foundation,  
that would double down on Bush's crusades as a way out of the current  
mess. But in the 1970s, the New Right was in ascendance; today, it is  
visibly decomposing. Then, it could lay responsibility for the deep  
and prolonged crisis that gripped the United States at the feet of the  
"establishment," while offering solutions -- an arms build-up, a  
renewed push into the Third World, and free-market fundamentalism --  
that drew much of that establishment into its orbit.

     Today, the Right wholly owns the current crisis, along with its  
most immediate cause, the Iraq War. Even if John McCain were able to  
squeak out a win in November, he would be the functional equivalent  
not of Reagan, who embodied a movement on the march, but of Jimmy  
Carter, trying desperately to hold a fraying coalition together.

     The Right's decay as an intellectual force is nowhere more  
evident than in the fits it throws in the face of the Left's -- or  
China's -- advances in Latin America. The self-confidant vitality with  
which Jeane Kirkpatrick used Latin America to skewer the Carter  
administration has been replaced with the tinny, desperate shrill of  
despair. "Who lost Latin America?" asks the Center for Security  
Policy's Frank Gaffney -- of pretty much everyone he meets. The  
region, he says, is now a "magnet for Islamist terrorists and a  
breeding ground for hostile political movements… The key leader is  
Chávez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who has declared a  
Latino jihad against the United States."

     Scare-Quote Diplomacy

     But just because the Right is unlikely to unfurl its banner over  
Latin America again soon doesn't mean that U.S. hemispheric diplomacy  
will be demilitarized. After all, it was Bill Clinton, not George W.  
Bush, who, at the behest of Lockheed Martin in 1997, reversed a Carter  
administration ban (based on Linowitz report recommendations) on the  
sale of high-tech weaponry to Latin America. That, in turn, kicked off  
a reckless and wasteful Southern Cone arms race. And it was Clinton,  
not Bush, who dramatically increased military aid to the murderous  
Colombian government and to corporate mercenaries like Blackwater and  
Dyncorp, further escalating the misguided U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin  
America.

     In fact, a quick comparison between the Linowitz report and the  
new Council on Foreign Relations study on Latin America provides a  
sobering way of measuring just how far right the "liberal  
establishment" has shifted over the last three decades. The Council  
does admirably advise Washington to normalize relations with Cuba and  
engage with Venezuela, while downplaying the possibility of "Islamic  
terrorists" using the area as a staging ground -- a longstanding  
fantasy of the neocons. (Douglas Feith, former Pentagon  
undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S. hold off invading  
Afghanistan and instead bomb Paraguay, which has a large Shi'ite  
community, just to "surprise" the Sunni al-Qaeda.)

     Yet, where the Linowitz report provoked the ire of the likes of  
Jeane Kirkpatrick by writing that the U.S. should not try to "define  
the limits of ideological diversity for other nations" and that Latin  
Americans "can and will assess for themselves the merits and  
disadvantages of the Cuban approach," the Council is much less open- 
minded. It insists on presenting Venezuela as a problem the U.S. needs  
to address -- even though the government in Caracas is recognized as  
legitimate by all and is considered an ally, even a close one, by most  
Latin American countries. Latin Americans may "know what is best for  
themselves," as the new report concedes, yet Washington still knows  
better, and so should back "social justice" issues as a means to win  
Venezuelans and other Latin Americans away from Chávez.

     That the Council report regularly places "social justice" between  
scare quotes suggests that the phrase is used more as a marketing ploy  
-- kind of like "New Coke" -- than to signal that U.S. banks and  
corporations are willing to make substantive concessions to Latin  
American nationalists. Seven decades ago, Franklin Roosevelt supported  
the right of Latin American countries to nationalize U.S. interests,  
including Standard Oil holdings in Bolivia and Mexico, saying it was  
time for others in the hemisphere to get their "fair share." Three  
decades ago, the Linowitz Commission recommended the establishment of  
a "code of conduct" defining the responsibilities of foreign  
corporations in the region and recognizing the right of governments to  
nationalize industries and resources.

     The Council, in contrast, sneers at Chávez's far milder efforts  
to create joint ventures with oil multinationals, while offering  
nothing but pablum in its place. Its centerpiece recommendation --  
aimed at cultivating Brazil as a potential anchor of a post-Bush, post- 
Chávez hemispheric order -- urges the abolition of subsidies and  
tariffs protecting U.S. agro-industry in order to advance a "Biofuel  
Partnership" with Brazil's own behemoth agricultural sector. This  
would be an environmental disaster, pushing large, mechanized  
plantations ever deeper into the Amazon basin, while doing nothing to  
generate decent jobs or distribute wealth more fairly.

