The Trump administration presents its strategy for the western hemisphere — its reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine — as a novelty, but it really conforms to a very old pattern. It’s a reversion to a model for US relations with the western hemisphere that is more than a century old. It was later superseded by the Cold War framework and the US rise to global preeminence.
Curiously, this return to the western hemisphere represents a shrinkage of US ambitions from a certain perspective. Greg Grandin has developed his analysis of this point in several books, particularly Empire’s Workshop, where he argues that Latin America is where the US goes to reinvent itself. It retrenches in the western hemisphere during moments of crisis.
You could think of it in those terms: Trump is a phenomenon of crisis, related to the collapse of the neoliberal dispensation, the long decline of profitability in the US corporate sector, and the vast financial bubbles they’ve had to inflate to compensate for declining growth rates. There is a generalized crisis of US capitalism. At the same time, US global power is faced with the rise of China and the diminishing returns from military adventures such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There’s a logic to US retrenchment in the western hemisphere: to reinvent itself, to reassert its power, to rack up some easy military victories, and then to control the entire hemisphere and dominate its resources, as the National Security Strategy document specifies. The Caribbean in particular is going to be especially vulnerable to abrupt reassertions of US military power without the ambition to engage in nation-building occupations such as it attempted in Iraq.
The Caribbean in particular is going to be especially vulnerable to abrupt reassertions of US military power.
One could then differentiate between the Caribbean as a primary theater of US aggression and South America as a secondary area. South American countries are much bigger…
Auteur: Tony Wood
