Western Hemisphere
A Small State’s Guide to Influence in World Politics by tom long. Oxford University Press, 2022, 240 pp.
Building on his seminal 2015 work, Latin America Confronts the United States, Long persuasively presses his case that smaller states, with creative leadership, can often successfully defend their national interests in contests with bigger ones. He urges his scholarly colleagues to redefine international relations studies by stretching beyond the interactions of great powers to focus on the many smaller states that light up the geopolitical firmament. Deploying some 20 illustrative country studies, Long outlines the key variables that smaller states must consider in designing winning bargaining strategies: which policy issues matter in dueling countries, the extent of policy divergence between them, and the cohesion among elites in great powers. Smaller polities can be ambitious but must admit the very real constraints imposed by asymmetries of power and by global norms and institutions. Long’s success stories in Latin America include Panama gaining control over its canal at the end of the twentieth century and, more recently, El Salvador negotiating with the United States over military facilities and Bolivia bargaining with neighboring Brazil over natural gas.
Globalizing Patient Capital:
The Political Economy of Chinese Finance in the Americas by stephen b. kaplan. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 390 pp.
Drawing on his academic expertise and his practical experience as a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Kaplan presents an in-depth, carefully reasoned assessment of the sudden burst in Chinese lending to Latin American governments. Some critics allege that China surreptitiously seeks to lure vulnerable countries into debt traps, but Kaplan emphasizes how Chinese state banks are working to export what they perceive as their successful state-led development model while creating fresh business opportunities for large state-owned enterprises. In contrast to capitalist banking, Chinese lenders offer long-term loans that better fit the development needs of Latin America; less concerned with the near-term debt repayment capabilities of loan recipients, patient Chinese lenders don’t seek to impose intrusive macroeconomic conditions on countries. But Chinese banks do seek assurances by demanding collateral in commodity exports and by tying credits to purchases of Chinese industrial products and sometimes even by requiring a Chinese workforce for local projects. Kaplan advises Latin American governments to push back against Chinese procurement demands, to insist on greater transparency in project contracts, and to mitigate future debt burdens through alternative forms of financing, including direct foreign investment.
Escaping the Governance Trap: Economic Reform in the Northern Triangle by neil shenai. Palgrave Pivot, 2022, 175 pp.
Security and Illegality in Cuba’s Transition to Democracy by vidal romero. Tamesis, 2021, 174 pp.
Two books seek ways to ward off chaos in Central America and the Caribbean. Shenai, a former U.S.Treasury Department official responsible for Central America, has written a thoughtful study of the vexing problems plaguing the countries of the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Loyal to his Treasury training, Shenai makes the case for structural economic reforms such as improving tax collection, reducing barriers to legitimate commerce, and expanding the access of citizens to financial instruments. If combined with enhanced public-sector accountability and financial integrity, these economic reforms could lead to virtuous cycles of more rapid economic growth, renewed trust in government institutions, and stronger, more efficacious development. Recognizing that reform-minded forces in Central America confront entrenched vested interests, Shenai calls on the United States—along with Canada, Mexico, and international financial institutions—to actively engage when domestic constituencies eager for reform gain sway. Shenai’s hopeful policy recommendations are broadly in line with those of the Biden administration’s
“root causes” strategy for reducing immigration from the Northern Triangle. Fixing Central America is a complex generational project, and Shenai urges patience even as he recognizes that many politicians, in the region and in Washington, inevitably search for quick fixes.
Romero, a Mexican political scientist, fears that Cuba, a decaying socialist state, could descend into the gang-infested criminality and corruption that haunt the nearby Northern Triangle. Currently, the Cuban government guarantees public security while tolerating a culture of illegality characterized by petty corruption in the public sector and widespread black markets. Romero imagines a disturbing future wherein an inefficient bureaucratic state allows a degree of economic liberalization only to open the floodgates to international criminal organizations; the consequent turmoil prompts popular demands for an even more authoritarian government. To escape this nightmare scenario, Romero proposes preemptive measures remarkably similar to those the Biden administration and the international community are now urging for the Northern Triangle: enhancing public-sector transparency, combating money laundering, incorporating informal entrepreneurs into the legal economy, and constructing positive, independent civic organizations. He adds that Cuba should be admitted to international financial institutions to receive assistance in building competitive markets and pursuing progressive governance reform.
Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by sam w. haynes. Basic Books, 2022, 496 pp.
Haynes delivers a powerful counternarrative to the traditional foundational myths about the defense of the Alamo and the origins of Texas: the shopworn narrative of a heroic American resistance overcoming Mexican despotism. In so doing, he proposes another myth: a pre-independence, Mexico-ruled multicultural province where English speakers, Hispanics, indigenous tribes, and freed Blacks coexisted in relative harmony. For all these groups, apart from white males, independence for Texas in 1836 and then its incorporation into the United States as a state in 1845 resulted not in liberation but in a devastating loss of liberty. Haynes enriches this revisionism with the histories of embattled indigenous tribes (some native to the region, others recently arrived), all tragic victims of a purposeful, blood-soaked ethnic cleansing perpetrated by whites. Endemic political chaos in Mexico City and an underfunded and poorly led Mexican military allowed Texas, with a population of under 100,000 (only some 30,000 of whom were Anglo-Americans), to win independence from Mexico, with a population of some eight million people. Haynes’s riveting tale of the state’s violent, intolerant, color-coded history reverberates in the radical politics of today’s increasingly radical Texas Republican Party.
Infinite Country: A Novel by patricia engel. Avid Reader Press, 2021, 256 pp.
Engel’s unstated premise is that national borders are artificial, illegitimate boundaries and that enduring family love and human compassion should outweigh restrictive, often brutal immigration laws. She wraps her worldview in a poignant if at times overwrought tale, threaded with Andean mythologies, of three generations of urban, working-class Colombians who overcome social barriers and personal flaws to finally reunite in their new homeland, the northeastern United States. Burnishing her progressive credentials, Engel, a dual U.S.-Colombian citizen, insists on leavening her heroes’ achievements with sharp if familiar criticisms of the depreciated American dream. In describing the heartbreak of family separations and betrayals across generations, Engel’s style lies between the lyricism of the prolific Chilean novelist Isabel Allende and the deeper erudition of the younger Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli. Tellingly, Engel fails to consider the route to redemption suggested, albeit through a form of magical realism, in Disney’s blockbuster film Encanto: namely, that internally displaced persons, rather than venture across international borders, can find safer havens within their Colombian homeland, rich in natural beauty, community solidarity, and economic opportunities.