Wikileaks, Wikileaks...
Le Monde has a neat scoop from Wikileaks: Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim once tried to calm the Americans down and explain why Brasilia was not that worried about Hugo Chavez: "He barks but doesn't bite."
Ouch!!!!
Then things almost get worse: in 2004, Brazil tried to get the US to support their sale of Super Tucano trainer/light fighter planes to Venezuela by promising to help the opposition!
Once more with Wikileaks, we learn less about substance than about form, but this one remains a keeper because it confirms that Itamaraty has a much better grip on what needs to be done with Chavez than the American government.
Why? Well, the US wanted to prevent Brazil from selling planes that had no bearing whatsoever on the strategic balance of South America (which is why Brazil was keen on selling them in the first place). Meanwhile, Chavez was getting 24 units of one of Russia's best fighter jets, which is a factor of instability. The more money Chavez invests in small turbo-prop trainer/ground support planes, the less is left for sophisticated weapons. Moreover, a rational policy would want Brazil as tightly involved as possible in Venezuela's military and weapons' technology programs.
Dumber still: Brazil needed US permission because the Super-Tucano uses American technology. By exploiting that fact to constrain Brasilia, the US was basically killing its chances of getting the contract for the major jet acquisition that Brazil has been toying with for years, and on which it should finally decide soon.
Both these details did not seem to register in D.C.
Michael Shifter is really right: the US is not conspiring any more in Latin America. Their policy doesn't seem to be going anywhere in fact: they are just blowing it, time after time.
Photo Jonathan Blair
Showing posts with label Venezuela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Venezuela. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
A tough one for Chavez to swallow...
Hugocito cannot like this one from fellow-Albista Correa
From Stratfor (Intelligence Guidance: Week of July 11, 2010): "July 13: Naval forces from Ecuador, the United States, Colombia, Mexico and Chile will participate in the Unitas naval maneuvers in Peru." Unitas indeed!
Now: How about a military cooperation program between Ecuador and the US, perhaps along the line of the Brazil-US one?
As Fidel once said (speaking for some strange reason of dissidents' leaving "his" island): "The rats are abandoning the sinking ship."
The real point is: People will take Chavez money and sometimes even applaud his rhetoric, but on serious things, like regional military cooperation or relations with the US, the region's progressives (from Evo and Correa to Lugo and Lula) look noticeably tepid towards the big red friend.
[By the way: sorry for the break. The blog is on again...]
From Stratfor (Intelligence Guidance: Week of July 11, 2010): "July 13: Naval forces from Ecuador, the United States, Colombia, Mexico and Chile will participate in the Unitas naval maneuvers in Peru." Unitas indeed!
Now: How about a military cooperation program between Ecuador and the US, perhaps along the line of the Brazil-US one?
As Fidel once said (speaking for some strange reason of dissidents' leaving "his" island): "The rats are abandoning the sinking ship."
The real point is: People will take Chavez money and sometimes even applaud his rhetoric, but on serious things, like regional military cooperation or relations with the US, the region's progressives (from Evo and Correa to Lugo and Lula) look noticeably tepid towards the big red friend.
[By the way: sorry for the break. The blog is on again...]
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Two hubs, many spokes, no frame: The Shape of Post-American Americas
Fareed Zakaria's Post-American World doesn't say much about the Americas: a few remarks on Brazil, fewer still on Mexico's regional assertiveness, a dismissive reference to Hugo Chavez' rants, and peppered here and there, brief allusions to some of the smaller countries of the region. Why say more? The fate of American power was not played out in the Western Hemisphere and nothing that happened there over the last twenty years weakens his general thesis: US influence is declining and challengers are more assertive while, on the whole and sometimes slowly but without much prodding, market economies and democracy consolidate their hold on politics and state policy, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
This, however, does not tell us much about what those post-American Americas look like, which is what this short piece is about: how does the global lessening of America's power leave the rest of the hemisphere?
My answer is simple, but not straightforward: the post-American Americas have broken into a strange contraption: one America that is at least as American as ever, tightly organized around the United States; a second one that is less American than ever, for the most part loosely organized around Brazil; and between the two halves, a relationship whose importance for each side gets ever slighter. Think of the whole as a surreal bicycle.
1- A tight wheel in the North
The United States remains the hub of a system that includes Canada and Mexico, but also the Caribbean, Central America, and possibly even Venezuela. Among the spokes, not much goes on, but their relationship with the hub is the most important foreign issue for their economic prosperity and political stability.
The nature of existing hub-and-spoke relationships varies. America is the primary trade partner of all the spokes, but only Canada, Mexico and the US share extensive value chains. A massive amounts of energy flows into the US from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. Capital movements contribute to the tightness of the wheel, with investments flowing freely and in large quantities between the US, Canada and Mexico. Beyond that core, the movement is largely unilateral, as massive amounts of private capital goes from the US to the Caribbean fiscal havens while migrants, both legal and illegal, send remittances from the US back to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. People and drugs move in the opposite direction. Mexico and –through the latter—Central America represent the main source of migrants to the United States, of whose economy they have become critical cogs. Cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, penetrates the US through Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico. High-potency marijuana crosses southward from Canada and northward from Mexico.
That system is diverse and dynamic, with heavily interdependent formal and informal economies and deeply intertwined social universes. In most ways, it "works," with massive movements of goods, people and money circulating smoothly; but in others it doesn't, as violence ravages its peripheries, from Mexico's Northern border to the shantytowns of San Salvador, Guatemala City and Kingston, Jamaica.
Overall the region remains dominated by the United States. It is however by no means governed or even actively managed by Washington. There is instead the overwhelming sense and the reality that what happens in the United States is profoundly consequential for its neighbours, whereas the opposite is not true. The mostly uncontrolled character of US domination reflects a decline of America's ability to effectively control its environment whereby its tremendous economic and political prominence cannot effectively be mustered for any purpose.
2- A wobbly wheel in the South
A superficially similar structure is emerging in South America, with Brazil as the hub, and its neighbours as spokes. The wheel is smaller though: Brazil truly matters only for Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and to some extent for Venezuela. Colombia shares a huge frontier with Brazil, but aside from substantial cocaine exports, it has never had much interaction with it. Ecuador and Chile, out of immediate reach and with economies tuned increasingly to the Pacific are also largely out of the system.
The southern wheel is also far from tight. Quite a few things happen between the spokes but the region remains massively extroverted. Above all , there is no integrated core with significant value chains and circulation of capital. Instead, except for Brazil's dependencies (Bolivia and Uruguay, to some extent, and especially Paraguay), much of the region's exports, mostly agricultural commodities and minerals, are sent the world over. Imports are just as globalized, as are investment inflows. In the its most integrated part, capital and manufactured goods go from Brazil to its neighbours, while people, agricultural products and—for Bolivia and Paraguay—energy flow in the other direction. Argentinean car exports to Brazil is an exception, still significant, but since they began decades ago, little has grown around them, especially not integrated production chains. The other exception, electronic and consumer goods from Paraguay, are in fact Asian exports—many of them illegal—merely transiting through the notoriously porous Paraguayan customs.
Much has been made of an alternative system emerging around Venezuela, and articulating Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Cuba into a progressive alliance. This more openly "anti-imperialist" coalition, however, has even less substance than the Brazilian-centred wheel: its member countries are poor—Venezuela excepted—socially restless and politically divided, they are all utterly dependent on the export of a few commodities, and neither invest nor trade much among themselves—except for oil, from Venezuela to non-energy producers. As the Venezuelan core decays economically and sickens politically, what substance this alternative has had may soon dissipate.
Regional interdependence is thus limited and in fact declining. Even energy, long touted as the potential backbone of an integrated sub-continent, is losing much of its steam because oil and gas discoveries, everywhere but in Chile and Uruguay, are making everyone a net energy exporter. The commodity boom further lessens interdependence as most countries compete with one another for shares of the global market.
The large and growing asymmetry between Brazil and the rest of the sub-continent further weakens the local system, for low interdependence and high —and growing—asymmetry is no recipe for integration. And yet, shared governance arrangements abound: the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Union of the Nations of the South (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OCTA), the Andean Community, the Mercosur Parliament and soon its South American counterpart, along with multi-yearly presidential summits, to name but a few. In theory, these should provide the region with substantial governance capability. In practice, none of these arrangements has much organizational substance, resources or political legitimacy. Regional governance remains a matter of ad hoc and "variable geometry" presidential diplomacy.
