The Next Decade (30 page)

Cuba and the Caribbean

Early in the nineteenth century, American prosperity was founded on the river system that enabled farmers in the Louisiana and Ohio territories to ship their agricultural output to the East Coast and Europe. All of these goods first flowed to the city of New Orleans and were then transferred from barges to oceangoing vessels. The United States fought to keep New Orleans safe, first at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, and then during the Texan war of independence. New Orleans and nearby ports remain the largest by tonnage in the United States, enabling midwestern grain to be shipped out and steel and other industrial goods to be shipped in.

Because a naval force in Cuba could control the sea-lanes in and out of the Gulf of Mexico and thereby could control New Orleans, the United States has always been obsessed with the island. Andrew Jackson contemplated invading it, and in 1898 the United States intervened to drive out the Spaniards. A half century later, when a pro-Soviet government emerged there under Fidel Castro, Cuba became a centerpiece of U.S. strategy. An anti-American Cuba without the Soviets was a trivial matter. An anti-American Cuba with Soviet missiles was a mortal threat.

As we look toward the decade ahead, Cuba has no great power patron, so the president can craft his Cuban policy in response to American political opinion. But he must bear in mind that if the United States faces a global competitor, Cuba will be the geographic point at which that competitor can put the greatest pressure on the United States. This makes Cuba the prize it will aim for.

In the long run, bringing Cuba back under American influence is a rational, preemptive policy, and it is highly desirable to do so before a global competitor emerges to raise the stakes and the price. Fidel and Raúl Castro will die or retire during the decade we’re considering, and the political and intelligence elites who control the island are both younger and more cynical than the founding generation of the Castro regime. Rather than gambling on whether they can survive the deaths of the founders, they will be open to accommodation, amenable to deals that allow them to retain their position while granting America increasing power over their foreign policy. The transition will be the moment for the United States to try to deal. Before the Castros leave power they might be open to a deal that preserves their legacy while conceding to American influence. If that fails, the insecurity of the transition might be the moment to approach their heirs. The American interest is simple and has nothing to do with human rights or regime change. It is to have guarantees that regardless of future challenges, Cuba will not become a base for foreign powers. Having achieved that, the United States will have achieved much.

Venezuela is another Latin American country that has managed to attract attention by appearing to be a significant threat to the United States. It is not. First, the Venezuelan economy depends on exporting oil, and the realities of geography and logistics make it inevitable that Venezuela will export its oil to the United States. Second, Venezuela’s physical isolation—with the Amazon to the south, the Caribbean (dominated by the U.S. Navy) to the north, and a hostile and stable Colombia to the west, on the other side of mountains and jungle—renders the country otherwise irrelevant, even if Islamist terrorists, say, showed up and tried to exploit its current rift with the United States. Even if a new global challenger sought to align with Venezuela and use it as a launching pad for mischief, the country’s location does not allow for a significant air or naval base. Obviously, it would be desirable to have Venezuela shift its strategic outlook by the 2030s, but that is not essential to U.S. interests.

Venezuela is a case in which U.S. foreign policy should discipline itself to ignore ideology and annoyance and focus on strategy. In all likelihood, Hugo Chávez will lose power within the regime he created. Indeed, if the United States were to cut a deal with Cuba at the right time, part of that deal might be the withdrawal of Cuban support for Chávez. But even if he remains in power, he presents no threat to anyone but his own people.

BRAZIL AND THE ARGENTINE STRATEGY

There is only one Latin American country with the potential to emerge as a competitor to the United States in its own right, and that is Brazil. It is the first significant, independent economic and potentially global power to develop in the history of Latin America, and it has hedged its bets nicely.

Brazil is the world’s eighth largest economy and the fifth largest country both in size and in population. Like most developing countries, it is heavily oriented toward export, but its exports are well balanced. Two-thirds are primary commodities (agricultural and mineral) and the rest are manufactured products. The geographic distribution of its exports is impressive as well, with about equal amounts going to Latin America, the European Union, and Asia. A relatively small but not insignificant amount goes to the United States. This balanced export posture means that Brazil is less vulnerable to regional economic downturns than are more focused economies.

Right now Brazil is not a power that is particularly threatening or important to the United States, nor does the United States represent a challenge to Brazil. There is minimal economic friction, and geography prevents Brazil from easily challenging the United States. Brazilian expansion northward would be irrational, because the terrain to the north is extremely hard to traverse, and there is nothing to the north that Brazil needs. Venezuelan oil, for instance, cannot be easily shipped to Brazil because of the terrain, and Brazil has ample supplies of its own anyway.

Brazil’s Trade Relations

The only challenge that Brazil could pose to the United States would be if its economic expansion continued enough for it to develop sufficient air and naval power to dominate the Atlantic between its coast and West Africa, a region not heavily patrolled by the United States, unlike the Indian Ocean or South China Sea. This would not happen in the next decade, but as Brazilian wage rates rise, the geographical factors are such that Brazilian investments in Africa might carry lower transportation costs than investments in other parts of Latin America. Thus there would be advantages for Brazil in developing relations with sub-Saharan countries, particularly Angola, which, like Brazil, is Portuguese-speaking. This could lead to a South Atlantic not only dominated by Brazil but with Brazilian naval forces based on both the Brazilian and the African coasts.

