U.S. Security Interests in Latin America

U.S. Security Interests in Latin AmericaNational Security and United States Policy toward Latin America. by Lars SchoultzReview by: Gregory F. TrevertonInternational Security, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Spring, 1988), pp. 212-216Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539004 .

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US. Security Gregory F. Treverton Interests in Latin

America Book Review:

National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America

by Lars Schoultz Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. 377 pp.

Fifteen years ago, U.S. Latin Americanists and those who studied strategy or American foreign policy inhabited different worlds. The first were very much Peruvianists or Brazilianists, absorbed in studies of social class and development in "their" country; for them, moreover, if the U.S. government was not the villain of the piece, at least it was to be kept at arm's length. The strategists or foreign policy analysts were simply ignorant of Latin America. And so studies of American policy toward the region were few, mostly diplomatic history, generally uninformed by much understanding of how U.S. actions affected Latin American societies. If Latin Americans wrote about the subject, it was in broad, structural terms like dependence theory, often mechanistic and almost always of little help to policy.1

Lars Schoultz's book, its analysis careful, its prose a pleasure to read, is testimony to the change in intellectual climate. His thesis bridges the two worlds: U.S. policy toward Latin America is determined by beliefs about the causes and consequences of instability in Latin America. To be sure, most of the "Latin Americanists" Schoultz admires most are concerned with U.S.

Gregory Treverton, now Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, served the National Security Council during the Carter Administration. His most recent book is Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

1. Examples of the best Latin Americanists trying to come to grips with the relationship between society and politics in a particular country are: Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureau- cratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Alred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Peter H. Smith, Argentina and the Failure of Democracy: Conflict among Political Elites, 1904-1955 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). For the dependence perspective applied to individual countries, see Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, eds., Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974). For a collection of essays on U.S.-Latin American relations, many of them from the dependence perspective, see Julio Cotler and Richard R. Fagen, Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

International Security, Spring 1988 (Vol. 12, No. 4) ? 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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policy only indirectly, but not all are.2 And there is now more work on American policy toward the region, and more of it is done by people who also are serious scholars of the region. That is the case for Schoultz. It is also true for some of the writers Schoultz admires less-Howard Wiarda or Robert Leiken, for example.3

Schoultz's stated subject is the perceptions of policymakers, which raises a truth-in-advertising problem for his title. His problem reminds me of mine when, as director of studies for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, I was often asked in the United States what "the Europeans" thought about this or that. When I answered, I was never quite sure whether I was saying what "Europeans" thought, what I thought they thought, what I thought they should think, or simply what I thought. Schoultz's real pur- pose is not just to understand policymakers' perceptions; it is to assess them. So his book becomes a statement about how American national security interests in Latin America ought to be perceived.

That made me wish he had used his interviews with policymakers only as examples, not as the ostensible subject of his book. While he is aware of the softness of his interview data, his frequent reference to "many policy-makers think" and "not all agree" still made me wonder, as I used to wonder about myself, just whom was being spoken for.

If it is sometimes unclear whom Schoultz is speaking of, it is also difficult to decide of what he speaks. His subject is not Latin America but Central America and the Caribbean. Indeed, aside from occasional scrambles to reschedule debt and periodic bashing over their failure to destroy more drug crops, South America has all but fallen off the radar scope of U.S. policy. The United States has never intervened directly with military force in South America, and its influence has never been preeminent there. In fact, the influence of the United States, of its culture and economic policies, is prob- ably greater there now than twenty years ago, despite (perhaps because of?) official neglect.4

2. For instance, William Durham, Scarcity and Survival; Merilee Grindle, State and Countryside; Nora Hamilton, Limits of State Autonomy; Cynthia McClintock, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change; and Peter Evans, Dependent Development. 3. See, for example, Howard Wiarda, In Search of Policy: The United States and Latin America (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1984); or Robert Leiken, Soviet Strategy in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1982). 4. Disaggregating "Latin America" is necessary and too seldom done. Abraham Lowenthal's latest book, Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), is a welcome exception, even if he does not stretch that differentiation to his policy recommendations.



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Thus Schoultz's central question: why do Americans worry about the consequences of instability in Central America? The prior question might be: do they worry much? On that score Schoultz mentions but does not empha- size how unimportant even Central America has been most of the time to American foreign policymakers, ringing assertions of neighborhood notwith- standing. Preoccupied with bigger stakes elsewhere, their desire for stability in the region was not necessarily as cynical as FDR's quip that at least Somoza was "our" SOB. Rather, any Latin American issue was a diversion, hence a bother. Stability in the region meant policymakers could focus their attention where they deemed it more important-elsewhere.

Still, even if Central America is not all that important to senior policymakers even now-recall that the Reagan White House disliked Alexander Haig's 1981 campaign against Nicaraguan aid to Salvadoran insurgents not because they disagreed with it but rather because it distracted attention from more serious business, i.e., Reagan's budget and tax-cutting-it is more on the public mind now than a decade ago.