In that game, Brazil plays the key role, but not as a regional leader. The country's economic and political weight is accepted as a fact, but its clout and influence is actively and tenaciously denied by all. No major country in the region, for instance, supports Brazil's claim to a permanent seat at the Security Council and Brazilian candidates to the head of the WTO and the Inter-American Development Bank have failed to get support from South America. In fact, Brazil does not seem to have much leverage over its neighbours. Its efforts to dissuade Bolivia from nationalizing the assets of Brazilian flagship Petrobras in the gas sector went to naught and Argentina keeps imposing special tariffs and quotas against Brazilian products, in open violation of Mercosur rules. Brazil's successes at defusing tensions between Colombia, on one side, and Ecuador and Venezuela, on the other, appear to have depended exclusively on the personal qualities of Lula and on the dexterity of its diplomatic service. In a severe confrontation opposing Mercosur members Argentina and Uruguay about the location of a huge paper mill, however, the Brazilian government did not even dare test its influence.
Brazil's regional leadership, in other words, exists more in the imagination of Davos Summit guests and heads of states in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, than on the ground. Even more than the US, it "dominates" the region on paper, but cannot translate that dominance into significant influence.
3- No frame
The Americas have long been seen as the US backyard. They have been claimed as such by the United States since James Monroe famously barred European powers from interfering on the continent. For a long time, however, there was not much substance to the claim and Britain did as it wished, dominating the continent economically until World War II. Still, the OAS traces its roots back to a "Pan-American Union" established in 1890, US marines have been roaming around the Caribbean basin since then, American multinationals have invested massively in the resource sectors of much of the continent and, between 1950 and the end of the 1990s, they had little "foreign" competition. From those standpoints, Zakaria is thus warranted to speak of an American domination of the continent.
A closer look, however, reveals a much different picture, and shows the break I have documented earlier to be less significant than it looks. Throughout the XXth century, true imperial dominance was largely confined to the Caribbean and Central America, with the South largely free of outright intervention. Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Grenada, and Panama bore the brunt of the Empire's dominance. The sub-continent, however, had a very different history.
Much fuss was made about US support for the military regimes of the Southern Cone and for the coups that launched them in the 1960s and 1970s, but that support was never critical and those regimes' claim to power were largely self-sustaining. A convergence of interest between Cold War America and anti-communist and reactionary military and economic elites has long been painted as the manipulation by Washington of political establishments dependent on that support to stay in power. It is easy to forget how nationalist and profoundly anti-liberal those regimes were, how free they all felt not to play into the US' anti-Cuban policy or, to take specific examples, how nationalized Codelco became the cash-cow of the Chilean military, how the Peruvian military launched the land reform in their country, how Brazil's generals were not particularly keen on US multinationals, how their economic policy is best termed state capitalism and how quick they were to establish relations with communist Angola and to cut military cooperation with Jimmy Carter's America. Similarly, when the time came for the generals to leave, US influence proved marginal: elites turned their back on them, civil society mobilized and in some cases—Argentina and Chile for instance—sheer hubris brought them down. Differently from Central America and the Caribbean, in sum, domestic factors, not US schemes and manipulations, overwhelmingly determined the rise and the fall of South America's military dictatorships.
What has broken down since the end of the 1980s is thus partly an illusion, for the Empire's backyard has always been smaller than it looked. Still, what power and influence there was is indeed shrinking as American strategic and economic interests in the region as a whole diminish.
The most important strategic challenges to America are either wildly exaggerated, like the Chavez threat, or self-created, like the prohibition-induced illegal drug market and the "War on Drugs"-induced violence in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. When Washington does not realize on its own that a strong presence is not a good idea, it is told. As the Colombian government's progressively wins its civil war, the legitimacy of significant American military cooperation with, and presence in, the country will also shrivel. Recently expelled from Ecuador, the American military looks doomed to fully abandon the region in the next decade.
Economically, the US is also losing interest in South America, whose proportion of US stock of investments has declined significantly over the last ten years, from 11% of its global portfolio in 1998, to 7% in 2008. Trade numbers tell the same story, with 68% of US exports to Latin America (2008) going to Mexico, and with Brazil (at 1.8% of world total) the only exporter from the region to rank among the 15 top sources of US imports. From the standpoint of US companies, consumers and economic policy-makers, in other words, South America, with or without free trade agreements, is a part of the world like any other.
The flip side of that declining interest has been a growing presence of new players in the region. Canadian companies dominate the mining sector of most Andean countries, and of the continent as a whole for exploration. European banks, particularly Spain's, along with Canada's Scotia, have aggressively invested in the region. China, while still tentative and not particularly welcome, should soon make significant forays in the resource sector. Russia and France are strong players in the regional arms market. Even Iran is now expressing interests, albeit essentially for diplomatic reason. The overall effect is that while the Americas decline in US global portfolio, the US also declines as an investor in the region, further weakening hemispheric interdependence.
The breakdown of imperial America's continental hold makes hemispheric arrangements superfluous. The project of a Free Trade Area of the Americas collapsed less as a result of Brazilian resistance than of Washington's and especially Wall Street's indifference. The OAS has long been a diplomatic backwater, notwithstanding its recent ventures –sometimes successful—into local crises. Its recent reinvention as a bulwark of democracy on the continent, already tested in the recent Honduran crisis, could soon break on the reefs of Chavez' autocratic consolidation, in the face of which it will likely be impotent and divided. The Summit of the Americas' process is quickly sinking into irrelevance. There simply is no more need for such arrangements and their survival is becoming a matter of inertia: meetings follow meetings, treaties beget commitments, diplomats sustain posting locations, and bureaucrats hold to their jobs. The Inter-American Development Bank is a partial exception: for a long time larger a player in the region than the World Bank, well-managed, largely controlled by borrowers and devoid of the market fundamentalism of other Washington-based IFIs, it has developed into a useful financing tool for the region's governments. As the integration agenda that has underlain much of its recent work breaks down, it should lose what political drive it had and become strictly a prudent and well-managed source of relatively cheap credit.
The region is left without a frame, but the idea of a shared identity endures, and ideas matter. "Latin America" still structures much of the diplomatic activity in the region, and it explains why in the face of low and declining interdependence weak institutional arrangements survive and why new ones keep popping up, just as spineless and institutionally deficient. It also explains why the United States remains a constant reference of nationalist discourse while, paradoxically, American analysts keep deploring their country's indifference towards the region.
Conclusion: From Imperium to Condominium
The surreal contraption of this two-wheeled frameless America survives, in the face of the progressive breakdown of its material and strategic basis. Perhaps "post-modern" Americas suits that reality better than post-American. Yet, what is happening in the Western hemisphere does not belie Zakaria. The Americas as a single whole has been a casualty of globalization and of the end of the Cold War. Together, these have broken down what unity Imperial and Cold War America had brought to the region. What is left is typical of the post-American world: a diverse and quite open continent where the United States, still massively dominant, must negotiate with all but the smallest states, and where emerging powers, local like Brazil, or foreign like China, are becoming significant players, though they find themselves at least as constrained as the old empire.
This, however, does not tell us much about what those post-American Americas look like, which is what this short piece is about: how does the global lessening of America's power leave the rest of the hemisphere?
My answer is simple, but not straightforward: the post-American Americas have broken into a strange contraption: one America that is at least as American as ever, tightly organized around the United States; a second one that is less American than ever, for the most part loosely organized around Brazil; and between the two halves, a relationship whose importance for each side gets ever slighter. Think of the whole as a surreal bicycle.
1- A tight wheel in the North
The United States remains the hub of a system that includes Canada and Mexico, but also the Caribbean, Central America, and possibly even Venezuela. Among the spokes, not much goes on, but their relationship with the hub is the most important foreign issue for their economic prosperity and political stability.
The nature of existing hub-and-spoke relationships varies. America is the primary trade partner of all the spokes, but only Canada, Mexico and the US share extensive value chains. A massive amounts of energy flows into the US from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. Capital movements contribute to the tightness of the wheel, with investments flowing freely and in large quantities between the US, Canada and Mexico. Beyond that core, the movement is largely unilateral, as massive amounts of private capital goes from the US to the Caribbean fiscal havens while migrants, both legal and illegal, send remittances from the US back to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. People and drugs move in the opposite direction. Mexico and –through the latter—Central America represent the main source of migrants to the United States, of whose economy they have become critical cogs. Cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, penetrates the US through Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico. High-potency marijuana crosses southward from Canada and northward from Mexico.
