Becoming a primarily regional power is actually an opportunity to fundamentally reconsider relations with our home region, North America.
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Some recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane and dangerously volatile state of US relations with its home region, the continent of North America. A record 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities across the nation in 2022. This year, the possible lifting of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands of more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to soar across the border, as some are already able to do. To see also : From the United States to China, major economies are stagnating. But not India.. Most of these refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms ravaged by climate change. The failed US response to such an unnerving world ranges from nervous waiting by the Biden administration with no plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a “wall” of four-mile border in a rusty shipping container (which he now has to dismantle).
Meanwhile, millions of destitute people in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, are struggling to survive in the world’s worst slums, ravaged by recent earthquakes and wracked by endemic gang violence. As the United Nations Security Council debated launching an international military intervention to address what its secretary-general called “an absolutely nightmarish situation,” the United States expelled an additional 26,000 Haitian asylum-seekers without a hearing in 2022. The harshness of this was captured in September 2021 when Border Cavaliers on patrol used “unnecessary force” to push Haitians back across the Rio Grande. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Washington’s recent economic sanctions against communist Cuba, imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, resulted in 250,000 refugees fleeing to the United States last year, more than 2 percent of the island’s population.
Further south, after years of US-led economic blockades and at least one Washington-sponsored coup, Venezuela has hemorrhaged 6.8 million citizens in what the United Nations has called “the world’s greatest crisis world of refugees and migrants”. In 2018, only 100 Venezuelans crossed the southern US border. In 2022, that number was an unprecedented 188,000. And keep in mind that all of this will likely seem like just a trickle in the years to come when, as the World Bank recently warned, a human flood could head north as the devastation of climate change uproots as many as 4 million people each year from Mexico. and Central America.
As negative as that sounds, there are some faint signs that, however intermittently, the United States could at least be moving towards a more positive relationship with the North American continent, which includes Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean island nations. And it can’t happen soon enough as, within a decade, the growth of a multipolar world will slowly replace Washington’s dreams of global hegemony with multinational alliances like the European Union or emerging regional powers like Brazil, India, Nigeria and Turkey.
On a broader level, geopolitical shift is eroding the ability of any would-be hegemon, including China, to dominate much of the globe as Washington has done for the past 75 years. As the US share of the global economy has declined from a whopping 50% in 1950 to just 13% in 2021, its world leadership has followed a similar downward trajectory, a process not unlike what Britain has experienced. in the decades before the First World War. economic and imperial decline is now undermining Washington’s long-held goal of maintaining its dominance over Eurasia, the epicenter of global power. It has done so for decades through a tripartite geopolitical strategy, controlling the western end of the continent through NATO and the east through a vast chain of military bases along the Pacific coast, while working diligently to prevent China or Russia from reaching any type of full-scale dominance in Central Asia.
Dream, as they say. In this century, with its disastrous wars, Washington has already lost much of its influence in both the Greater Middle East and Central Asia, while its once close allies (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) go for the own way. Meanwhile, China has gained significant control over Central Asia, while its recent ad hoc alliance with an increasingly battered Russia only solidifies its growing geopolitical power on the Eurasian continent.
While the war in Ukraine momentarily strengthened the NATO alliance, the unilateral US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ending a disastrous 20-year war, forced European leaders for the first time in half a century to consider how they might be life and NATO in a changing planet. They are only now beginning to imagine what it would mean to take over its own defense perhaps a decade from now, with most of the US military forces withdrawn from Europe. In short, for the first time in memory, we could really be on another planet.
At the eastern edge of Eurasia, Beijing and Washington appear ominously preparing for an armed showdown over Taiwan that, as outlined in a six-stage scenario by Reuters news service, would likely destroy that island’s cities, disrupt trade world and would devastate much of East Asia. Given Beijing’s strategic advantage of mere proximity to that island and the likelihood of heavy US naval losses in such a conflict, Washington would, eventually, likely blink and withdraw from the “first island chain” (Japan-Taiwan- Philippines) to a “second island chain” (Japan-Guam-Palau) or even a “third island chain” (Alaska/Hawaii/New Zealand).
