Mission Creep in Latin America

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Mission Creep in Latin America - U.S. Southern Command's New Security Strategy

Tom Barry - 7/13/2005

U.S. security strategy in the Western Hemisphere has had, except in rare occasions, little or nothing to do with protecting national security and the U.S. homeland. Since the early 19 th century, the pursuit of U.S. national security in Latin America and the Caribbean has largely been grounded in the pursuit of U.S. interests.

Latin American and Caribbean societies commonly accept this fact of life in a hemisphere dominated for the past couple of centuries by the United States. Few would expect the U.S. government to pursue policies that run counter to the prevailing consensus in Washington about what constitute U.S. national interests.

When projected abroad, the interests of great powers such as the United States are variously described as being colonial, mercantilist, imperial, or hegemonic. The latter term—hegemonic—can encompass any of the previous three. A further distinction often made by scholars of international relations is that some hegemons are benevolent—meaning that they exercise their hegemony with a view to the mutual well-being of their own populations and those of the countries under their sway.

Great powers commonly describe themselves as benevolent, employing terms such as “Pax Britannica,” to British imperialism, and Pax Americana, or its later version, the “American Century,” to U.S. hegemony. It is rare, however, that a dominated country conceives of foreign hegemony as “benevolent.”


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http://globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=981&cid=1&sid=27