That system is diverse and dynamic, with heavily interdependent formal and informal economies and deeply intertwined social universes. In most ways, it "works," with massive movements of goods, people and money circulating smoothly; but in others it doesn't, as violence ravages its peripheries, from Mexico's Northern border to the shantytowns of San Salvador, Guatemala City and Kingston, Jamaica.
Overall the region remains dominated by the United States. It is however by no means governed or even actively managed by Washington. There is instead the overwhelming sense and the reality that what happens in the United States is profoundly consequential for its neighbours, whereas the opposite is not true. The mostly uncontrolled character of US domination reflects a decline of America's ability to effectively control its environment whereby its tremendous economic and political prominence cannot effectively be mustered for any purpose.
2- A wobbly wheel in the South
A superficially similar structure is emerging in South America, with Brazil as the hub, and its neighbours as spokes. The wheel is smaller though: Brazil truly matters only for Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and to some extent for Venezuela. Colombia shares a huge frontier with Brazil, but aside from substantial cocaine exports, it has never had much interaction with it. Ecuador and Chile, out of immediate reach and with economies tuned increasingly to the Pacific are also largely out of the system.
The southern wheel is also far from tight. Quite a few things happen between the spokes but the region remains massively extroverted. Above all , there is no integrated core with significant value chains and circulation of capital. Instead, except for Brazil's dependencies (Bolivia and Uruguay, to some extent, and especially Paraguay), much of the region's exports, mostly agricultural commodities and minerals, are sent the world over. Imports are just as globalized, as are investment inflows. In the its most integrated part, capital and manufactured goods go from Brazil to its neighbours, while people, agricultural products and—for Bolivia and Paraguay—energy flow in the other direction. Argentinean car exports to Brazil is an exception, still significant, but since they began decades ago, little has grown around them, especially not integrated production chains. The other exception, electronic and consumer goods from Paraguay, are in fact Asian exports—many of them illegal—merely transiting through the notoriously porous Paraguayan customs.
Much has been made of an alternative system emerging around Venezuela, and articulating Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Cuba into a progressive alliance. This more openly "anti-imperialist" coalition, however, has even less substance than the Brazilian-centred wheel: its member countries are poor—Venezuela excepted—socially restless and politically divided, they are all utterly dependent on the export of a few commodities, and neither invest nor trade much among themselves—except for oil, from Venezuela to non-energy producers. As the Venezuelan core decays economically and sickens politically, what substance this alternative has had may soon dissipate.
Regional interdependence is thus limited and in fact declining. Even energy, long touted as the potential backbone of an integrated sub-continent, is losing much of its steam because oil and gas discoveries, everywhere but in Chile and Uruguay, are making everyone a net energy exporter. The commodity boom further lessens interdependence as most countries compete with one another for shares of the global market.
The large and growing asymmetry between Brazil and the rest of the sub-continent further weakens the local system, for low interdependence and high —and growing—asymmetry is no recipe for integration. And yet, shared governance arrangements abound: the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Union of the Nations of the South (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OCTA), the Andean Community, the Mercosur Parliament and soon its South American counterpart, along with multi-yearly presidential summits, to name but a few. In theory, these should provide the region with substantial governance capability. In practice, none of these arrangements has much organizational substance, resources or political legitimacy. Regional governance remains a matter of ad hoc and "variable geometry" presidential diplomacy.
In that game, Brazil plays the key role, but not as a regional leader. The country's economic and political weight is accepted as a fact, but its clout and influence is actively and tenaciously denied by all. No major country in the region, for instance, supports Brazil's claim to a permanent seat at the Security Council and Brazilian candidates to the head of the WTO and the Inter-American Development Bank have failed to get support from South America. In fact, Brazil does not seem to have much leverage over its neighbours. Its efforts to dissuade Bolivia from nationalizing the assets of Brazilian flagship Petrobras in the gas sector went to naught and Argentina keeps imposing special tariffs and quotas against Brazilian products, in open violation of Mercosur rules. Brazil's successes at defusing tensions between Colombia, on one side, and Ecuador and Venezuela, on the other, appear to have depended exclusively on the personal qualities of Lula and on the dexterity of its diplomatic service. In a severe confrontation opposing Mercosur members Argentina and Uruguay about the location of a huge paper mill, however, the Brazilian government did not even dare test its influence.
Brazil's regional leadership, in other words, exists more in the imagination of Davos Summit guests and heads of states in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, than on the ground. Even more than the US, it "dominates" the region on paper, but cannot translate that dominance into significant influence.
3- No frame
The Americas have long been seen as the US backyard. They have been claimed as such by the United States since James Monroe famously barred European powers from interfering on the continent. For a long time, however, there was not much substance to the claim and Britain did as it wished, dominating the continent economically until World War II. Still, the OAS traces its roots back to a "Pan-American Union" established in 1890, US marines have been roaming around the Caribbean basin since then, American multinationals have invested massively in the resource sectors of much of the continent and, between 1950 and the end of the 1990s, they had little "foreign" competition. From those standpoints, Zakaria is thus warranted to speak of an American domination of the continent.
A closer look, however, reveals a much different picture, and shows the break I have documented earlier to be less significant than it looks. Throughout the XXth century, true imperial dominance was largely confined to the Caribbean and Central America, with the South largely free of outright intervention. Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Grenada, and Panama bore the brunt of the Empire's dominance. The sub-continent, however, had a very different history.
Much fuss was made about US support for the military regimes of the Southern Cone and for the coups that launched them in the 1960s and 1970s, but that support was never critical and those regimes' claim to power were largely self-sustaining. A convergence of interest between Cold War America and anti-communist and reactionary military and economic elites has long been painted as the manipulation by Washington of political establishments dependent on that support to stay in power. It is easy to forget how nationalist and profoundly anti-liberal those regimes were, how free they all felt not to play into the US' anti-Cuban policy or, to take specific examples, how nationalized Codelco became the cash-cow of the Chilean military, how the Peruvian military launched the land reform in their country, how Brazil's generals were not particularly keen on US multinationals, how their economic policy is best termed state capitalism and how quick they were to establish relations with communist Angola and to cut military cooperation with Jimmy Carter's America. Similarly, when the time came for the generals to leave, US influence proved marginal: elites turned their back on them, civil society mobilized and in some cases—Argentina and Chile for instance—sheer hubris brought them down. Differently from Central America and the Caribbean, in sum, domestic factors, not US schemes and manipulations, overwhelmingly determined the rise and the fall of South America's military dictatorships.
What has broken down since the end of the 1980s is thus partly an illusion, for the Empire's backyard has always been smaller than it looked. Still, what power and influence there was is indeed shrinking as American strategic and economic interests in the region as a whole diminish.
The most important strategic challenges to America are either wildly exaggerated, like the Chavez threat, or self-created, like the prohibition-induced illegal drug market and the "War on Drugs"-induced violence in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. When Washington does not realize on its own that a strong presence is not a good idea, it is told. As the Colombian government's progressively wins its civil war, the legitimacy of significant American military cooperation with, and presence in, the country will also shrivel. Recently expelled from Ecuador, the American military looks doomed to fully abandon the region in the next decade.
Economically, the US is also losing interest in South America, whose proportion of US stock of investments has declined significantly over the last ten years, from 11% of its global portfolio in 1998, to 7% in 2008. Trade numbers tell the same story, with 68% of US exports to Latin America (2008) going to Mexico, and with Brazil (at 1.8% of world total) the only exporter from the region to rank among the 15 top sources of US imports. From the standpoint of US companies, consumers and economic policy-makers, in other words, South America, with or without free trade agreements, is a part of the world like any other.
The flip side of that declining interest has been a growing presence of new players in the region. Canadian companies dominate the mining sector of most Andean countries, and of the continent as a whole for exploration. European banks, particularly Spain's, along with Canada's Scotia, have aggressively invested in the region. China, while still tentative and not particularly welcome, should soon make significant forays in the resource sector. Russia and France are strong players in the regional arms market. Even Iran is now expressing interests, albeit essentially for diplomatic reason. The overall effect is that while the Americas decline in US global portfolio, the US also declines as an investor in the region, further weakening hemispheric interdependence.
