Obama's Latin America Policy: A Score Card

Abstract

According to Senator John McCain, “John F. Kennedy described the peoples of Latin America as the United States’ ‘firm and ancient friends, united by history and by the United States’ determination to advance the values of American civilization throughout the hemisphere’” (Kennedy 1962, quoted in McCain 2007, 30). Latin American countries make natural partners of the United States, despite the inattentive pollution of this relationship by previous administrations of the United States. However, from the moment he became America’s 44thpresident, Barack Obama expressed a policy towards Latin America that is centred on the idea of equal partnership and mutual engagement, by saying, “I know that promises of partnership have gone unfulfilled in the past. There would be no senior or junior partner to this new engagement; there is simply engagement based on mutual respect; common interests and shared values” (Obama 2009). This two-part analysis examines President Obama’s foreign policy legacy in Latin America looking at his change of strategy on U.S.-Cuba relations and the challenges that followed. The initial part will focus on the political and intellectual significance of ‘legacy’ as a study, then examine U.S. foreign policy shift from the Bush to the Obama administration. This first part of a two-part assessment concludes that despite Obama’s Latin America policy not living up to its full expectation, it was more pragmatic, cordial and multilateral towards Latin America than most American administrations to date.