Even though Brazil is not yet in any way a threat to American interests, the underlying American strategy of creating and maintaining balances of power in all areas requires that the United States begin working now to create a countervailing power. There is no rush in completing the strategy, but there is an interest in beginning it.

In the next decade, while maintaining friendly relations with Brazil, the United States should also do everything it can to strengthen Argentina, the one country that could serve as a counterweight. It should be remembered that early in the twentieth century Argentina was the major power in Latin America. Its current weakness is not inevitable. The United States should work toward developing a special relationship with Argentina in the context of a general Latin American development plan that also includes resources devoted to Uruguay and Paraguay.

This is a region where modest amounts of money now can yield substantial benefits later. Argentina’s geography is suited for development; it has an adequate population and room for still more people. It has a strong agricultural base and a workforce capable of developing an industrial base. It is protected from all military incursions except those from Brazil, which should give it an incentive to play the role that the United States wants it to play.

The challenge in Argentina is political. Historically, its central government has been focused on addressing social problems in ways that actually undermine economic development. In other words, politicians tend to gain popularity by spending money they don’t have. Argentina has also gone through periods of military and other dictatorship with imposed austerity, a cycle in which it does not differ fundamentally from other Latin American countries, including Brazil.

The Brazilians will see a long-term threat in U.S. support for Argentina, but ideally they will be preoccupied with their own development and the internal stresses it generates. Nevertheless, the United States should be prepared for the Brazilians to offer Argentina economic incentives that would tie its economy closer to their own. Still, two factors play in the Americans’ favor. First, Brazil still needs to preserve its investment capital for domestic use. Second, Argentina has long feared Brazilian dominance, so given a choice between Brazil and the United States, it will opt for the latter.

The American goal should be to slowly strengthen Argentina’s economic and political capabilities so that over the next twenty to thirty years, should Brazil begin to emerge as a potential threat to the United States, Argentina’s growth rivals Brazil’s. This will require the United States to provide incentives for American companies to invest in Argentina, particularly in areas outside of agricultural products, where there is already sufficient investment. The United States also should be prepared to draw the American military closer to the Argentine military, but through the civilian government, so as not to incite fears that the U.S. is favoring the Argentine military as a force in the country’s domestic politics.

The American president must be careful not to show his true intentions in this, and not to rush. A unique program for Argentina could generate a premature Brazilian response, so Brazil should be included in any American program, if it wishes to participate. If necessary, this entire goodwill effort can be presented as an attempt to contain Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. It will all cost money, but it will be much cheaper, in every sense, than confronting Brazil in the 2030s or 2040s over control of the South Atlantic.

MEXICO

Like Cuba, Mexico is a special case in U.S. relations, and the obvious reason is that it shares the long U.S. border stretching from Texas to California. And yet Mexico is a society at a very different stage of development from Canada, the neighbor to the north, and it therefore interacts with the United States very differently. Nowhere else do domestic politics and geopolitics intersect more directly and perhaps more violently than along the desert frontier south and west of El Paso.

These two countries have had a complex and violent relationship throughout their history. In 1800, if a reasonable person had asked which would be the dominant power in North America in two hundred years, the logical answer would have been Mexico. It was far more developed and sophisticated (and better armed) than the United States at the time. But after vastly expanding its territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the United States pushed Mexico to its current borders, first by seizing Texas and then by waging the Mexican-American War, which forced Mexico out of its holdings as far north as today’s Denver and San Francisco.

The reason for American success in appropriating those western lands was ultimately geographical. Compared to the area around Mexico City, the northern part of the country is underpopulated, and it was even more so in the nineteenth century. The reason is that the land running from the border both north into the United States and south into Mexico is intensely dry and desolate, and it is especially inhospitable on the Mexican side. That meant that the Mexicans found it difficult to settle and support populations north of the desert, and even harder to move armies northward. During the uprising of Anglo settlers in Texas, the Mexican president and military leader Santa Anna moved an army of peasants north through the desert to San Antonio. A period of cold weather then crippled many of his soldiers, who were from the jungles of the south and had no shoes. Santa Anna’s army was exhausted by the time it arrived, and while it defeated the defenders of the Alamo, it was itself defeated at San Jacinto, near the present city of Houston, by a force that had only two virtues: it was not exhausted and it was not shoeless.

The creation of a new border between the United States and Mexico created a new reality in which the populations on both sides are able to move freely back and forth, migrating with economic opportunities and engaging in smuggling whatever is illegal on the other side. These turbulent borderlands exist throughout the world, between any countries whose political boundaries and cultural boundaries don’t match up, usually because, as in this case, the border has moved. Sometimes, as in the case of Germany and France, the issue of the borderland generates war. At other times, as between the United States and Canada, the border is a matter of little importance. The situation of Mexico and the United States in the next decade will be somewhere between the two extremes.

Mexico is a country of 100 million people, most of whom live hundreds of miles away from the United States. It is now the world’s fourteenth largest economy—counting only legal commerce—with a GDP of over $1 trillion. It annually exports about $130 billion worth of goods to the United States and imports about $180 billion worth, making it the second largest trading partner with the U.S., after Canada. The United States obviously can’t afford to disengage from Mexico, certainly not in less than a generation. Nor does it want to.