The breakdown of imperial America's continental hold makes hemispheric arrangements superfluous. The project of a Free Trade Area of the Americas collapsed less as a result of Brazilian resistance than of Washington's and especially Wall Street's indifference. The OAS has long been a diplomatic backwater, notwithstanding its recent ventures –sometimes successful—into local crises. Its recent reinvention as a bulwark of democracy on the continent, already tested in the recent Honduran crisis, could soon break on the reefs of Chavez' autocratic consolidation, in the face of which it will likely be impotent and divided. The Summit of the Americas' process is quickly sinking into irrelevance. There simply is no more need for such arrangements and their survival is becoming a matter of inertia: meetings follow meetings, treaties beget commitments, diplomats sustain posting locations, and bureaucrats hold to their jobs. The Inter-American Development Bank is a partial exception: for a long time larger a player in the region than the World Bank, well-managed, largely controlled by borrowers and devoid of the market fundamentalism of other Washington-based IFIs, it has developed into a useful financing tool for the region's governments. As the integration agenda that has underlain much of its recent work breaks down, it should lose what political drive it had and become strictly a prudent and well-managed source of relatively cheap credit.
The region is left without a frame, but the idea of a shared identity endures, and ideas matter. "Latin America" still structures much of the diplomatic activity in the region, and it explains why in the face of low and declining interdependence weak institutional arrangements survive and why new ones keep popping up, just as spineless and institutionally deficient. It also explains why the United States remains a constant reference of nationalist discourse while, paradoxically, American analysts keep deploring their country's indifference towards the region.
Conclusion: From Imperium to Condominium
The surreal contraption of this two-wheeled frameless America survives, in the face of the progressive breakdown of its material and strategic basis. Perhaps "post-modern" Americas suits that reality better than post-American. Yet, what is happening in the Western hemisphere does not belie Zakaria. The Americas as a single whole has been a casualty of globalization and of the end of the Cold War. Together, these have broken down what unity Imperial and Cold War America had brought to the region. What is left is typical of the post-American world: a diverse and quite open continent where the United States, still massively dominant, must negotiate with all but the smallest states, and where emerging powers, local like Brazil, or foreign like China, are becoming significant players, though they find themselves at least as constrained as the old empire.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Bye, bye Pink Wave. Hello boring alternance?
Sebastián Piñera will be Chile's next president. He has won a clear victory over Eduardo Frei, who was unable to build on the performance of his predecessor Michelle Bachelet and her government, whose popularity hovers around 80%.
Don't expect big changes in the country's policy, however. Chile has become dreadfully serious over the last two decades, which means that its domestic and international policies hover around centrist policies, just as they do in most developed democracies. This makes for boring politics, with marginally meaningful party alternance the only game in town. But boring politics is the privilege of the wealthy. Think of Canada...
In the region as a whole, there is more in the offing. Next month, Costa Rica will have elections that no one will talk about, because they will largely be inconsequential. If Uribe does not run in the May elections in Colombia (and time is running out to change the constitution and enable him to do it), a less conservative politician take could well take over the country's presidency, with not much of a change in public policy, even on security. While nothing is settled yet, Brazil will probably also elect a more liberal president than Lula next October, once again with few substantive policy changes in sight. In all those countries, the economy is stable, inflation is low, poverty is declining, as are homicides and kidnappings.
Compare this with the recent referendums and elections in Honduras, Nicaragua (municipal) or Venezuela (on the Constitution) where politics is indeed most interesting, where inflation is high, growth prospects are bad, crime is rising and poverty increasing. Compare this also to Argentina, which is teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis and where a lot of nasty things could happen between now and 2011, when the term of Cristina Fernandes de Kirchner ends.
The big division of the continent is not between Right and Left, but between boring but serious regimes, and lively but irresponsible ones, where wild things can happen at any time.
My hunch is, most Latin Americans would take the bore...
[I just found out that Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, in DC, has a similar take on the meaning of that election and those that are coming up.
Don't expect big changes in the country's policy, however. Chile has become dreadfully serious over the last two decades, which means that its domestic and international policies hover around centrist policies, just as they do in most developed democracies. This makes for boring politics, with marginally meaningful party alternance the only game in town. But boring politics is the privilege of the wealthy. Think of Canada...
In the region as a whole, there is more in the offing. Next month, Costa Rica will have elections that no one will talk about, because they will largely be inconsequential. If Uribe does not run in the May elections in Colombia (and time is running out to change the constitution and enable him to do it), a less conservative politician take could well take over the country's presidency, with not much of a change in public policy, even on security. While nothing is settled yet, Brazil will probably also elect a more liberal president than Lula next October, once again with few substantive policy changes in sight. In all those countries, the economy is stable, inflation is low, poverty is declining, as are homicides and kidnappings.
Compare this with the recent referendums and elections in Honduras, Nicaragua (municipal) or Venezuela (on the Constitution) where politics is indeed most interesting, where inflation is high, growth prospects are bad, crime is rising and poverty increasing. Compare this also to Argentina, which is teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis and where a lot of nasty things could happen between now and 2011, when the term of Cristina Fernandes de Kirchner ends.
The big division of the continent is not between Right and Left, but between boring but serious regimes, and lively but irresponsible ones, where wild things can happen at any time.
My hunch is, most Latin Americans would take the bore...
[I just found out that Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, in DC, has a similar take on the meaning of that election and those that are coming up.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Venezuela on the war path?
This, from a friend of mine currently unable to publish on this blog: "I'm starting to wonder how long it will be until the Venezuelans have another 'accident' like the one that bombed a dredging unit in Guyanesse waters. The diversionary theory of war is looking more and more applicable."
Well, at the very least, Hugo Chavez seems to be looking for a way to divert Venezuelans' attention from inflation, corruption, shortages of basic goods, power outages and especially violent crime. His main theme is obviously Colombia, whom he accuses now of using unmanned drones to attack Venezuela. This accusation, moreover, is only a tiny bit of his big campaign against the military agreement between Colombia and the US that will enable American aircraft to use Colombian airbases as part of their support for that country's war against the FARC and narco-traffickers.
Now, the way in which the US has managed this file is worse than incompetent, like much of their policy towards the region under Obama -Honduras is the other prominent example. However, the idea that Colombia, which is just now --for the first time in its history-- getting close to controlling its own territory, would be looking for a war with Venezuela, is preposterous. What has to be on Uribe's mind, however, is the support that the FARC --which now has allied with the ELN, the other Colombian guerrilla movement-- is getting from its neighbours, Ecuador and Venezuela. That thesis was recently bolstered by a report from an unlikely source: the Commission named by Ecuador President Rafael Correa, to investigate the circumstances surrounding Colombia's attack on a FARC base on Ecuadorian soil. The report shows clearly that Ecuadorian officials and organizations linked to Venezuela were indeed collaborating with the FARC and meeting its representatives in Ecuador. No mention is made of weapons' provision or direct financial support, but there is enough in that report for Colombia to claim that its neighbours are supporting the guerrilla. Nobody in the region and few countries in the world would accept that as a legitimate excuse for Colombia's to engage in hit-and-run operations in either country, but this may not be enough for the Colombian government who, with massive public support, now appear to be moving for the kill. Such operations, however, could clearly be enough for Venezuela to take the confrontation to a higher level. This would be a high risk gamble, however, and one unlikely to get much support from Brazil and friends in the region (but that's another story).
Chavez, however, is not stopping there. He has also accused the Netherlands (yes!) of planning an aggression against his country. In his own words (though in my translation): "I am accusing the Netherlands, along with the Yankee Empire, of planning an attack against Venezuela." He has in mind the presence of 250 US naval personal in Dutch autonomous islands Aruba and Curação, from where they work on drug interdiction in the Caribbean. Both islands, by the way, are in Venezuela's territorial water.
The problem, in sum, is that if Chavez is looking for trouble, he won't have a hard time finding it: Colombia is indeed aggressively present in border areas, so is the US -both in Colombia and the Caribbean. Moreover, and in spite of the formal archiving of the country's claim over more than half of Guyana's territory, that old claim would be easy enough to resuscitate, for the greatest pleasure of Venezuela's ultra-nationalist circles.
The truly sad thing is that Venezuelans already have enough problems on their plate. It is not surprising in fact that most, according to recent polls [Globe and Mail, Dec. 22: A-13], are utterly uninterested in a war with Colombia, which is the most likely diversionary scenario. Still, would that stop a Chavez who is getting deeper in a hole of his own doing from "jumping"? It's not clear to me. Let's just hope my friend is wrong...
