THE LAST WORD
McClellan, Jim
THE LAST WORD Acrophobia Jim McClellan The United States emerged from World War II as the world's greatest power. In fact, considering the devastation of the rest of the planet, the United States...
...corporations cornered foreign markets...
...From the No Transfer Resolution of 1811 through the Monroe Doctrine, the Polk and Roosevelt Corollaries, gunboat and dollar diplomacy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the overthrow of Arbenz, Bosch, and Allende, the United States has sent an unambiguous signal to the world: Latin America is the private property of North America...
...All of Latin America is special...
...military bases ringed the globe...
...Why has North America been so preoccupied with the "security" of Central and South America...
...Some cite economic factors: North Americans have sought to control their neighbors to the South to exploit their raw materials and create a Jim McClellan is an assistant professor of history and government at the A lexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College...
...monopoly market for American manufactured goods...
...Other analysts go beyond economic determinism, pointing out, for example, that the United States is strong in a hemisphere in which all other nations are weak...
...South America is a tree trunk...
...Theories abound...
...They are realists...
...Americans of all ages look at the map of the world on the wall with an elementary-school concept of up and down...
...They merely seek to make the trunk which sustains them as secure as possible...
...The limb touches the dragon at its soft underbelly, and the beast is thus precariously balanced at the top of the tree...
...When American schoolchildren first enter the classroom, they are confronted with many baffling sights: flags, loudspeaker boxes, wall posters covered with symbols for sounds and numbers which are as yet meaningless to them...
...The main threat the fierce dragon must fear is termites in the tree trunk...
...Actually, our Latin American policy is deeply rooted in subconscious, primordial instincts...
...When Americans look at a map of the Western Hemisphere, they subconsciously contrive to perceive the American half of the globe in the only way that made any sense during those anxiety-ridden days in the first grade: They see North America as a fierce dragon...
...If the tree falls, the dragon will come crashing down...
...This is serious...
...But the Pax Americana lasted a scant two decades before the Empire began to disintegrate...
...When Americans talk about the Fall of the American Empire, they mean it literally...
...The global power vacuum invited American expansion, and the invitation was enthusiastically accepted...
...It is there...
...They talk about driving "up" to New England or "down" to Florida...
...or, more to the point, they talk about flying "down" to Rio...
...The weakness of most of the popular theories is that they are equally applicable to American foreign policy in either the Western or the Eastern hemisphere...
...Lawrence is its mouth, and Canada and Alaska make up its wings...
...Bolivar, like most students of inter-American affairs, never realized that North Americans wish to inflict no misery on the Latin peoples, nor do they wish to promote Latin liberty...
...Such pillars of the Free World as Taiwan, Vietnam, or Iran might crumble without precipitating, the collapse of America, but Mexico is special...
...This explains North America's overriding fear of foreign ideologies boring within Latin America...
...Central America is a limb of the tree...
...In fact, considering the devastation of the rest of the planet, the United States was the world's sole surviving power...
...attachment to Latin America...
...Baja California and Florida are its legs, the Gulf of St...
...Mexico now demands to be treated as a nation rather than an oilwell...
...Distant parts of the American Empire may be lost and little remembered, but not Latin America...
...Among the most bewildering objects they see are large charts with deep blue backgrounds and multicolored pictures of undecipherable figures...
...The United States attracted the most loyal assortment of allies money could buy...
...Americans do not question how the dragon got up in the tree...
...They fail to account for the intensity of the U.S...
...Still other analysts explain North American domination of Latin America in terms of defense requirements, or adduce some vague sense of mission to take up the white man's burden...
...Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Latin America, once observed that the United States seemed "destined by Providence to plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty...
Vol. 43 • October 1979 • No. 10
