A much more useful approach was laid out by the
journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann in “U.S. Foreign
Policy: Shield of the Republic,” which he published in 1943 during
World War II. Lippmann spoke of “the order of power,” that is, the
relationships among the handful of great military and economic
powers that matter the most. In his view of history, American
foreign policy has always been defined by America’s relations with
other great powers: first Britain and France, and later Germany,
Japan and the Soviet Union.
To this might be added a corollary: America’s
relationship with Mexico, the other populous nation in North
America and one with which, along with Canada, the U.S. shares a
2,000-mile border. Quite
apart from the importance of good bilateral relations, American
friendship and partnership with a stable, prosperous Mexico is
critical to U.S. foreign policy.
Since the 1840s,
European great powers have hoped to tie down the U.S. on its
southern border. Britain sought to keep the
republic of Texas out of the United States, in order to pursue a
divide-and-rule strategy in North America. During the American
Civil War, France’s dictator Louis Napoleon imposed an Austrian
prince, Maximilian, as puppet ruler in a short-lived attempt to
turn Mexico into a French colony. In the years preceding World War
I, Imperial Germany and the U.S. engaged in a kind of cold war in
Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. The
Zimmerman Telegram, in which the German government promised to
support Mexico’s attempt to recapture territories lost to the U.S.,
increased American public support for U.S. intervention against
Germany. Franklin Roosevelt’s
euphemistically named “Good Neighbor” policy of appeasing
repressive dictatorships in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere
succeeded in dissuading any Latin American countries from becoming
allies of the Axis powers. Later during the Cold War the Soviets
found allies in Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere but Mexico remained
neutral.
For American strategic thinkers, the ultimate
nightmares have long been an alliance between a foreign great power
rival and a hostile Mexico, or chaos in Mexico exploited by
America’s enemies. For the foreseeable future, only China, which is
still far from being a superpower, has the potential to become a
serious military rival of the U.S., as Britain, France, Japan,
Germany and the Soviet Union were in earlier generations. It
follows that relationships among the U.S., China and Mexico are
much more important to the future of American strategy than the
outcome of the Arab Spring or the resolution of the Arab-Israeli
conflict or the success or failure of Russia to regain influence in
Central Asia or whether the United Kingdom splits up because of
Scottish secession. And far more important than the fates of
Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are problems more for their
neighbors — China, India, Russia, Iran — than for us.
What makes the China Question and the Mexican Question
today particularly difficult is the existence of a high degree of
economic and demographic integration among those countries and the
U.S. Thanks to successful Chinese policies of pressuring
multinationals to transfer production to its territory, much of the
U.S. industrial base is integrated with China’s factory system. The
American and Mexican labor markets are deeply integrated, thanks to
legal and illegal immigration as well as trade.
This means that thinking about the U.S.-China
relationship and the U.S.-Mexican relationship in simple-minded
military terms cannot work. For example, while a hostile
China might be militarily balanced in various ways, it makes no
sense to talk about “containing” China geographically. The
containment of the Soviet Union worked because the Soviet empire
(as distinct from Russia itself) included the populations and
economies of its East European colonies. The Cold War ended when
the Red Army withdrew from the former empire in Eastern Europe.
But China, like America, is a continental nation-state
whose power resources are almost entirely internal. In deriving its
military potential from its large internal population and domestic
economy, China is like the United States, although less favored
with resources. Encircling China with U.S. bases in Australia,
Vietnam and northeast Asia will not cripple it but may provoke
it.
The excessive militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border
would also be a mistake. Ever since the U.S. annexed Texas,
California and the Southwest in the Mexican-American War, the
smuggling of contraband and human beings has been a profitable
trade along la
Frontera — so profitable that local officials, in return
for payoffs, have turned a blind eye for generations. Today’s
Mexican drug cartels are no different in kind from
the tequileros who
smuggled alcohol across the border during America’s misguided
experiment with Prohibition in the 1920s. The repeal of Prohibition
dried up much of that business. The legalization of less dangerous
drugs like marijuana would reduce, though not eliminate, the border
drug trade and the attendant violence.
While border fencing in some areas and beefed-up Border
Patrol units make sense, illegal immigration can be checked much
more easily on the demand side, by prosecuting American employers
of illegal immigrants, than on the supply side, by turning the
border into a fortified combat zone. Comparisons between national
border fences and the Berlin Wall are nonsense; the former seek to
keep unwanted foreign natioanls out, the latter was built to keep
citizens from escaping. Even so, for diplomatic reasons it is
probably not prudent to create an Iron Curtain between the U.S. and
one of the two countries in the world that are most important to
America.
America’s foreign policy planners need to think
carefully as well about the bilateral relations between China and
Mexico, whether collaborative or competitive. China and Mexico, as
developing countries reliant on trade for growth, are also
competitors. The relationship between China, which may
surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and Mexico, which
like the U.S. has one of the world’s largest populations as well as
a large market and abundant resources, is significant in itself. In
addition to the Chinese Question and the Mexican Question as viewed
by America, then, there is the Sino-Mexican question.
Many proponents of NAFTA back in the 1990s hoped that
the treaty would encourage American-based multinationals to
offshore production to Mexico, rather than to China or other remote
countries, spurring Mexican growth and reducing poverty and illegal
immigration. That didn’t happen. But in the event of a serious
Sino-American trade war the U.S. might seek to bring back some of
the manufacturing it has lost to Mexico and other North American
countries as well as the U.S. itself, generating new industrial
growth and its spillover effects on both sides of the border.
And then there is energy. To everyone’s surprise,
fracking technology has greatly expanded recoverable reserves of
oil and natural gas, in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S. In
light of the continued marginal role of renewable energy worldwide,
North America has the potential to become even more important in
global fossil fuel energy markets. Here there is potential for
collaboration among the U.S. and Mexico, as well as Canada — but
also competition, if Asian and European powers pit the
energy-exporting nations of North America against one another.
These are issues that have not received enough
attention from the officials, academics and journalists who debate
foreign policy, distracted as they have been, first by misguided
American wars in the Middle East and South Asia and more recently
by the global economic crisis. To make matters worse, in American
public debate complex questions have to be reduced to shouting
matches over illegal immigration or trade among demagogic nativists
on one side and open-borders, one-world libertarian and leftist
utopians on the other.
The future of America will depend to a considerable
degree on developments in China and Mexico. But we Americans cannot
settle on the right answers until we start asking the right
questions.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/29/why_china_and_mexico_matter/singleton/
Out of the Backyard: New Latin American and Caribbean Bloc Defies
Washington
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3342-out-of-the-backyard-new-latin-american-and-caribbean-bloc-defies-washington-
South America Consolidates Its Role as an Emerging Power
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3345-south-america-consolidates-its-role-as-an-emerging-power