Well, at the very least, Hugo Chavez seems to be looking for a way to divert Venezuelans' attention from inflation, corruption, shortages of basic goods, power outages and especially violent crime. His main theme is obviously Colombia, whom he accuses now of using unmanned drones to attack Venezuela. This accusation, moreover, is only a tiny bit of his big campaign against the military agreement between Colombia and the US that will enable American aircraft to use Colombian airbases as part of their support for that country's war against the FARC and narco-traffickers.
Now, the way in which the US has managed this file is worse than incompetent, like much of their policy towards the region under Obama -Honduras is the other prominent example. However, the idea that Colombia, which is just now --for the first time in its history-- getting close to controlling its own territory, would be looking for a war with Venezuela, is preposterous. What has to be on Uribe's mind, however, is the support that the FARC --which now has allied with the ELN, the other Colombian guerrilla movement-- is getting from its neighbours, Ecuador and Venezuela. That thesis was recently bolstered by a report from an unlikely source: the Commission named by Ecuador President Rafael Correa, to investigate the circumstances surrounding Colombia's attack on a FARC base on Ecuadorian soil. The report shows clearly that Ecuadorian officials and organizations linked to Venezuela were indeed collaborating with the FARC and meeting its representatives in Ecuador. No mention is made of weapons' provision or direct financial support, but there is enough in that report for Colombia to claim that its neighbours are supporting the guerrilla. Nobody in the region and few countries in the world would accept that as a legitimate excuse for Colombia's to engage in hit-and-run operations in either country, but this may not be enough for the Colombian government who, with massive public support, now appear to be moving for the kill. Such operations, however, could clearly be enough for Venezuela to take the confrontation to a higher level. This would be a high risk gamble, however, and one unlikely to get much support from Brazil and friends in the region (but that's another story).
Chavez, however, is not stopping there. He has also accused the Netherlands (yes!) of planning an aggression against his country. In his own words (though in my translation): "I am accusing the Netherlands, along with the Yankee Empire, of planning an attack against Venezuela." He has in mind the presence of 250 US naval personal in Dutch autonomous islands Aruba and Curação, from where they work on drug interdiction in the Caribbean. Both islands, by the way, are in Venezuela's territorial water.
The problem, in sum, is that if Chavez is looking for trouble, he won't have a hard time finding it: Colombia is indeed aggressively present in border areas, so is the US -both in Colombia and the Caribbean. Moreover, and in spite of the formal archiving of the country's claim over more than half of Guyana's territory, that old claim would be easy enough to resuscitate, for the greatest pleasure of Venezuela's ultra-nationalist circles.
The truly sad thing is that Venezuelans already have enough problems on their plate. It is not surprising in fact that most, according to recent polls [Globe and Mail, Dec. 22: A-13], are utterly uninterested in a war with Colombia, which is the most likely diversionary scenario. Still, would that stop a Chavez who is getting deeper in a hole of his own doing from "jumping"? It's not clear to me. Let's just hope my friend is wrong...
Monday, December 21, 2009
Venezuela in Mercosur: Insights from Copenhagen (out of all place)
Brazil's Senate has finally approved the entry of Venezuela in the Mercosur bloc. The only hurdle remaining now is a vote from the Paraguayan Congress.
Brazilian advocates of the move, like Celso Amorim, the country's foreign minister, point out that this will make the bloc significantly larger and more powerful. For Brazil and Argentina, it could also pay handsomely if Venezuela complies with Mercosur rules and fully eliminates tariffs on imports from bloc countries: both already have huge trade surpluses with Venezuela and the latter exports basically nothing but oil.
There will be a price to pay, however. Mercosur acts as a bloc in trade negociation, i.e. no member country can sign an agreement with anybody without the other bloc members agreeing to it. For the foreseeable future, this will mean making deals that Hugo Chavez approves of. And the problem is, Venezuela has very little at stake in trade negotiations, because markets are fully open to the only thing it exports, namely its thick oil. In other words, it is free to be as rigid as it likes. Clearly, moreover, Venezuela under Chavez appears keen on doing just that.
For a recent example, take Copenhagen. Everybody agrees that the agreement is at best a rough starting point. At least, arguably, everybody appears willing to start something. But wait a bit: not everybody. Out of 193 countries, five refused to sign the agreement: Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan and Venezuela. But for Sudan--which also enjoys a perverse kind of "freedom" thanks to its oil--, this little club is Chavez' club.
Dear Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay: unless the Paraguayan Congress holds out indefinitely, expect more of the same on everything that Mercosur gets involved with. One more nail on the bloc's coffin?
Brazilian advocates of the move, like Celso Amorim, the country's foreign minister, point out that this will make the bloc significantly larger and more powerful. For Brazil and Argentina, it could also pay handsomely if Venezuela complies with Mercosur rules and fully eliminates tariffs on imports from bloc countries: both already have huge trade surpluses with Venezuela and the latter exports basically nothing but oil.
There will be a price to pay, however. Mercosur acts as a bloc in trade negociation, i.e. no member country can sign an agreement with anybody without the other bloc members agreeing to it. For the foreseeable future, this will mean making deals that Hugo Chavez approves of. And the problem is, Venezuela has very little at stake in trade negotiations, because markets are fully open to the only thing it exports, namely its thick oil. In other words, it is free to be as rigid as it likes. Clearly, moreover, Venezuela under Chavez appears keen on doing just that.
For a recent example, take Copenhagen. Everybody agrees that the agreement is at best a rough starting point. At least, arguably, everybody appears willing to start something. But wait a bit: not everybody. Out of 193 countries, five refused to sign the agreement: Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan and Venezuela. But for Sudan--which also enjoys a perverse kind of "freedom" thanks to its oil--, this little club is Chavez' club.
Dear Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay: unless the Paraguayan Congress holds out indefinitely, expect more of the same on everything that Mercosur gets involved with. One more nail on the bloc's coffin?
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Conservative revolutionaries
It is striking how utterly NOT progressive Latin American leftist leaders can be on gender and drug issues, from Castro to Ortega and Chavez.
Castro's well-documented repression of homosexuals is probably the most extreme case, but there are others. A surprising one is the Sandinistas' opposition to abortion. There is a famous anecdote to that effect. In the mid-eighties, a global feminist gathering took place in Managua to express solidarity with the threatened revolution in the face of US support for the contras. Daniel Ortega was the guest of honour at a big gala held during the conference. He was accompanied by his wife, poet Rosario Murillo, then pregnant, and five of their children, including a few from previous marriages. During question period, one of the visitors asked when the government would legalize abortion, to which Daniel, after making a reference to the need to sustain the war effort, said "La mujer nicaraguense va a cumplir con su deber reproductivo," i.e. "Nicaraguan women will comply with their reproductive duty." The answer obviously met with dead silence from the feminist audience, but no doubt in the name of revolutionary solidarity, they kept quiet and the whole thing would subsequently be censored from newspaper accounts of the meeting. All but one account, that is, though a very cryptic for anyone not in the know. At the time, a group of young Sandinista artists and intellectuals were publishing a small weekly called La Semana Comica, very funny, liberal and iconoclastic. The edition that followed the meeting featured a huge centerfold black-and-white photo of a long line of naked pregnant women, seen in profile. Below it, was the slogan of the Sandinista's women mass organization, AMNLAE: "We are AMLAE". I don't know if that hastened the fall of La Semana Comica, which stopped publication a bit later. Given how popular it was with the intellectual rank and files of the Front, my hunch is the economic crisis killed it, not the government, but who knows. Very clearly, however, this one must have irked Daniel and his cronies.
The latest bout of leftist moralism is almost as pathetic: the satiric "Family Guy" program has been banned from Venezuelan TV. Chavez's Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said he was shocked by an episode's section called "A bag of weed" which is an hilarious plea for pot legalization that has gone viral on the web. The problem for Mr. El Aissami, obviously, is that most people watching the program can find it in cyberspace and probably do it already anyway. Good for them.