Even without such a disastrous future conflict, which could obviously become nuclear, Washington’s position in Eurasia is already starting to fade. Elsewhere in the world, its influence in South America has declined staggeringly since the Cold War of the last century, while China, capitalizing on a now half-century-old alliance with independent states in Africa, has become the foremost power on that continent.
Amid the fading of Washington’s global hegemony, its most enduring legacy, the liberal international order, has indeed fostered economic growth by strengthening a series of regional powers known as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) or, more recently, the “13 new emerging economies” (including Indonesia, Nigeria and South Africa). Their ascendancy is likely to prevent Washington or Beijing from exerting anything resembling the kind of imperial-era or Cold War-era global domination that followed. Conversely, regional associations such as the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union are expected to grow ever stronger.
As its global power rapidly fades, the United States will no doubt become a much more regional power. While some Washington insiders might see this trend as at best a retreat or at worst a defeat, it’s actually an opportunity to fundamentally reconsider relations with our home region of North America.
The current US position on this continent is a twisted knot of contradictions, the bitter legacy of a troubled history. For more than a century, there has been a striking duality in Washington’s relationship with its home region, marked by friendship in the North and ambiguity or even hostility in the South, especially Central America and the Caribbean. After breaking decades of informal imperial rule by Britain over all of Latin America at the dawn of the twentieth century, Washington sought to control its southern neighbors with repeated military interventions: taking Puerto Rico in 1898 and seizing the Canal Zone of Panama in 1903, sending Marines to occupy Caribbean countries like Haiti for decades at a time.
In a bold attempt to change his imperial stance, President Franklin Roosevelt adopted a “good neighbor policy” in the 1930s, briefly abjuring armed occupation. Building on that goodwill, in 1947 Washington forged a mutual defense pact, the Rio Mutual Assistance Treaty, with about two dozen countries in this hemisphere, including Mexico, most of Central America, and all of South America. The Cold War, however, soon led to a wave of controversial CIA interventions: the overthrow of the democratic reformist government of Guatemala in 1954, the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961, the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and a series of bloody secret wars in Central America in the 80s.
Even now, the social trauma of those covert wars, marked by US-funded massacres and death squads, is evident in criminal gangs like MS-13 whose members estimated at 60,000 now terrorize the northern tier of Central America, forcing many thousands of their victims to flee to the relative safety of the US border. Instead of a collaborative effort to address an increasingly horrific regional blend of endemic violence and climate change, Washington has reacted increasingly repressively, mobilizing border patrols in a futile attempt to seal off its southern border, as if it had no role or responsibility for the fate of its neighbors.
To the north, however, Canada provides a model for regional collaboration. After strained relations throughout the 19th century, marked by several failed U.S. invasions of Canada, Washington, beginning in 1903, negotiated its border disputes with Ottawa. Those arbitrations became a model for modern international relations, while Secretary of State Elihu Root won a Nobel Peace Prize. To crown this process, in 1909 the two countries set up the International Joint Commission, which, over 110 years, amicably settled some 50 disputes, some of which might otherwise have become quite serious.
As allies in World War I and World War II, the two nations also developed a military alliance that has only deepened over the decades. Not only was Canada a co-founder of NATO in 1949, but at the height of the Cold War the countries combined their continental defenses to form the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). As a fully binational command, with senior officers from both air forces, NORAD has become the strongest American alliance, tasked with air and, as of 2006, maritime defense on the entire North American continent. Building on such resilient military ties, the two nations joined Mexico in 1994 in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, while slightly modified under President Trump, has maintained close trade ties between these three countries for the past 30 years. .
As a legacy of its troubled hemispheric history, however, US relations with the rest of North America are a tangle of contradictions that only complicate painfully lingering problems. Yet there are now obvious solutions, using this country’s relationship with Canada and the European Union as models, that could begin to transcend the increasingly unnerving irrationality of armed borders, asymmetrical power and punitive policies towards neighbors. poorer southerners.
