Latin American foreign policy: how much choice?

In his review of Joseph Tulchin's new book, Latin American Foreign Policy: How Much Choice? Chris Sabatini says the author has written a much-needed nuanced, detailed history of foreign policymaking in the region, but ignores recent scholarship and younger scholars when discussing current affairs.

Author

Christopher Sabatini

Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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U.S. studies of the international relations of Latin American states and inter-American foreign policy have traditionally been viewed (stuck even) through the prism of U.S. hegemony, in large part for good reason. Since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the United States has treated the hemisphere as its special prerogative. As  the overwhelming economic, military and political power, the Colossus to the North became the central factor shaping how Latin America and Caribbean states identified and asserted their national interests in foreign policy.

That scholarly approach  to the international rela tions of Latin America and  the Caribbean—while largely justifiable—precluded the development of more granular, comparative U.S. scholarship on the foreign policymaking processes and institutions in the region. Fortunately, as  the shadow of U.S. power has waned in the hemisphere, the field has enjoyed somewhat of a boom. From single country case studies (such as Aspirational Power by Mares and Trinkunas on Brazil) to edited volumes on regional multilateralism (such as Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie’s The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism: The Case of Latin America) to analyses of remerging extra-hemispheric powers’ role in the region (such as Kevin Gallagher’s The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialization and R. Evan Ellis’s China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores), academics, think-tankers and policy analysts are turning their attention to the evolving dynamic of international and global relations in the hemisphere.

To this much-welcome flurry of research and publication, former director of the Latin American Program at  the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Joseph Tulchin, has added his historical perspective. His book, Latin America in International Politics: Challenging US Hegemony, is an erudite, nuanced and sweeping view of the evolution of Latin American foreign policies in the context of U.S. power from independence to the present.

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