Matt Yglesias

An Administration Win on Honduras

Unfortunately, foreign policy achievements have a way of not getting noticed if they don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives. This is too bad, since finding ways to resolve conflicts that don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives is generally preferable to approaches based on death and destruction.

So let’s take a time out to note that the Obama administration’s approach to Honduras looks to be paying off in the form of a deal that will temporarily re-instate President Zelaya in advance of new elections to be held in January. The US has an unfortunate history of backing coups in Latin America and an unfortunate history of heavy-handed involvement in Latin American domestic politics, so threading the needle between heavy-handed involvement and coup-backing was difficult. But they got the job done, and as Tim Fernholz says the results are likely to be appreciated throughout the region.

Since When Have Conservatives Opposed Banana Republics?

Steve Benen observes the absurdity of right-wingers arguing that America will achieve “banana republic” status unless we allow past crimes and human rights violations to go unpunished. But I think there’s something weirder about the specific decision to use this term, and about Karl Rove’s specific comparison of Barack Obama’s America to “a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses.” I mean, since when are Americans conservatives against Latin American countries being run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses?

The Summit of the Americas went down just a few days ago, and we were treated to the view that not only is bona fide leftist dictator Fidel Castro so horrible that we should attempt to starve the victims of his misgovernment into line, but also that essentially all the democratically elected left-of-center leaders across Latin America—from Rafael Correa to Daniel Ortega to Hugo Chavez to Evo Morales to Cristina Kirchner are America’s enemies. And to the end of defeating these guys, American conservatives have a long history of backing America-friendly military dictators. Just a few years ago the Bush administration backed a coup against Chavez. The Somoza regime that Ortega overthrew in the late 1970s had been backed for years by the United State. Many American conservatives were so in love with Argentina’s military dictatorship that they were inclined to support it even against Saint Margaret Thatcher.

Back to basics, the origin of the term is that a “banana republic” is a Latin American despotism being propped up by the United States government at the behest of US-owned fruit exporters. It’s a specifically left-wing form of derision for the sort of historical abuses of American power in the Western Hemisphere that conservatives can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge.

Obama and Post-Cold War Latin America

I have a new column up at The Daily Beast about the handshake of doom and the need for a shift to a post-Cold War policy toward Latin America:

Nowadays, the Soviets are long gone. And with them, all rationale for looking at the region through this lens. There’s just no way to imagine a military threat to the United States emerging from Latin America. For all the rhetorical heat generated by Chavez’s clashes with the American right, all he really wants from America is for Citgo to sell us oil and gas. And guess what? All we want from Venezuela is the ability to buy oil and gas. Latin America is close by, and, over a century, American meddling in its affairs has generated a lot of ill will. That ill will generates a certain number of movements powered by America-bashing rhetoric. The absolute worst thing we can do is respond by entering into a downward spiral of recriminations and cold shoulders that only builds more ill will. The best approach is to recognize that our interests in Latin America are limited in scope, so we should just do our best to be polite—cooperate with those governments who want to cooperate with us, and shake hands with the rest while perhaps making some small talk.

Instead, conservatives would have us double-down on decades of failed Cuba policy by extending the same treatment to Chavez and perhaps others such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Realistically, all such a policy can achieve is antagonizing other Latin American leaders who don’t have the luxury of imperiously “isolating” their neighbors to create a self-fulfilling prophesy of an anti-American bloc. Look around at reviews of Obama’s performance at the summit, and outside the fever swamps of the American right the only criticism you hear is that the administration isn’t going far enough toward improving relations with Cuba. And that’s about right. After all, what was achieved by excluding Cuba from the meeting of hemispheric leaders? Citizens of all the countries of Americas should hope that the Obama-Chavez greeting won’t be the new president’s last controversial handshake.

A related angle on this, as per Daniel Drezner, is that Obama’s approach to foreign policy is about setting priorities and not wasting national energy and credibility on third-tier things like a spat with Venezuela.