ABHORRING THE U.S. VACUUM
Washington's vanishing posture in Latin America is inviting chaos.
A group of Russian naval warships, including a nuclear submarine, sailed into the Caribbean Sea this week, passing 25 miles off the U.S. coast to arrive in Cuba on Wednesday. It is part of a five day tour for the Russian flotilla deep within a region vital to U.S. national security interests. The Biden administration dismissed it as a “messaging tactic” in response to Western support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Meanwhile, Ryan Dubé and James Areddy reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on how China is nearing completion of the $3.5 billion Chancay deep water container port about 50 miles north of Lima, the capital of Peru. Former U.S. officials told the newspaper that the massive Chinese project “highlights a diplomatic void that the U.S. has left in Latin America”.
What is underneath?
Jairo Gonzalez Ward and I have written often about the consequences of the United States shrinking its diplomatic footprint in Latin America and retreating from the region. It is most vividly seen in how the Maduro regime’s embrace of drug cartels and Washington’s geopolitical enemies has helped sustain it in power in exchange for nourishing rampant destabilization all throughout the region.
Once upon a time, there was a U.S. regional security policy that was broadcast so clearly to the world that your average mid-level diplomat at any Latin American foreign ministry could recite its main points from memory. This was no relic of the Cold War. Plan Colombia, co-conceived by then-Senator Joe Biden, was a good example of what the U.S. and its regional allies used to do. The net positive results were evident not only to regional governments but to the voters in those countries.
The usual chorus of naysayers about the “failed war on drugs” say Plan Colombia was a failure because it didn’t eradicate cocaine production and trafficking in the Americas. They miss the point of having a robust regional security policy that stabilizes democratic governments and allows economic development to happen and markets to be built. It isn’t the end, but it’s certainly the necessary beginning and it can’t just be abandoned without consequences.
The absence of similar, interwoven security alliances first with Mexico, then the Caribbean states and ultimately the whole of South America was not for lack of wanting. It was more about a lack of U.S. confidence, focus and persistence over time and successive administrations. We didn’t fail. We gave up.
A foreign minister for one of the region’s bigger economies was in Washington this year and was blunt about where things stand. Even for governments who loathe Chinese communism as an article of faith, it is hard to pass up on Beijing’s investments. “It’s very simple,” the minister said to a small group. “Their offers are excellent down to the fine print, and you are not offering anything like it. You need to make a better offer.”
Peruvian Foreign Minister Javier González-Olaechea told the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. “is present almost everywhere in the world with a lot of initiatives, but not so much in Latin America. It’s like a very important friend who spends little time with us.”
The signals of danger for U.S. national security are alarming beyond the security threats and strains on democratic order in Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. Venezuelan drug gangs are now terrorizing communities as far south as Chile, the most developed country in the region. The drug trafficking and organized crime industry is becoming so lucrative that it is drawing in more talent and becoming more innovative in its business models. There is no comparable campaign being waged, nor a requisite financial and policy investment being made, for a viable alternative that would better serve the interests of the United States and the people of each affected country.
It is also spreading into cultural destabilization. Iran is embraced by Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and powerful political factions in Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina. Iranian-backed cells and their local allies have been nurturing community bonds and political ties with the Arab diaspora in the region and are building out to broader constituencies. The immediate explosion of anti-Semitism throughout Latin America in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas was no coincidence. It’s been decades in the making, and anti-Americanism is part and parcel with its conspiracy-minded cultural message for the disaffected working classes ringing major cities like São Paulo and Buenos Aires.
There are no comparable podcasts, talk radio voices, television series, newspaper columnists, authors, religious leaders, political parties, cultural influencers or even enthusiastic allied presidents or prime ministers in Latin America to counter any of this with our own strategic messaging. That American campaign went silent long ago.
Our take:
The absence of a robust U.S. regional policy today leaves all the doors open for chaos. This is rooted in three fundamental facts about Latin America: its underperforming economies are still chronically mercantilist, its faith in democracy waxes and wanes and its people will not accept misery as a way of life. In such an environment, strength is respected and weakness is deeply feared. The U.S. has to choose which it wants to be in their eyes, and it’s a binary choice. There is no gray area.
The results are clear from our failure to set out a policy that makes abundantly clear what our interests are, how they relate to every other country’s top interests, and how regional security isn’t an option. There is no such policy, so there is no real leverage being exerted, no carrots or sticks that advance it, nor a full-scale diplomatic and strategic communications campaign to weave its common objectives into the mindset of every Latin American capital.
Instead, Russian warships are sailing unfettered into the Caribbean, Iran is spreading its poisonous cultural propaganda and the Chinese are building infrastructure in the region that is wired to their interests, not ours. The best talent on Earth is available in the United States to build, execute and lean into a strategic policy in Latin America to promote and defend U.S. and regional interests. There are unrivaled American minds in strategic communications who know how to stay on the offensive and win in the “messaging tactics” game being forfeited to our adversaries today. It’s high time that Washington stopped looking down its nose on the vital importance of waging geopolitical campaigns on all fronts in defense of our interests. The most dire need is right in our neighborhood, where the noise is keeping a lot of us up at night.
NOTE TO READERS: I will be on vacation next week so I’ll not be writing again until June 28th. Take good care of yourselves in the meantime. -KI