Leading us astray
US Leadership in a World of Uncertainties, eds Michael Stricof and Isabelle Vagnoux, reviewed by Gavin O'Toole, 12 January 2023
US Leadership in a World of Uncertainties, edited by Michael Stricof and Isabelle Vagnoux, 2022, Palgrave
The title of this book is the first sign that the reader should proceed with caution, carefully considering assumptions that might have been made at the germination of this collection.
This caution responds to the potential for a normative, if not always wholly uncritical, approach to US foreign policy and international relations in western scholarship.
That is because the reader is invited to depart from a premise of Washington’s global “leadership”, for good or ill, and how contemporary challenges to this can be assessed.
Palgrave is not a publisher generally given to banging a drum, but this approach will not appeal to scholars in countries identified as the source of those challenges, those sympathetic to alternative perspectives associated with those countries, or even those striving to approach this theme with the cold objectivity that history demands.
In short, one is immediately left wondering not only whether by this formula US leadership is real, but whether we are meant to finish reading this collection thinking that it is desirable. The reflex to rally behind a mighty ally in times of turbulence can be irresistible.
Are we being asked to depart from the position that the appetite to dominate the politics, economy and culture of entire regions in fact reflects a natural order?
The appeal to caution becomes even more pressing in the chapter by Isabelle Vagnoux on Latin America, where US hegemony has always been shaped by the imperialist assumptions of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, regardless of the rhetoric of John Kerry who announced in 2013 as Secretary of State that the Monroe era is over (even if Donald Trump’s National Security adviser John Bolton then unilaterally resurrected it).
This chapter—surprisingly the only one devoted to Washington’s “backyard”, given that the countenance it shows the world has so often been shaped in this region—is entitled “What is Left of US Leadership in the Americas?”
What we subsequently read at times feels far less critical of US motives in the region than it should be. It is written in the classic vein of international relations scholarship where the analysis proceeds solely from the level of inter-state interactions and those between governments, while the absent guests at the party are the long-suffering citizens who have to endure the implications of those motives.
Vagnoux—co-editor of this collection—explores a potted history of US relations with countries in Latin America, security concerns, democracy, economic competition, and soft power.
She argues that the US has learned that affirming unilateral leadership is counterproductive, and has moved progressively away from compulsion towards policies of “enhanced partnership” yet, staggeringly, then brushes over the large body of material suggesting direct interventions in Venezuela by stating: “As far as we know, and until archives prove us wrong, Washington took no part in the Venezuelan coup of 2002, or in trying to overthrow Nicolas Maduro in recent years —except for the support all democracies granted to the opposition leader Juan Guaidó …”
The Bush administration came under intense scrutiny for its role in 2002 after admitting that US officials had held a series of meetings with Venezuelan military officers and opposition activists. It is safe to say that Guaidó—a gambit recently abandoned by Joe Biden’s administration hungry for Venezuelan oil—was a hand-reared puppet groomed for leadership by Washington for a decade-a-half in the expectation of a coup. By stressing the support “all democracies” gave him, Vagnoux is clearly ignoring the pressure America’s natural allies came under to do so.
On the war against drugs, she is equally colour blind, failing to mention the astounding cost in bloodshed across countries such as Mexico and Colombia of the profoundly misguided militarisation of interdiction at the behest of the US. This flawed policy approach was challenged consistently by influential sections of elite opinion within Latin America. There was a good reason why Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declared the Mérida Initiative “dead” and security cooperation declined, and it was to do with the more than 360,000 murders and 27,000 people who have gone missing since 2006 when war on the cartels was declared.
Vagnoux chooses instead to fret about what Washington views as the “strategic threat” in the region posed by China, whose military programmes and growing presence increasingly give it “a potential dangerous foothold in the hemisphere”. This challenge to US military predominance sounds like a rant in the corridors of the Pentagon, and is reinforced by the writer appearing to bemoan the determination of some Latin American countries to remain “non-aligned” with regard to the conflict in Ukraine. Where Biden’s most recent overtures to Venezuela are considered, it is in terms of the advantage to the US of the latter’s oil in the wake of the sanctions it has imposed on Moscow—the interests of Caracas, the owner of that oil, are not even an afterthought.
However, it is in the consideration of democracy that this chapter is most unnerving, with the author attributing the democratisation of the hemisphere in the 1980s to “OAS oversight and US leadership in democracy promotion”, and arguing that “in the twenty-first century, while the OAS and Washington may have slowed down democratic backsliding, they have proved unable to avoid it in a majority of Latin American countries”.
This is, frankly, a breath-taking distortion of the Janus-faced US attitude towards democracy in the Americas, a mantra that has been used with great cynicism to mask a long history of direct interference in independent states. To imply that decades of support for authoritarian regimes followed by open hostility to the social democracy that Latin America’s mostly impoverished people are still trying to forge amounts to democratic promotion is preposterous, especially in an era within the US itself when there has been what the author admits, dismissively, “some democratic erosion in recent years”. One must ask whether the attack on the Capitol—mimicked recently by supporters of the Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro—amounts to “some democratic erosion”.
In her analysis of relations with Cuba, Vagnoux chooses to conveniently overlook the historical condition of US subjugation that gave rise to the revolution, the aggressive stranglehold over Cuban policy of a far-right Republican caucus that is innately hostile to democracy, and the continuing, illegal embargo against the island that is entering its seventh decade. Cuba is merely presented as an opportunity for Biden to appease opponents of the regime in Havana, and not as one of the most important examples of American bad faith for governments throughout the region. The notion that Washington is a bulwark of liberal internationalism is simply not credible to large swathes of Latin American public opinion.
Overall, this collection looks at challenges facing US foreign relations globally, and offers a survey of its policies in many areas—from regional policies in the Middle East to macroeconomic policy, nuclear diplomacy and cyberspace. In that sense, it will be a source of reference for scholars of international affairs.
However, one is left wondering why the editors seem to have given Washington the benefit of the doubt in so many respects, and to have adopted what Alan McPherson has called “an impulse on the part of the defenders of the United States to ignore foreign critics of US power, a collective rolling of the eyes—call it forbearance fatigue—with deleterious effects on international affairs”.
Perhaps Palgrave should think more carefully about publishing collections devoted to “US leadership” in a world that appears to be paying such a high price for it.