Why then the concern over instability in Central America? Schoultz first devotes three chapters to dogs that did not bark: strategic minerals, sea lines of communication, and U.S. military bases. Neither Schoultz nor his inter- viewees think the first two are more than marginally important, sea lines in the Caribbean a partial exception, and the same is generally true of U.S. bases; at least Schoultz detects no argument for more bases in the region.

Concern over possible Soviet military bases is more serious. Schoultz notes that this concern unites Americans from far right to moderate left, yet he is skeptical: with longer-range missiles, why should Moscow want to base nuclear submarines in the Caribbean, still an American lake? Why, indeed, should it want a base anywhere in the region? The answer is that we cannot know. We do know that Cuba, while it is no threat to the United States, can pose a military threat to its neighbors. At a minimum, it, and the Soviet forces there, imposes a new set of conditions with which U.S. military planners must cope. It may be that it was unwise in the 1960s to risk nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. But it does seem clear that if we can, at modest cost, deter the Soviet Union from new military deployments in the region, it is worth doing so. The same goes for Cuba.

The issue of bases slides into the less tangible reason for all the fuss. Does the United States need special influence, even control, in "its" region? Would the rise of anti-American regimes there be a loss in the global com- petition with the Soviet Union? The questions are two sides of the same coin. I wish they had been at the center of the book; perhaps they will be in



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Schoultz's next, for I do not think the questions are as easily dealt with as he does here.

Great powers by definition have larger interests and capabilities than small ones; like it or not, Mexico falls within the security orbit of the United States, just as Finland does for the Soviet Union. If it could, surely the United States would like to make its rhetoric come true, and make of "its" region a bastion of democracy. We would like to do so even if it did not seem necessary for our immediate national security, defined primarily in terms of physical threats. We would like to because we believe democracies are more peaceful and because we would not like to be surrounded by antithetical regimes-a conclusion Raymond Aron came to in his post-Vietnam study of American interests.5

So the question then becomes less one of broad objectives than of the costs and benefits of policies designed to achieve them. One set of costs that Schoultz notes is plain: Soviet (or Cuban) microchips are not going to rebuild Nicaragua's flattened economy, but those countries' arms can make the San- dinista government less vulnerable to outside threats. Only an American invasion would rid the United States of the Sandinistas, and that invasion is opposed by Americans as much as they dislike the Sandinista government.6 Thus, aid to the contras has stood as the "middle option," no more than a holding action.

But did that aid help or hurt? Both those who supported aid to the contras and those who opposed it did so in the name of a broadly similar objective- pluralism if not democracy. For one group, the contras kept the Sandinistas off balance and pushed them toward moderation, while for the other, what those same contras pushed the Sandinistas closer toward was authoritarianism and the Soviet embrace. How can this issue be decided? Is any analysis relevant? At least it is intriguing to notice that the pro-contra logic reversed the premise Schoultz attributes to traditional American policymakers: instability in the region was to be abetted, not feared, in the short run at any rate.

That leads back to the issues about which strategists ought to learn most from regional specialists-the causes, not the consequences of instability. Here, Schoultz's focus on what policymakers think about poverty or com-

5. Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-73 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). 6. For evidence on this point, see my "Strategy in Central America," Survival, Vol. 28, No. 2 (March/April 1986).



International Security 12:4 | 216

munism, not what he thinks they should think, means that he offers no answers, only provocative hypotheses. For instance, "the rival beliefs about the causes of instability [local conditions or outside influence] are mutually exclusive; they cannot be accommodated by merging them together."7 This may be so in that those who hold the rival positions give no quarter, but it seems improbable that in fact the Soviet Union and its allies are either the cause of instability in the Third World, or no cause at all.

There are cases that Latin Americanists could comb for evidence. What was the role of the Soviet Union and Cuba in the events that brought the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua? Were they active? Or were they more passive beneficiaries of their association with a Leninism that provided con- venient justification for the revolutionaries' vanguard party? Was their action mostly after the fact, once the Sandinistas had taken power and needed Soviet and Cuban arms, not microchips, to retain it? Or consider Peru: it has been buying Soviet arms for more than a decade. Has that relationship been a factor for stability, instability, or neither?

The regional specialists also should be able to provide guidance in dealing with instability. When strategists confront instability, their response is "development," grandly labelled a "Marshall Plan for X," if X is an important enough country. The result usually is a combination of economic carrots (aid, land reform, and the like) and military sticks intended to give the government under threat some breathing room. Often, however, the carrots, like land reform, are enough to undermine existing bases of support for the government but not enough to coopt the insurgents, who are more interested in power than program: witness El Salvador.

The Latin Americanists should be able to help the strategists and foreign policy analysts do better. Schoultz makes a start by explicitly bridging the gap between the worlds those two groups inhabit. He helps us understand how policymakers think, or at least say they think, about instability and its consequences in Central America. On issues where those policymakers agree, such as strategic minerals, hearing the argument in their words is helpful. It is less so, however, for the larger issues on which they disagree, like the sources of instability in the region. I would like Schoultz to spell out what he thinks about those issues, and thus how he thinks policymakers should think.

7. Lars Shoultz, National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1987), p. 309.



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U.S. Security Interests in Latin America