     Dominated by representatives from the finance sector of the U.S.  
economy, the Council recommends little beyond continuing the failed  
corporate "free trade" policies of the last twenty years -- and, in  
this case, those scare quotes are justified because what they're  
advocating is about as free as corporate "social justice" is just.

     An Obama Doctrine?

     So far, Barack Obama promises little better. A few weeks ago, he  
traveled to Miami and gave a major address on Latin America to the  
Cuban American National Foundation. It was hardly an auspicious venue  
for a speech that promised to "engage the people of the region with  
the respect owed to a partner."

     Surely, the priorities for humane engagement would have been  
different had he been addressing not wealthy right-wing Cuban exiles  
but an audience, say, of the kinds of Latino migrants in Los Angeles  
who have revitalized the U.S. labor movement, or of Central American  
families in Postville, Iowa, where immigration and Justice Department  
authorities recently staged a massive raid on a meatpacking plant,  
arresting as many as 700 undocumented workers. Obama did call for  
comprehensive immigration reform and promised to fulfill Franklin  
Roosevelt's 68 year-old Four Freedoms agenda, including the social- 
democratic "freedom from want." Yet he spent much of his speech  
throwing red meat to his Cuban audience.

     Ignoring the not-exactly-radical advice of the Council on Foreign  
Relations, the candidate pledged to maintain the embargo on Cuba. And  
then he went further. Sounding a bit like Frank Gaffney, he all but  
accused the Bush administration of "losing Latin America" and allowing  
China, Europe, and "demagogues like Hugo Chávez" to step "into the  
vacuum." He even raised the specter of Iranian influence in the  
region, pointing out that "just the other day Tehran and Caracas  
launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits."

     Whatever one's opinion on Hugo Chávez, any diplomacy that claims  
to take Latin American opinion seriously has to acknowledge one thing:  
Most of the region's leaders not only don't see him as a "problem,"  
but have joined him on major economic and political initiatives like  
the Bank of the South, an alternative to the International Monetary  
Fund and the Union of South American Nations, modeled on the European  
Union, established just two weeks ago. And any U.S. president who is  
sincere in wanting to help Latin Americans liberate themselves from  
"want" will have to work with the Latin American left -- in all its  
varieties.

     But more ominous than Obama's posturing on Venezuela is his  
position on Colombia. Critics have long pointed out that the billions  
of dollars in military aid provided to the Colombian security forces  
to defeat the FARC insurgency and curtail cocaine production would  
discourage a negotiated end to the civil war in that country and  
potentially provoke its escalation into neighboring Andean lands.  
That's exactly what happened last March, when Colombia's president  
Alvaro Uribe ordered the bombing of a rebel camp located in Ecuador  
(possibly with U.S. logistical support supplied from Manta Air Force  
Base, which gives you an idea of why Correa wants to give it to  
China). To justify the raid, Uribe explicitly invoked the Bush  
Doctrine's right of preemptive, unilateral action. In response,  
Ecuador and Venezuela began to mobilize troops along their border with  
Colombia, bringing the region to the precipice of war.

     Most interestingly, in that conflict, an overwhelming majority of  
Latin American and Caribbean countries sided with Venezuela and  
Ecuador, categorically condemning the Colombian raid and reaffirming  
the sovereignty of individual nations recognized by Franklin Roosevelt  
long ago. Not Obama, however. He essentially endorsed the Bush  
administration's drive to transform Colombia's relations with its  
Andean neighbors into the one Israel has with most of the Middle East.  
In his Miami speech, he swore that he would "support Colombia's right  
to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders."

     Equally troublesome has been Obama's endorsement of the  
controversial Merida Initiative, which human rights groups like  
Amnesty International have condemned as an application of the  
"Colombian solution" to Mexico and Central America, providing their  
militaries and police with a massive infusion of money to combat drugs  
and gangs. Crime is indeed a serious problem in these countries, and  
deserves considered attention. It's chilling, however, to have  
Colombia -- where death-squads now have infiltrated every level of  
government, and where union and other political activists are executed  
on a regular basis -- held up as a model for other parts of Latin  
America.

     Obama, however, not only supports the initiative, but wants to  
expand it beyond Mexico and Central America. "We must press further  
south as well," he said in Miami.

     It seems that once again that, as in the 1970s, reports of the  
death of the Monroe Doctrine are greatly exaggerated.

     Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the  
author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the  
Rise of the New Imperialism and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin  
America in the Cold War.