Castro's well-documented repression of homosexuals is probably the most extreme case, but there are others. A surprising one is the Sandinistas' opposition to abortion. There is a famous anecdote to that effect. In the mid-eighties, a global feminist gathering took place in Managua to express solidarity with the threatened revolution in the face of US support for the contras. Daniel Ortega was the guest of honour at a big gala held during the conference. He was accompanied by his wife, poet Rosario Murillo, then pregnant, and five of their children, including a few from previous marriages. During question period, one of the visitors asked when the government would legalize abortion, to which Daniel, after making a reference to the need to sustain the war effort, said "La mujer nicaraguense va a cumplir con su deber reproductivo," i.e. "Nicaraguan women will comply with their reproductive duty." The answer obviously met with dead silence from the feminist audience, but no doubt in the name of revolutionary solidarity, they kept quiet and the whole thing would subsequently be censored from newspaper accounts of the meeting. All but one account, that is, though a very cryptic for anyone not in the know. At the time, a group of young Sandinista artists and intellectuals were publishing a small weekly called La Semana Comica, very funny, liberal and iconoclastic. The edition that followed the meeting featured a huge centerfold black-and-white photo of a long line of naked pregnant women, seen in profile. Below it, was the slogan of the Sandinista's women mass organization, AMNLAE: "We are AMLAE". I don't know if that hastened the fall of La Semana Comica, which stopped publication a bit later. Given how popular it was with the intellectual rank and files of the Front, my hunch is the economic crisis killed it, not the government, but who knows. Very clearly, however, this one must have irked Daniel and his cronies.
The latest bout of leftist moralism is almost as pathetic: the satiric "Family Guy" program has been banned from Venezuelan TV. Chavez's Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said he was shocked by an episode's section called "A bag of weed" which is an hilarious plea for pot legalization that has gone viral on the web. The problem for Mr. El Aissami, obviously, is that most people watching the program can find it in cyberspace and probably do it already anyway. Good for them.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Should Canada worry about Brazil?
Readers of Western media will have noticed a strange buzz about Brazil recently. President Lula still benefits from a huge capital of sympathy, from all sides, and most Western analysts see Brazil as a benevolent new global player, far less threatening than Iran, devoid of the dark sides of Russia and China, less messy than South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, or Pakistan, and much more accessible and easy to understand than far-away and complicated India and Indonesia. There is growing discomfort, however, with the perceived unreliability of Brazil as an ally of Western capitalist democracies. This has nothing to do with Lula's leftist background, which he has shown to be largely irrelevant to his domestic and international policies. In fact, the problem with Brazil, assuming there is one, does not appear to be ideology, but the fact that it pushes pragmatism and realism a tad too far.
Such discomfort was epitomized recently by The Economist magazine, which asked, in a cover story, editorial and special section, "[o]n which side is Brazil?" suggesting that the West should demand that Brazil show more principled stances on issues like democracy, human rights, and nuclear proliferation, that it adopt a less nationalistic tone in its dealings with the US, a more critical attitude towards Iran and Venezuela, and a tad less openness towards China. The self-appointed voice of the global establishment thus wants Brazil to demonstrate a clearer alignment with the positions of Western powers, in exchange, presumably, for better Brazilian access to the core clubs of global governance, the UN Security Council above all.
That position is preposterous on many counts, beginning with the idea that it is the West that holds the key to Security Council reform, when in fact, nobody can deliver a permanent seat to anyone today. As to the other clubs, Brazil is at the centre of WTO trade negotiations, and a weighty player in global warming and nuclear proliferation discussions; it was already a regular attendee to extended G8 meetings, and with the G20 all but taking over the coordination role traditionally held by the G8, Brazil's place at the centre of global economic governance is assured. The reason for that presence has nothing to do with Brazil's alignment with other capitalist democracies and does not result from Western generosity: Brazilians are invited because few if any global agreements can be reached without their being involved in the discussion and fully supportive. Arguably in fact, few clubs of which Brazil is not a member can claim much clout today. In other words, there is very little that can be offered by the West in exchange for Brazil's alignment: the West needs Brazil more than Brazil needs the West. This is what appears to rattle some analysts: little leverage on a state that does not always appear to behave as one wishes.
These concerns are not justified: there are no good reasons to worry about Brazil for the simple reason that the way in which the country deploys its growing power are consistent with Western democracies' interests. More importantly, the convergence between Brazil and the West is robust precisely because it is based on a pragmatic and realist reading by Brazilian elites, both in and out of government, of the country's hard-core interests, not on some fluffy ideological commitment.
Brazil is playing by the liberal cookbook both domestically and internationally, and winning. In addition to drastically lowering tariffs beginning in 1989, its economic discipline since the mid-1990s have made it an anchor of economic stability in Latin America. In fact, the country has suffered the least of any major capitalist country from the financial crisis. The Brazilian economy's resilience over the last eighteen months has convinced Moody's, on September 22, to join Fitch and Standard and Poor and give the country an investment grade credit rating. Growth prospects for 2010 --at 4.5-5%-- are excellent, inflation is under control, and the unemployment rate is lower than in Canada or the United States. Already an ethanol superpower, significant oil and gas discoveries have made the country essentially self-sufficient in energy and a soon-to-be significant oil exporter –and maybe OPEP member too. Brazilian politics has had its share of scandals in recent months, but the foundation of its democracy is extremely sound and the next presidential elections, in 2010, will likely be as clean as any in the Western world. Finally, public security, long a bane for tourists, investors, and above all Brazilians rich and poor, has bettered radically in the country's largest metropolitan areas.
The worriers challenge none of this. What bothers them are Brazil's international stands and the willingness of President Lula to talk and hold photo-ops with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; to refuse to openly confront Hugo Chavez on his weapons' buying spree, on his increasingly authoritarian rule, and on his ambitions to build within Latin America some kind of anti-liberal and anti-US coalition; to periodically, if indirecly, question the legitimacy of the global non-proliferation regime; to be assertive and vocal in questioning US military presence in Latin America; and to demand with increasing insistence reforms in global governance institutions that would give more power to India, China, and Brazil itself.
If we consider that the interests of capitalist democracies can only be served by regional stability in the Americas and by a functional set of global governance institutions, most of Brazil's current stands, far from worrying, should be seen as significant contributions to the defense and promotion of those interests. A confrontational stance towards Chavez and his band of small, poor, and mostly unstable allies, would contribute nothing to the management of current tensions in the region. Often in the face of US indifference or bungling, as in the case of American access to some of Colombia's military bases, Lula and his diplomats have been most adept at disarming the various international crises linked to what are hopefully the last stages of that country's continuing civil war. Brazil's own weapons acquisition program prevents the balance of military power in South America from tilting towards Venezuela.
One can draw a similar picture on the global scene: the recent financial crisis has clearly shown the inadequacies of current mechanisms of global financial governance, from the IMF to the G-7; the UN Security Council, without Japan, Germany, India, or any African or Latin American country among its permanent member, clearly suffers from a tremendous deficit of legitimacy and political clout; nuclear powers, comfortable in their oligopoly, have until now proven unwilling to move decisively towards effective disarmament, which was supposed to be the counterpart to non-nuclear states' acquiescence to complete vulnerability. The issue of Iran --whose President will be visiting Brazil next month-- may look more ambiguous. Yet, there is nothing to suggest that Brazil would support the nuclear program of what is after all a competitor among emerging powers. Moreover, Brazil's maneuvers could very well be meant to gain a seat at one of the few global tables on which it does not sit: indeed, the P5+1, the world's "team" charged with negotiating with Iran (made up of the Security Council's permanent members and of Germany) excludes all emerging powers from the South, something once again that diminishes its legitimacy and clout. In the end, Brazil's building a bridge with Iran, as it has done with Venezuela, could be either helpful or at worse irrelevant to global efforts to contain Iranian ambitions.
What is most interesting and advantageous from the West's standpoint, however, is that Brazil is acting very much for its own sake. Instability and the military build up in South America threaten its interests much more than the US' or any other power's, and better balanced and more legitimate global governance institutions imply more space and more power for Brazil itself. This basically means that those options are stable and hat the country's policy is largely predictable. Brazil is on its own side, but that side is also, from most standpoints, the West's side.
What about Canada?
This is a mixed bag for Canada. On one hand, and this is most important, an increasingly prosperous, reliable and stable Brazil that works to limit tensions and instability in the Americas clearly serves Canadian interests, however one defines them. Similarly, effective global governance is a true public good and to the extent that Brazil's growing involvement in global affairs enhances the world's ability to confront its problems, its growing influence also serves Canadian interests. The flip side of it all, however, is that what space Brazil occupies is largely lost to others, and Canada is one of those losers. As became clear at the Pittsburgh Summit, there are new players around and Canada's privileged access to the core clubs of global governance is threatened if not already significantly curtailed. There is something unjust about this: the country's sacrifice in the defense of Western democracies' interests and values, from WWII to the Balkans and Afghanistan, and its contribution to world governance over the last 50 years have been by any measure significantly greater than Brazil's. Yet this is not about justice but about power and effeciveness: most "minimum governing coalitions" today need Brazil, not Canada.
