Losing the Americas?

“America was settled by people seeking God, while the rest of the Americas were settled by people seeking gold.”

I was persuaded against the concept of nation-building or stepping into insoluble foreign arguments and civil wars, often hinged on histories that Americans can’t relate to, by the Vietnam War.

Such a wasting, frustrating war. Fought with valor, a valor that the politicians who spun its web didn’t deserve.

Vietnam was symbolic of the Cold War era, when Washington’s attention was riveted on various iterations of nation-building and empire-building as it confronted both the Soviets and China’s communist ambitions.

The loser in all of this was the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

 As a kid raised on the US-Mexican border, and then as an adult engaged in the economic life along the Texas-Mexico border for a number of years, I always wondered why the US didn’t pay more attention to its neighbors, thinking that the most significant export to them should be the concept of the gift of God-given human freedom, the rule of law, and free markets.

Instead of showing them how to fish, we too often gave them a fish, and they learned nothing.

I often think of the quote attributed to the late Roger Babson, an American historian and economist: “America was settled by people seeking God, while the rest of the Americas were settled by people seeking gold.” Or the brutal honesty of the late British historian Paul Johnson, who wrote: “Everyone in [Central and South America] talked revolution and practiced graft.”

Ah, the paths not taken. 

The Founding Fathers were clear about foreign adventures, none more so than President George Washington. He wanted the new country to have a dominant, battle-ready navy and army to defend the nation’s rapidly growing commerce and trade routes across the Atlantic and in the Western Hemisphere, while avoiding entanglements, especially with the always-quarreling European nations.

He also warned about foreign powers buying their way into the affairs of both America and the Western Hemisphere, writing, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence [believe me] the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Our early presidents all agreed with this policy perspective. The fifth President, James Monroe, and his Secretary of State and future President, John Quincy Adams, would formally codify this policy in 1823 as the Monroe Doctrine (full text here). Secretary Adams wrote the document (which many consider a founding document) after President Monroe became alarmed by whispers from Spain, Britain, France, and Portugal about ambitions to colonize parts of South America. The doctrine would proclaim to would-be colonizers the right of the Americas to be governed by republican forms of government, and the duty of the US to protect the hemisphere’s interests, and its own.  

(One of our more witless presidents, Barack Obama, who never knew another country he loathed more than his own, declared the Monroe Doctrine dead in 2013.)

Even before the Monroe Doctrine was formalized, Thomas Jefferson set the example with the Barbary Pirates, who grew rich and increasingly powerful by extorting fees for open water passage across North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, until the US Marines marched against the official palace in Tripoli, raised the American flag, and replaced the “pasha” with a new ruler.   

In the two centuries that followed, the Monroe Doctrine was employed numerous times, even if not by name, to protect the delicate sensibilities of our neighbors, who did not want to be seen as politically impotent or subservient to the US.

In the post-WWII era, America has found itself in situations that require this exclusive, narrow response to save or defend American lives or interests, or to deter foreign powers using New World proxies.  

John F. Kennedy’s naval “quarantine” of communist Cuba in 1962 to stop further installation of Soviet controlled nuclear-armed missiles only ninety miles off the coast of Florida is a classic example. (Before the revolution, Cuba was one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America, behind only the US and Canada, higher than some European countries, and with excellent health care. Communism left it one of the poorest.)   

In 1983, Ronald Reagan used US Marines and Army Rangers to rescue and secure the island of Grenada, where a rogue communist leader, funded and aided by both the old Soviet bloc, Cuba, and China, overthrew the existing government, intending to lead a “Leninist” revolution throughout the Caribbean.

[Your humble author wrote the official account on the communist government for the US Department of State in 1984, “The Foreign Policy of the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada,” using over 10,000 original documents recovered.]

Neighboring islands appealed to President Reagan to intervene. The US already suspected that Grenada had become a transit point for Soviet Bloc arms entering Latin America, while the Cubans were building a 10,000-foot runway capable of accommodating heavy military aircraft. In addition, 500 US students in a medical school on the island were tempting potential hostages.

In December 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to oust the military dictator, Manual Noriega. The unelected, de facto ruler had been charged in both France and the US with racketeering and drug trafficking, and it was feared that his reckless behavior and cartel ties endangered the Panama Canal, controlling 40% of US trade.

Similarly, of course, on January 3, the US launched a brilliant, lightning strike against the narco-communist dictator, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, which resulted in his capture, as well as his wife, Cilia Flores. Both Maduro, his wife, and son are charged with narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, conspiracy, and weapons possession, as well as charges that go back several years. Running drugs into the US, between Venezuela and Mexico, choreographed by China, not only killed hundreds of thousands of American citizens, but it also represents a front on the psychological battlefield. But most importantly, it offers the Chinese a foothold in the Caribbean.

Maduro’s government developed extensive and strong relationships with China, Russia, and Iran, all of whom provided significant economic and military support and purchased Venezuelan oil. China’s trade with Venezuela grew dramatically, as did Venezuela’s debt to China, after China’s $62 billion investment since 2007, primarily in its oil industry, partly repaid with oil.  

These strategic alliances were the key to Maduro’s regime maintaining a stranglehold on once-prosperous Venezuela. First, under the late Hugo Chavez, who hand-picked Maduro before his death from cancer in 2013, and then under Maduro, the economy of Venezuela was destroyed. Its GDP contracted nearly 75%, with hyperinflation, massive governmental and cartel crime, official murder, food shortages, and oil production stunningly falling to only 20% of its former level, after the regime fired experienced oil professionals to employ novice political supporters.

The ugly truth is that we see this pattern over and over again across the Americas – everyone talks a good game until they don’t. Based on that historic trend alone, one has to wonder whether the US didn’t intervene enough, not too much. Regardless, the graft, corruption, cartels, serial revolutions, wide open violence, and corrupted media seem to be in the very DNA of the Americas, back to Mr. Babson’s quote about gold. (Now, Canada itself is slipping into the early stages of tyranny.)  

President Trump took a tactical tool out of the toolbox, retrofitted it for the modern era, and announced his intention to secure the homeland and the US’s interests in the Western Hemisphere. While the US has been engaged in the discussion of what a woman is or isn’t, some really dangerous people have been maneuvering to flip the world balance. China, Russia, Islamic fanatics, and billion-dollar cartels understand power and violence as the sharpest tools of statecraft, not words. It’s about power and nothing less.

As with the Iranians this week, the Venezuelan people must themselves restore their government, democracy, and the rule of law. We can help them, but ultimately, they must craft their own future. The governments of both El Salvador and Argentina are important templates, and not a moment too soon.

For half a century, America has basically let our own backyard, our neighbors, become an unkempt mess. Mexico and Brazil have every imaginable resource, as do virtually every country from the Rio Grande south. These nations’ relative poverty is not due to want; it is due to an unwillingness to use the greatest resources of all – God’s gracious gift of human freedom and the mechanisms of moral and civic order.