Roundtable XX-43
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2019 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Roundtable Review Volume XX, No. 43 17 June 2019 Lars Schoultz. In Their Own Best Interests: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780674984141 (hardcover, $35.00/£28.95/€31.50). URL: https://hdiplo.org/to/RT20-43 Contents Introduction by Dustin Walcher, Southern Oregon University ......................................................................... 2 Review by Max Paul Friedman, American University ............................................................................................ 6 Review by Tom Long, University of Warwick ........................................................................................................ 13 Review by Abraham F. Lowenthal, University of Southern California ......................................................... 19 Review by Debbie Sharnak, Harvard University .................................................................................................. 23 Review by Jeffrey F. Taffet, United States Merchant Marine Academy ....................................................... 26 Author’s Response by Lars Schoultz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ................................... 29 © 2019 The Authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. 1 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XX-43 Introduction by Dustin Walcher, Southern Oregon University or more than two generations, Lars Schoultz has focused a well-trained eye on the dynamics of U.S.- Latin American relations. Schoultz is a political scientist by training, a historian by methodology, and a gifted writer by practice. He is likely best known for his book, Beneath the United States: A History of FU.S. Policy toward Latin America, which thoroughly overviews the efforts of the United States to dominate its neighbors, and pulls no punches in its critical assessment of U.S. policy over time.1 In eir Own Best Interest functions as something of a companion to that earlier survey. It, too, explains U.S. policy toward Latin America over the longue durée. It, too, is based on a careful reading of U.S. primary sources. e differences emerge from the book’s central organizing focus; In eir Own Best Interest analyzes the myriad ways that various U.S. citizens sought to ‘uplift’ Latin Americans. ose efforts, argues Schoultz, have been at the heart of the United States’ misguided and often hostile interactions with the countries of Latin America. In recounting the story of U.S.-Latin American relations around the theme of ‘uplift,’ Schoultz argues that U.S. policymakers operated on a continuum ranging between altruism and realism. us virtually all U.S. policymakers ultimately sought to uplift Latin Americans, albeit with different justifications, and oftentimes via divergent policy approaches. Nonetheless, this U.S. drive to improve the country’s neighbors operated as a critical continuity in U.S.-Latin American relations since the nineteenth century. e reviewers’ assessments of In eir Own Best Interest are divided. Max Paul Friedman and Debbie Sharnak find the most to praise. By contrast, Tom Long, Abraham Lowenthal, and Jeffrey Taffet are more critical. Sharnak explains that “Schoultz effectively lays out how the idea of civilizing Latin America has become ubiquitous over the last century” – which was, after all, a central objective of the book. Friedman offers that “Schoultz is second to none in his ability to go deep-sea diving in the depths of U.S. records, some quite far afield from the major collections, and surface with little gems.” While Lowenthal finds the book “gracefully written, with wry and elegant wit,” he would like to see Schoultz set altruism and realism against other potential explanations for the behavior of U.S. policymakers. Long declares that the conclusion, which is “laced with hypotheses is frustratingly incomplete.” Finally, while Taffet applauds the book’s “appreciation of the ways in which the early twentieth-century record of U.S. engagement in Latin America illuminates contemporary, post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy in Latin America,” he ultimately concludes that “[i]n other respects the book is more problematic, and its promise unfulfilled.” Schoultz’s relative inattention to Latin American voices emerges as one of those potentially problematic areas. As Long in particular makes clear, In eir Own Best Interest is a book about U.S. policymaking. Sharnak observes that, “[p]erhaps what is most obviously missing from this impressive volume is Latin American voices.” If one of the dominant trends in the field has been the internationalization of the history of inter- American affairs, Schoultz unapologetically writes a history of U.S. policymaking from the standpoint of the U.S. government; businesses and non-governmental organizations, as Sharnak points out, are minimized in this narrative. For their part, Latin Americans remain in the background when they make any appearance. While recognizing the value of exploring deeply the records of a single powerful country, the reviewers explore ways that the inclusion of Latin American voices in a serious and sustained manner could have altered the contours of Schoultz’s argument. As Taffet suggests, “[a] deeper dive into Latin American sources of the era 1 Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2 | Page Roundtable XX-43 would have revealed the existence of a widely-held view in the region that the exertion of U.S. power in uplift endeavors was good and welcome.” Another critical issue the reviewers confront centers on Schoultz’s overall framing of the question of uplift. Friedman, Long, and Lowenthal in particular argue that Schoultz’s definition of uplift is, in Friedman’s words, “so flexible that one could argue [Eisenhower Treasury Secretary George] Humphrey wanted to uplift Latin Americans by telling them to eschew statism and adopt free-market thinking and austerity measures,” while also, more intuitively, incorporating the president’s brother and informal advisor, Milton Eisenhower, who encouraged enhanced foreign aid expenditures to Latin America simultaneously. ese two figures opposed one another within the Eisenhower administration, but could each be seen as promoting uplift, albeit via wildly different pathways. e reviewers question how meaningful and useful ‘uplift’ is as a category of analysis given such remarkable elasticity. Another widespread area of critique concerns Schoultz’s lack of serious engagement with the secondary literature. Friedman, Lowenthal, and Taffet each raise the issue. While his employment of primary sources from the United States across a substantial time horizon is impressive and praiseworthy, the reviewers observe that Schoultz is not in dialogue with the extant literature. e omission of major works of scholarship—many of which Lowenthal and Taffet list—is surprising. It limits the book’s utility in so far as In eir Own Best Interest could have built upon, or explicitly challenged, the conclusions of other scholars. Instead, the book exists in isolation—presenting an engaging narrative without addressing ongoing conversations between other scholars. Importantly, the reviewers come away from reading In eir Own Best Interest with additional questions that Schoultz broaches but does not ultimately answer. Given that Schoultz finds that the drive to uplift the United States’ neighbors entails a paternalistic approach to international affairs that ought to be avoided, what would an alternative policy framework look like? In particular, when Latin Americans from different parts of the region and different sectors of society asked for various kinds of assistance—as was the case, for example, in the aftermath of World War II—what ought U.S. policymakers have done? Put another way, are there ever circumstances when policies of uplift are desirable and effective? Questions of causation also percolate. Where did this drive to provide uplift come from? To what extent did the global Cold War matter to the story of U.S. efforts to provide uplift after World War II? Why did senior U.S. officials focus on Latin America to greater degrees at some times than others? In eir Own Best Interest has the potential to provide inspiration to future scholars who seek to address these challenging questions. Finally, it is notable that in some ways Schoultz’s most recent work harkens back to an older tradition in writing about the history of U.S. foreign relations. In his most famous work, historian William Appleman Williams explained U.S. support for “torture and terror” in Cuba, arguing: That sad result was not caused by purposeful malice, callous indifference, or ruthless and predatory exploitation. American leaders were not evil men. They did not conceive and ex[ecute] some dreadful conspiracy. Nor were they treacherous hypocrites. They believed deeply in the ideals they proclaimed, and they were sincere in arguing that their policies and actions would ultimately create a Cuba that would be responsibly self-governed, economically prosperous, and socially stable and happy. All, of course, in the image of America. 3 | Page Roundtable XX-43 Precisely for those reasons, however, American diplomacy contained the fundamental elements of tragedy.2 e phenomenon that Williams discusses fits within Schoultz’s broad definition of ‘uplift,’ and Schoultz’s analysis