Beyond hurt feelings, there is also a real price to be paid: to lose access to core governance clubs implies a diminished ability to shape global politics in a way that is consistent with one's own interests. Canada will need to fight harder and is very likely to lose more battles in coming years, on all fronts, from trade to environmental regimes.
The ultimate balance is not clear: I would venture that Canadians gain more from the contribution of a more assertive and influential Brazil to regional and global governance than it loses through diminished influence. Yet, I would not bet the farm on this.
Such discomfort was epitomized recently by The Economist magazine, which asked, in a cover story, editorial and special section, "[o]n which side is Brazil?" suggesting that the West should demand that Brazil show more principled stances on issues like democracy, human rights, and nuclear proliferation, that it adopt a less nationalistic tone in its dealings with the US, a more critical attitude towards Iran and Venezuela, and a tad less openness towards China. The self-appointed voice of the global establishment thus wants Brazil to demonstrate a clearer alignment with the positions of Western powers, in exchange, presumably, for better Brazilian access to the core clubs of global governance, the UN Security Council above all.
That position is preposterous on many counts, beginning with the idea that it is the West that holds the key to Security Council reform, when in fact, nobody can deliver a permanent seat to anyone today. As to the other clubs, Brazil is at the centre of WTO trade negotiations, and a weighty player in global warming and nuclear proliferation discussions; it was already a regular attendee to extended G8 meetings, and with the G20 all but taking over the coordination role traditionally held by the G8, Brazil's place at the centre of global economic governance is assured. The reason for that presence has nothing to do with Brazil's alignment with other capitalist democracies and does not result from Western generosity: Brazilians are invited because few if any global agreements can be reached without their being involved in the discussion and fully supportive. Arguably in fact, few clubs of which Brazil is not a member can claim much clout today. In other words, there is very little that can be offered by the West in exchange for Brazil's alignment: the West needs Brazil more than Brazil needs the West. This is what appears to rattle some analysts: little leverage on a state that does not always appear to behave as one wishes.
These concerns are not justified: there are no good reasons to worry about Brazil for the simple reason that the way in which the country deploys its growing power are consistent with Western democracies' interests. More importantly, the convergence between Brazil and the West is robust precisely because it is based on a pragmatic and realist reading by Brazilian elites, both in and out of government, of the country's hard-core interests, not on some fluffy ideological commitment.
Brazil is playing by the liberal cookbook both domestically and internationally, and winning. In addition to drastically lowering tariffs beginning in 1989, its economic discipline since the mid-1990s have made it an anchor of economic stability in Latin America. In fact, the country has suffered the least of any major capitalist country from the financial crisis. The Brazilian economy's resilience over the last eighteen months has convinced Moody's, on September 22, to join Fitch and Standard and Poor and give the country an investment grade credit rating. Growth prospects for 2010 --at 4.5-5%-- are excellent, inflation is under control, and the unemployment rate is lower than in Canada or the United States. Already an ethanol superpower, significant oil and gas discoveries have made the country essentially self-sufficient in energy and a soon-to-be significant oil exporter –and maybe OPEP member too. Brazilian politics has had its share of scandals in recent months, but the foundation of its democracy is extremely sound and the next presidential elections, in 2010, will likely be as clean as any in the Western world. Finally, public security, long a bane for tourists, investors, and above all Brazilians rich and poor, has bettered radically in the country's largest metropolitan areas.
The worriers challenge none of this. What bothers them are Brazil's international stands and the willingness of President Lula to talk and hold photo-ops with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; to refuse to openly confront Hugo Chavez on his weapons' buying spree, on his increasingly authoritarian rule, and on his ambitions to build within Latin America some kind of anti-liberal and anti-US coalition; to periodically, if indirecly, question the legitimacy of the global non-proliferation regime; to be assertive and vocal in questioning US military presence in Latin America; and to demand with increasing insistence reforms in global governance institutions that would give more power to India, China, and Brazil itself.
If we consider that the interests of capitalist democracies can only be served by regional stability in the Americas and by a functional set of global governance institutions, most of Brazil's current stands, far from worrying, should be seen as significant contributions to the defense and promotion of those interests. A confrontational stance towards Chavez and his band of small, poor, and mostly unstable allies, would contribute nothing to the management of current tensions in the region. Often in the face of US indifference or bungling, as in the case of American access to some of Colombia's military bases, Lula and his diplomats have been most adept at disarming the various international crises linked to what are hopefully the last stages of that country's continuing civil war. Brazil's own weapons acquisition program prevents the balance of military power in South America from tilting towards Venezuela.
One can draw a similar picture on the global scene: the recent financial crisis has clearly shown the inadequacies of current mechanisms of global financial governance, from the IMF to the G-7; the UN Security Council, without Japan, Germany, India, or any African or Latin American country among its permanent member, clearly suffers from a tremendous deficit of legitimacy and political clout; nuclear powers, comfortable in their oligopoly, have until now proven unwilling to move decisively towards effective disarmament, which was supposed to be the counterpart to non-nuclear states' acquiescence to complete vulnerability. The issue of Iran --whose President will be visiting Brazil next month-- may look more ambiguous. Yet, there is nothing to suggest that Brazil would support the nuclear program of what is after all a competitor among emerging powers. Moreover, Brazil's maneuvers could very well be meant to gain a seat at one of the few global tables on which it does not sit: indeed, the P5+1, the world's "team" charged with negotiating with Iran (made up of the Security Council's permanent members and of Germany) excludes all emerging powers from the South, something once again that diminishes its legitimacy and clout. In the end, Brazil's building a bridge with Iran, as it has done with Venezuela, could be either helpful or at worse irrelevant to global efforts to contain Iranian ambitions.
What is most interesting and advantageous from the West's standpoint, however, is that Brazil is acting very much for its own sake. Instability and the military build up in South America threaten its interests much more than the US' or any other power's, and better balanced and more legitimate global governance institutions imply more space and more power for Brazil itself. This basically means that those options are stable and hat the country's policy is largely predictable. Brazil is on its own side, but that side is also, from most standpoints, the West's side.
What about Canada?
This is a mixed bag for Canada. On one hand, and this is most important, an increasingly prosperous, reliable and stable Brazil that works to limit tensions and instability in the Americas clearly serves Canadian interests, however one defines them. Similarly, effective global governance is a true public good and to the extent that Brazil's growing involvement in global affairs enhances the world's ability to confront its problems, its growing influence also serves Canadian interests. The flip side of it all, however, is that what space Brazil occupies is largely lost to others, and Canada is one of those losers. As became clear at the Pittsburgh Summit, there are new players around and Canada's privileged access to the core clubs of global governance is threatened if not already significantly curtailed. There is something unjust about this: the country's sacrifice in the defense of Western democracies' interests and values, from WWII to the Balkans and Afghanistan, and its contribution to world governance over the last 50 years have been by any measure significantly greater than Brazil's. Yet this is not about justice but about power and effeciveness: most "minimum governing coalitions" today need Brazil, not Canada.
Beyond hurt feelings, there is also a real price to be paid: to lose access to core governance clubs implies a diminished ability to shape global politics in a way that is consistent with one's own interests. Canada will need to fight harder and is very likely to lose more battles in coming years, on all fronts, from trade to environmental regimes.
The ultimate balance is not clear: I would venture that Canadians gain more from the contribution of a more assertive and influential Brazil to regional and global governance than it loses through diminished influence. Yet, I would not bet the farm on this.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Soft Containment: Brazil and the strategic game in South America
The Economist is worried about Brazil: On whose side is it? The West or the South? Democracies or dictatorships? The US or China? Chavez or Uribe? Why doesn't it do more for democracy in the region? Isn't its diplomacy under Lula not too cozy with China and Tehran, too lenient towards Venezuela, too harsh towards Colombia and still too nationalistic and anti-American?
Such questions and the worries that underlie them, which presumably should be shared by most capitalist democracies, are legitimate but unwarranted. Brazil is doing its own thing, as should be expected of a country that at last has the means of its regional and global ambitions. That "thing" happens to be a tad cynical and self-interested, but it is also very much consistent with Western democracies' interests and values.
