In 1832, runs his argument, Washington proclaimed the so-called Monroe doctrine. Named after President James Munroe who authored it, the doctrine holds that European powers should stay out of the Western hemisphere. It has been invoked numerous times during American history, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including most notably in the Spanish-American war which ended in victory for the US over Cuba in 1898.
Schmitt argues that the proclamation of the Monroe doctrine was a key conceptual turning point in America’s relationship with the outside world, and therefore too in her own understanding of her self. Whereas the original Pilgrim Fathers had wanted to break off all ties with Europe in order to create a perfect and “shining city on a hill”, and whereas the Monroe doctrine was in some respects a continuation of this policy, its announcement that European influence was to be held at bay throughout the Western hemisphere was the first proclamation that American military power should be projected outside the country’s national borders.
Schmitt claims, and many have agreed, that it encapsulated the first moment when America came to consider herself to be the embodiment of, and rightful vehicle for, universal political principles. It is obvious why people saw the Monroe doctrine as justifying the many battles fought in Latin America against Communist regimes by American proxies: those regimes were supported by Moscow and the US wanted its influence to be predominant in that continent.
In the light of this historical perspective, recent political developments in Latin America must surely give us pause for thought. The election on 20 April of a radical left-winger to the presidency of Paraguay is the last in a series of stunning victories, sustained now over a period of many years, of politicians in Latin America who embrace socialism; who hate America, the World Bank, the IMF and NAFTA; and who revere the heroes of the Cuban revolution.
These victories come less than two decades after the world foolishly proclaimed “the collapse of Communism” – a silly phrase which always obscured the fact that the government of the largest country in the world, China, is still Communist, and that Communism is also strong in many other parts of Asia including Vietnam, Burma and Nepal.
The new president-elect of Paraguay is Fernando Lugo. He is an ordained priest and former Catholic bishop now laicised by Rome because of his determination to seek political office. He is well known as an admirer of the iconic Argentine revolutionary, Che Guevara.
Lugo’s victory not only broke the grip on power of the Colorado Party, which has controlled Paraguay for 61 years without interruption, including when the country was a one-party state under General Stroessner; it also came just a two months after Fidel Castro, one of the longest-serving politicians in the world, managed to ensure the survival of Communism in Cuba by passing power to his brother, Raúl, and retiring peacefully himself.
Castro’s success in preserving Communism comes, of course, in spite of decades of attempts by the United States of America to unseat him, even to assassinate him, and to overthrow his brand of Caribbean socialism.
Other countries which have embraced left-wing or radical left and overtly anti-American regimes include Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua and to some extent Brazil. Indeed, the only truly pro-American regime left South of the Panama Canal now is in Colombia.
In many cases, the victories of the Left in these countries can only be seen as a sort of revenge for the defeats suffered during the Cold War. The most obvious example is Nicaragua, where the Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, has been president since 2006. This is the same Daniel Ortega against whom the Americans under Ronald Reagan mounted one of their most notorious “regime change” operations, the creation and funding of the anti-Communist guerrilla insurgency known as the “Contras”. It succeeded in overthrowing Ortega in 1990 – but one assumes that the taste of revenge was sweet indeed when he retook possession of the presidential palace sixteen years later.
Paradoxically, Ortega has succeeded in doing something in Nicaragua of which his Republican enemies in Washington can only dream. In 2006, Nicaragua banned abortion. As in Paraguay, there is some cross-fertilization between socialism and Catholicism, albeit of a rather left-wing kind.
Nicaragua has also recently pulled off a spectacular diplomatic success under its new-old president. Not only did he manage to persuade Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the controversial president of Iran, to visit Managua in 2006 – was this a deliberate desire to thumb his nose at the Yankees? – but he has also secured the decisive support of the 33-member Latin American and Caribbean group of United Nations members for the candidacy of his fellow Sandinista, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, to the post of new President of the United Nations General Assembly. Like Lugo of Paraguay, Brockmann is a Catholic priest; he was also Ortega’s Foreign Minister when Nicaragua was fighting the Contras and the Americas and, as such, was awarded Moscow’s Lenin Peace Prize in 1985.
