In a pair of stimulating recent articles in Foreign Policy and Nueva Sociedad, Andrés Malamud and Luis Schenoni discuss the declining relevance of the Latin American region to geopolitics.
Given their focus on regional trends, the articles are understandably low on specifics about particular countries and specific foreign policy choices. But the Nueva Sociedad article in particular provides useful descriptive data chronicling Latin America’s decline relative to other regions, during six historical periods between the Spanish-American War (1898) and the present day, across a range of variables, including population, national capacities, trade volume, military disputes, diplomatic relations, and participation in international organizations.
Of many interesting arguments raised in the articles, perhaps most intriguing is Malamud and Schenoni’s argument that today, the United States is close to self-sufficiency in both energy and drugs, two commodity exports that used to be foundational for Latin America and still set the tone of much diplomacy between Washington and the region. Meanwhile, Latin American industry is falling prey both to China and re-shoring; Latin American participation in international organizations has been weakened by a failure to coordinate regional foreign policies, especially between the big Latin economies; and even successful regional bodies like Mercosur look anachronistic and more relevant to the heavy industry of the 1990s than the information technology of the 21st century.
Malamud and Schenoni conclude, somewhat optimistically, that even though Latin America is not at the geopolitical table, at least it is not on the menu, cold relief after centuries of colonial extraction and a century of interventionist diplomacy from the region’s northern neighbor. That said, the sum of the evidence from the authors makes it clear that Latin America’s foreign ministries today spark only occasional, glancing interest from major international capitals.
In a month that brought the dismissal of an increasingly farcical Brazilian foreign minister, one wonders whether and how Latin American foreign ministries can overcome diminishing structural clout, declining organizational capacity, and the personal foibles of top leaders to regain international credibility and a more relevant seat at the global table. One path would be antagonistic, playing Beijing off against Washington, or acting simply as regional gadflies, following the Chávez-Maduro playbook. A second, equally damaging path would be the self-defeating sycophancy to Washington best illustrated in recent years by the outgoing Ernesto Araújo and the Bolsonaro progeny’s MAGA antics.
A third, more constructive path is hinted at in the Nueva Sociedad piece: a return to the diplomacy of the late 19th and early 20th century, when Latin America’s foreign ministries led the construction of a variety of doctrines designed in response to the challenges of the new post-colonial era, ranging from the Drago Doctrine prohibiting coercive debt collection to the development of the principle of territorial integrity (uti possidetis). Such constructive diplomatic engagement, of course, would require attention to diplomacy of a sort that has been sorely lacking in recent years, as the region’s governments have been beset by declining economic fortunes, political and ethical crises, and most recently, the devastating pandemic. Yet perhaps the tribulations of the past decade can also serve as a roadmap of areas within which creative diplomatic engagement might yield a more constructive post-pandemic role for Latin America in global affairs, whether it is by building bulwarks to support democracies in crisis, designing mutually beneficial environmental policy frameworks, improving regional health responses, or building transnational anticorruption enforcement mechanisms, among others.
Image: Arthur Max/MRE, Agência Brasil.