The latest bout of worry revolves around Brazil's critique of the installation of US military bases in Colombia. Lula, his foreign minister Celso Amorim, as well as some Brazilian generals, have expressed concerns about the need for and reach of heightened US military presence, and for its implications for the strategic balance in the Amazon. What else could have been expected? The Amazon represents 40% of Brazil's land mass and holds most of its bio-genetic and mineral reserves and much of it remains to be explored and developed. Brazil's Amazon neighbors are troubled countries, from politically effervescent Venezuela, to Bolivia, which goes back and forth from the brink of civil war, through Colombia, its drug traffickers and guerrillas in the, and Peru with its perpetual institutional fragility and resurgent Shining Path insurgency. For these reasons, which should be evident even from London, the Amazon is the Brazil's central security preoccupation and the sudden announcement that the US would expand its presence in Colombia, with surveillance technology and combat aircraft whose reach runs deep into the region, provoked understandable discomfort.
It is not Brazil but the US and Colombia that bungled this affair and it is Brazilian analysts that would be justified to ask "on whose side is the US"? Previous consultations would have gone a long way towards calming things down, with Brazil at least, if not with Venezuela. Even then, when the issue came up at the summit of the South American Nations' Union (UNASUL in Portuguese), Brazil joined Chile and Peru to prevent Chavez from getting a formal condemnation, however mild, of the US-Colombia accord.
What The Economist does not seem to get is Brazil's real game and how much it serves Western democracies' interests. Let's go over the problem, Brazil's way of dealing with it, and why Washington, London, Brussels and Ottawa should just say thanks.
Brazil sits in the middle of a region where almost everybody is going through difficult or at the very least uncertain times. The first group of preoccupations regard the domestic stability of its neighbors. Starting with countries not mentioned yet, Ecuador under president Correa is an unpredictable player whose political system remains extremely fragile. Argentina is getting ever deeper into troubles, with the Kirchner's family running out of options, either political or economic, and as the unsustainable nature of much of the policies they have implemented over the last years becomes clear. Uruguay is sound politically, but the financial crisis and the deepening problems of Argentina is hitting the small economy very hard. Even Chile is not quite the anchor of stability it once was, in spite of an economy that is picking up steam as the price of copper increases again, and as global interests for its massive lithium reserves is propped up by the global hybrid-electric craze. Discontent with Bachelet's administration is increasingly widespread and should lead to the breakdown of the Concertación alliance between the Social Party and the Christian Democracy, which has been in power since the fall of Pinochet. This would spell the end of stable majority government, as the Right is no more able than the Concertación's partners to stand alone in government. In Colombia, a military victory against the FARC does not appear likely in the short and medium term and drug production and export are increasing again, in spite of the government's effort and of US military and logistical aid. Bolivia remains not only fragile politically, but the most obvious object of nationalist mobilization remains Brazil, which has benefited immensely from early gaz contracts. Paraguay is in a similar situation, with a left-wing government Venezuela is most worrying, however, with a deepening political crisis in Venezuela and the continuing inability of the Chavez government to use the country's oil to build a sustainable economy and political system.
On top of those domestic issues lie a series of international tensions: between Chile and Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Chile and most recently Colombia and Ecuador. Some of them –especially around Chile's borders- go back half- or even a full century. Others are more recent and have to do with ideological affinities between the FARC and the Chavez (Venezuela) and Correa (Ecuador) regimes. Heated rhetoric, but also troop movements and especially weapons acquisition result. The countries of the region are buying submarines, planes, tanks, armored personal carriers and highly-accurate sniper rifles. The most aggressive buyers are Colombia, with a good reason, given the remaining strength of the FARC insurgency, and Venezuela, without one.
Add to all this the large nationally-based but transnational networks that produce and move billions of dollars worth of drugs and weapons, and you have one of the most complicated environment a country can have today, and Brazil is in the middle of it. Most worrying for Brazil, obviously, is Venezuela. Chavez' means, his unbounded global regional ambitions, his unpredictability, and the growing fragility of his domestic political base, make him a walking time bomb. Not as powerful as he would like, but large enough to justify much worry among its neighbors. What is more, from Brazil's standpoint, Venezuela's regional alliances (with Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, to a lesser extent Argentina, and possibly Peru in the near future), however laughable from a global standpoint, nonetheless represent a real strategic challenge to Brazil's own claims to regional supremacy, and –with Bolivia's gasz and Paraguay's hydro-electricity- an even more concrete –if not overwhelming- challenge to its energy security.
This is what Brazil has to deal with. And how does it do it? By having Lula outdo Chavez in global progressive legitimacy, by cajoling Venezuela and the Castros through with big accolades in public meetings, by mildly distancing itself from the US in global fora, for instance regarding Iran, by being hyperactive in regional diplomacy, and very indulgent in the renegotiation of asymmetric but perfectly legal energy contracts with small neighbors Bolivia and Paraguay. Working almost always through joint initiatives with Chile and Uruguay, Brazil intervenes in regional crises as they pop up, calming down the spirits when Colombia invades Ecuador in hot pursuit of FARC guerrillas, and preventing UNASUL from condemning the Colombia-US effort. Meanwhile however, it signs an agreement with Colombia allowing the latter military hot pursuit of guerrillas in Brazilian territory, and it gets on with its own very significant weapons acquisition program. Call this soft but extremely intelligent regional stability management and strategic threat containment.
The Economist would like Brazil to tone down its criticisms of Colombia and the US and to forcefully denounce Venezuela's not-so-slow closing of its political system and Cuba's human rights record. How this would help the magazine does not say. If even half of the previous diagnosis is right, how they it would severely weaken Brazil's legitimacy and moderating influence in the region. Moreover, they would not fly very well in Brazil itself, which does not make for a sound, long-term foreign policy.
The last part of The Economist argument has to do with Brazil's global initiatives, with its apparent preference for South-South linkages, its open courting of India and particularly China. This has to be the most ludicrous part of the magazine's analysis. What large resource producer in the world has not seen China's place among its trade partner go move from insignificance to prominence? Who is not courting, if warily, China's investments and organizing trade missions to Shanghai?
Should one conclude that Brazil is naive or that it is turning its back on the West? Well, again, not quite. Brazilian companies, like everybody else, are worried about China's manufacturing behemoth, but the country has outgrown its insecurity and the instinctive protectionist reflex that came with it. Brazilian multinationals and business people make their sums carefully, and their attitude, as a result, is very nuanced. Check the Brazil-China Chamber of commerce and compare what its produces every month to anything done in second-tier G8 countries (Canada, Spain, Italy, and even France). Naivete is the last word that will cross your mind, but you won't think of fear either. You will think of mature, careful, well-informed and long-term thinking.
China and India aside, South-South diplomacy, however insistent Brazil can sound about it, is also a second-best option for its diplomacy. It is because the North cannot deliver that Brazil seeks what in needs in the South. The US and EU cannot get Brazil a seat at the Security Council. Neither can they get it market access for its agricultural products. The US, in particular, is proving to be a tricky partner. Even leaving aside the little Colombia incident, and however fond Obama can be of Lula on a personal level, the US cannot deliver much. A case in point is Brazil's quest for fighter aircraft. Three countries are in the bidding: the US (with the F/A-18 Super Hornet), France (with the Rafale F3), and Sweden (with the Saab Gripen NG). Brazil wants the planes, but above all, it wants the technology and as large a part as possible of production process in the country. Sweden is offering to develop its as yet not-produced plane. France guarantees significant technology transfer and local production. The US, with a cheaper bid, is promising much but Brazil knows that at the last minute, Congress may say no because of the national security –and local jobs- implications of such technology and production transfers. Difficult to see how the Obama administration could resolve that one. Which means that the deep interconnection between the two countries' aircraft, armament and military establishment that would result from such a deal will most probably never develop.
In spite of all this, Brazil remains a remarkably steadfast ally of the US in the region, for the simple reason that the two countries' interests converge. Brazil has a vested interest in seeing Uribe win his war against the FARC and in the weakening of Colombia's drug cartels. Chavez is not real threat to the US, but a big problem for Brazil. If Venezuela and Tehran were ever to develop some kind of joint nuclear program, the US would be in a fit, but Brazil would be directly under threat. If Latin America's Andean region falls back into chaos and civil war, US interests, but above all Brazilian ones will be under threat. On all those files, the two countries interests converge and Brazil is closer to the action and has much more at stake. This is perhaps why its has been so much more clever, subtle, and effective, in its regional diplomacy, than the US or anybody else.
To sum up: On which side is Brazil? Well, on Brazil's side, which also happens to be the US and Western democracies' side too. You can calm down London.
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