Making Democracy Safe for the World: The Neo-Liberal Agenda and the New “Isolationism” in Relations with Latin America

Abstract

Throughout the 1980s, the makers of United States foreign policy stressed traditional Cold War objectives. The Reagan presidency highlighted support for anti-communist 'freedom fighters,' resistance to 'Marxist expansion/ and the 'liberation' of those living under communist rule. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the agenda changed. Emphasizing such putative triumphs as the victory in the Gulf War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the foreign policy plank of the Republican party in 1992 resembled what one reporter described as a 'victory lap around the world.'1 Yet in 1991, as the nation entered a severe economic recession, Americans were disinclined to celebrate what political leaders characterized as the triumph of United States leadership in the world community. President George Bush and congressional leaders faced a range of challenges to post-Cold War international policies. The rapid fall of Bush's approval rating in the months after the Gulf War appeared to show a growing sense among Americans that attention to costly foreign projects had come at the expense of urban renewal, government-assisted industrial recovery, and a national health care plan. Even so, the recent rethinking of the role of the United States in the world cast by some as a question of whether the United States should or will return to an 'isolationist' foreign policy has had little impact upon and has limited relevance to the rela-