Latin America Confronts the United States

2015/11/19 by Tom Long · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Alliance #Development economics #Economic history #Economics #Foreign policy #Free trade #Free trade agreement #History #International Development and Aid #International Relations and Foreign Policy #International Relations in Latin America #International trade #Latin Americans #Law #Negotiation #Panama canal #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Power (physics) #Sociology

paper · doi:10.1017/cbo9781316343890

openalex publication_date 2015/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Latin America Confronts the United States offers a new perspective on US-Latin America relations. Drawing on research in six countries, the book examines how Latin American leaders are able to overcome power asymmetries to influence US foreign policy. The book provides in-depth explorations of key moments in post-World War II inter-American relations - foreign economic policy before the Alliance for Progress, the negotiation of the Panama Canal Treaties, the expansion of trade through NAFTA, and the growth of counternarcotics in Plan Colombia. The new evidence challenges earlier, US-centric explanations of these momentous events. Though differences in power were fundamental to each of these cases, relative weakness did not prevent Latin American leaders from aggressively pursuing their interests vis-à-vis the United States. Drawing on studies of foreign policy and international relations, the book examines how Latin American leaders achieved this influence - and why they sometimes failed.

Citations

• The Concept of Power: a Constructivist Analysis
• Power in International Politics
• The Persistent myth of lost hegemony
• Small, Smart and Salient? Rethinking Identity in the Small States Literature
• Two Faces of Power
• Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games
• International Norm Dynamics and Political Change
• The Alliance for Progress: Aims, Distortions, Obstacles
• Campaigning Against Latin American Nationalism: U.S. Ambassador John Moors Cabot in Brazil, 1959-1961
• The Uncomfortable Truth about NAFTA: It's Foreign Policy, Stupid

Cited by

• Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898–1936
• Foreign relations of Colombia [wikipedia]

Related

• The Nixon Doctrine in South America
• When Foreign Policy Meets Social Demands in Latin America
• Latin America and the liberal international order: an agenda for research
• The United States and the Peruvian Challenge, 1968–1975
• El rol de Estados Unidos en la remilitarización de América Latina y el Caribe