Preparing for Deterioration of the Latin America and Caribbean Strategic Environment

This report originally appeared in the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The article examines the historically unprecedented turn to the Left, and to authoritarian populist regimes, across in Latin America and the Caribbean.

By contrast to the many other articles you likely have seen on this topic, the core argument of this work is that in the face of this historically unprecedented shift, it is not enough for the United States to simply “prepare for more bad things to happen in the hemisphere,” but rather, to anticipate the potentially catastrophic synergies between these likely trends. These include not only expanded economic dislocation, criminal violence and political mobilization and US rivals able to operate in the hemisphere in threatening ways (as we saw last week with the Russian threat to deploy military forces to Venezuela and Cuba). The effect of these synergies also means likely diminished leverage for the US to address these challenges through bilateral channels (including security cooperation), and in multilateral fora. In short, US policymakers and strategic planners must contemplate strategies for responding to a significant expansion of challenges, particularly while our loss of access and leverage means the bilateral and multilateral tools we looked to in the past no longer work (if they ever did).

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