Another “blast from the past” was the election in 2006 of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile, whose father was a general under the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. (He was an air force officer with the rank of air commodore, which is referred to as “brigadier general” in Chile.) General Bachelet, who had also been military attaché at the Chilean embassy in Washington, opposed General Pinochet’s American-backed coup in 1973 and was tortured as a result. Michelle Bachelet originally fled to Australia with her mother, but then in 1975 – and this is the key point – moved of her own accord to East Germany, where she went to university and married. President Bachelet is therefore one of that very rare breed of person (like the father of the current German Chancellor, Angela Merkel) who actually chose life in Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War against life in the capitalist West.
Nowhere is the presence of radical Leftism and anti-Americanism clearer than in Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez has been in power since 1998. He survived an American-backed coup against him in 2003, during which he lost power for three days but returned in triumph. Since then, he has used Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to promote his brand of leftist anti-Americanism across the whole continent ever since, with astonishing success.
This truly is a historic turn of events. It is true that these events are not being sponsored by European or other extra-American powers; but the geopolitical significance of them is no less great as a result. Latin America is to the United States what Eastern Europe was to the Soviet Union or India to the British Empire - the indispensable geopolitical basis on which to establish and maintain the country’s status as a world power.
More especially, Latin America has been the main theatre in history for American sponsored “regime change” operations which, in the latter part of the 20th century, were spread to the Middle East, Eastern Europe and, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. The Chicago-based journalist, Stephen Kinzer, documents many of these operations in his excellent work, Overthrow. A specialist on the US-backed coup against the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, in 1953, Kinzer has mentioned Afghanistan post 2001 and Iraq in 2003 as further examples of US-backed regime change (in these cases, prosecuted through invasion).
But Kinzer does not mention the numerous examples of regime change which the US has backed or organised in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, from the events of 5 October 2000 in Belgrade which overthrew Slododan Milosevic to the so-called “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. Yet in many cases, the operatives were the same: William Walker and Michael Kozak played a key role in the overthrow of General Noriega in Panama in 1989; the former became the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission in 1999, a mission widely held to have been thoroughly controlled by the CIA to which Walker doubtless belongs, while the latter became, as US ambassador to Belarus, the instigator of the (failed) “Operation White Stork” which tried to unseat President Lukashenko in 2001.
Kinzer makes a convincing point that these regime change operations usually make matters worse for the populations concerned. He is quite right. What he argues less strongly is that they are also geopolitically suicidal for the US. I am not talking about Afghanistan or Iraq: we know that US support for the mujihadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets eventually led to the rise of the Taliban and their friendship with Al Qaida. To that extent, the project backfired. But the 9-11 attacks, which were supposedly the consequence of this, were obviously a one-off event. In spite of America’s deeply neurotic over-reaction to them, they are obviously never going to be repeated. However horrible they were, they in fact represented no threat to the geopolitical pre-eminence of the United States as a world power. No American army was defeated; no US foreign policy or military goal was thwarted.
America has now tried to project its power so far, indeed – deep into the Hindu Kush, the deserts of Mesopotamia, the ancient Russian capital of Kiev – that it seems to have lost control of countries much nearer to home. Any country should try to get on with its neighbours; a world power needs to increase its influence across the world. By turning Latin America into a hotbed of anti-Americanism, George Bush has failed to do either.
To be sure, there are never any permanent victories in politics and the tide may change again. But relations with Europe will remain key to America’s future. I am not talking about the European Union, which is so mired in political correctness and social democracy that there is little hope that its members will ever behave politically again. I am talking about Russia, which yesterday inaugurated as president a man, Dmitri Medvedev, who has vowed to continue the domestic and foreign policy of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, whom he in any case will probably appoint Prime Minister. That foreign policy includes opposition to George Bush’s attempt to create a unipolar world. Russia is militarily the second most powerful state in the world and, where it leads, China will follow. With Latin America in ferment, President Bush has taken what was the world’s uncontested superpower and, in just eight years, turned it into a beleaguered nation with few friends and a currency in free fall. It is a spectacular achievement.