Many authors have characterized the Reagan-Bush Latin American policy as an attempt to restore U. S. hegemony there, heretofore in decline. The aim of the present paper is to propose an alternative view: it applied the same policy orientation as the prior administrations to a different, much more turbulent, context. This orientation may well be named “retrenchment”, which was inaugurated during the Nixon-Kissinger years as “low profile”, and continued by the Carter administration.
The essence of retrenchment policy is to modify the U. S. commitment to the Inter-American system as built in the 1930s and to adjust it to the post-Vietnam situations. The system, with the isolationist tinge of the 1930s, was obsolete from the outset for the postwar U. S. hegemony, thereafter committed also to worldwide strategic and economic policy objectives. The incongruence between the global and hemispheric goals was most apparent in two aspects of the system: (1) the U. S. commitment to the no-intervention principle in the Americas, inclusive of the vulnerable Caribbean Basin; (2) the authoritative multilateral approach, in which the United States demands explicit support from all the Latin American countries for every U. S. unilateral action in the hemisphere.
At first, the United States continued to uphold the system in the original shape, the Kennedy administration reinvigorating it with the “Alliace for Progress” initiative. The relative decline of U. S. power capabilities, however, compelled the Nixon administration to modify the system in the aspect (2) above mentioned, and the modification process was completed under the Carter administraion. The Reagan-Bush interventions in the Caribbean Basin in the critical years since 1979 can be characterized as further steps in the same modifying process of the system, this time in the aspect (1). Though different contexts light up different facets, the retrenchment policy has continued with the same goal: to maintain the hemispheric hegemony by streamlining the hemispheric system.
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