In the wake of World War II and 1,000 years of nearly endless warfare that made Europe the bloodiest continent in the world, new visionary leaders moved step by step towards forming a regional confederation that would replace conflict with cooperation. That European Union (EU), in turn, would create unprecedented levels of productivity and prosperity (at least until Britain withdrew from the EU and, more recently, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine) . While all 27 member states retain their full sovereignty, the EU’s executive commission and parliament, since the signing of the Lisbon Pact in 2007, have taken on common concerns for their 500 million citizens, including environment, economic development, human rights, border security and migration within the Union.
To solve its growing problems, all of North America – including Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean countries – could clearly benefit from a parallel union between its 23 sovereign states and their 590 million people. In many ways, the task should be easier than Europe’s. While the EU has 13 “official languages,” a North American union would only need three — English, French, and Spanish — fewer than tiny Switzerland.
As in Europe once upon a time, the main obstacle to North American integration is the economic inequality between North and South. Since its introduction in 1994, NAFTA has fundamentally reshaped North American economic relations, increasing cross-border investment and tripling regional trade between Canada, Mexico and the United States. And here’s a surprising post-NAFTA development: between 1994 and 2007, undocumented Mexican immigration to the United States only increased; since 2008, however, there has been a reverse flow “as more Mexican-born immigrants have begun to leave the United States than to arrive”.
Hoping to mimic this success, Congress approved the US-Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership in 2000 and, five years later, adopted the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). But special interests stymied CAFTA from the start, maximizing the negatives and downplaying the positives of such a multilateral agreement, while its Caribbean counterpart had minimal impact at best.
With examples of both successful and failed agreements in this hemisphere, better NAFTA-like pacts could be negotiated with the Caribbean and Central America. Given a real investment program aimed at more equitable economic integration, Washington could conceivably reduce, albeit gradually, the glaring economic disparity between the United States and Canada and their southern neighbors.
With such economic fundamentals in place, those countries could then move towards EU-style shared governance, so as to better address the growing climate crisis and its threat of demographic disaster. Through genuine regional collaboration, as well as a redefinition of “defense” (as in the Department of Defense) as greater protection from impending natural disasters, Washington could become the epicenter of a multinational union.
As its population continues to age, with the elderly expected to be over 18 by 2034, the United States will, in fact, urgently need new migration flows from the labor-rich nations of Central America and the Caribbean, as has said Biden. The White House hinted in its June 2022 Los Angeles Statement on Migration. And as climate change brings raging tropical storms to the Caribbean and devastating droughts to Central America’s northern triangle, Canada and the United States will be able to mobilize their legions of skilled scientists to seek environmental solutions that allow rural people to more safely take refuge in place.
Finally, the massive US defense budget, still dedicated to Washington’s dying dreams of global domination (and the corporate arms manufacturers that go with them), could be redirected towards a new kind of regional defense. Its goal would be to deal with a continent-wide explosion of climate-related disasters, including increasingly intense droughts, floods, fires, storms and the displaced populations that will accompany them.
Managing these common concerns fairly (and effectively) will mean developing limited areas of shared sovereignty on the model of the European Union. To create a successor to the moribund Organization of American States (OAS), Ottawa and Washington could lead North America’s 23 sovereign nations to form a permanent secretariat, similar to the European Commission.
Balancing national sovereignty with regional solidarity, such an empowered transnational body could then exercise executive authority over areas appropriate for shared governance, including civil protection, environmental disaster, economic growth, and workflows. And if such a union proves effective, it could be expanded, just as the EU has been, to incorporate the entire Western Hemisphere, supplanting or revitalizing the now comatose OAS.
By taking the necessary steps beyond CAFTA, NAFTA and NORAD, Washington could help steer its North American neighbors, reeling from the ravages of climate change, toward a more perfect union. In the process, this entire hemisphere would eventually become a much safer haven for its share of humanity in the troubled decades ahead.
