Yes We Can: A Changed Approach to the Americas

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As the massive, immediate, and open-ended US response to the crisis in Haiti shows, change has come to US policy in the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps unreasonably high expectations have not yet been met overall, but it is nonetheless undeniable that the Obama Administration has a different approach in the Americas than its predecessor.
 
Beginning with the April 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the Obama Administration laid out an agenda based on cooperation with willing partners to advance a broad agenda, based on economic recovery, long-term development, poverty alleviation, and energy cooperation. Overriding the agenda was a desire first and foremost to change the tone in hemispheric relations, and to restore the idea that, even when leaders disagree, they can still talk with one another.  
 
As a show of goodwill prior to the Summit, the Obama administration showed that it was taking partnership seriously in the global context.  Through forums including G20 meetings in London and then later in Pittsburgh, the United States welcomed nations like Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico into discussions designed to coordinate global financial and economic recovery.  Perhaps more importantly, it also signaled a desire to make the G20 the pre-eminent global financial forum, supplanting the G8, in part to institutionalize a Latin American role in these critical discussions.    
 
As well, prior to the Summit the administration announced a relaxation of certain restrictions on Cuba, including travel and communications, and signaled a willingness to go further pending concrete reciprocal actions toward democracy by the Castro regime.  This, too, was a change from the previous US position.
 
But partnership requires partners, and in the first opportunity after the Summit to show a willingness to cooperate—at the OAS General Assembly in Honduras—much of the hemisphere used the opportunity to force a political confrontation on Cuba that caused the US Secretary of State to leave the meeting early.  It’s well-known that much of Latin America and the Caribbean disagrees with US policy toward Cuba.  Indeed, many in the United States do, too.  But it was simply unnecessary and counterproductive to provoke a political confrontation at the General Assembly, rather than taking note of the previously-announced steps and encouraging additional moves from Washington on Cuba.
 
The US response to the democratic crisis in Honduras is another point of departure from the previous “ways of doing business.”  Indeed, immediately after President Zelaya was removed from power, the United States condemned the coup and worked assiduously with Costa Rica’s President Arias to establish a process to restore Zelaya (this would not have occurred under President Bush), all the while working to ensure that the previously-scheduled elections in Honduras were held in a free and fair manner.  Unfortunately, others in the hemisphere worked at cross-purposes, attempting to undermine the Honduran elections and throw that country into a state of permanent political turmoil, a scenario that would have been both dangerous and untenable.  Now, with the November elections behind them, the Honduran people have the best chance to look to the future, even as the status of Zelaya, who remains in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, remains to be resolved.
 
But perhaps the best signal yet of a new US approach to the hemisphere is on trade issues.  Without a doubt, trade expansion in the Western Hemisphere was a priority for the Bush Administration. Nonetheless, the Obama Administration has allowed pending agreements with Colombia and Panama to languish.  It has reformulated the Pathways to Prosperity initiative, originally begun to consolidate existing hemispheric trade agreements, into a platform to promote microenterprise, particularly for women and girls.  It has cancelled a successful program to allow Mexican trucks to enter the United States under provisions required by the North American Free Trade Agreement.  It has not sought trade negotiation authority from Congress that would allow it to conclude the Doha global trade negotiations which are so important for Brazil.
 
Those observers who may have been expecting that the United States under President Obama would cease acting like a superpower, would walk away from the fight against drugs, would abandon friends facing security challenges like Colombia or Mexico, and would align itself with populist movements and anti-US leaders in the hemisphere will be disappointed.  
 
Those who take an objective view of the United States, however, will have to conclude that policy in the Americas has changed, in some ways for the better, in some ways such as trade, for the worse.  But change it has, and the question now is whether regional leaders will respond with a new spirit of partnership, or as business as usual.