This volume appears as part of the Lexington Books series on Security in the Americas in the Twenty-First Century. Most of the chapters deal with US policy toward specific countries in the region during the Obama administration (2009–17), including Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Canada. There is also a substantive introductory overview of Obama's policies in the region and a concluding analysis relating these policies to elements of international relations theory. The book offers contributions from 20 academics, including the editors, many with widely ranging backgrounds and experiences.
Editors Hanna Kassab of Northern Michigan University and Jonathan Rosen, at Florida International University (FIU), have taken on a very ambitious project. Besides a policy overview and 11 country case studies of US bilateral relations, the volume also attempts to articulate a ‘doctrine’, i.e. a clearly defined and distinctive set of Obama administration regional policy objectives. In addition, the editors asked contributors to offer policy advice for Obama's final year in office and to provide their own theoretical framework for foreign policy analysis as well.
Many US foreign policy and regional scholars would be hard pressed to frame US–Latin American relations during the Obama years as a ‘doctrine’, because that term implies an overall coherence in regional foreign policy that was in fact largely absent. In reality, continuity with previous administrations would have provided a more accurate characterisation; some significant policy changes dated from President George H. W. Bush (1989–93) as responses to the end of the Cold War (e.g. Free Trade Agreements and support for democracies), or even earlier (e.g. the so-called Drug War). Others began with President Bill Clinton (1993–2001), including the Summits of the Americas, initiatives to improve relations with Cuba, and Plan Colombia to assist a government under siege in its efforts to secure a long-elusive peace. Indeed, the majority of the case studies themselves eschew references to a distinctive Obama foreign policy doctrine, toward Latin America at least, in favour of policy continuities. Khatchik DerGhougassian (Universidad de San Andrés) and María Belén Ahumada (Presidency of Argentina) reflect a view articulated in several of the other case studies as well: ‘[D]uring the [Obama] … years, nothing really changed in US–Argentine relations’ (p. 266).
As is the case with most edited volumes, some chapter contributions are more successful than others. The Cato Institute's Ted Galen Carpenter offers one of the best, a masterful overview that provides a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the major areas of the Obama administration's policy concerns in the hemisphere – drug trafficking, criminal groups, immigration, trade, populism and relations with competing and hostile regimes. Dario Moreno and María Ilcheva of FIU provide a particularly compact and coherent summary of US relations with Cuba and the details of the decision to restore diplomatic relations, Obama's one major shift in policy towards the region during his administration.
Bradford McGuinn, University of Miami, is one contributor who does focus on the Obama Doctrine, which he considers to be a form of liberal institutionalism with its more pragmatic, multilateral and case-by-case approach. In his treatment of El Salvador, however, he worries that the US administration's hardline approach to criminal violence there endangers the Doctrine with ‘re-securitisation’.
The study of US–Mexico relations, by Roberto Zepeda Martínez (Universidad Autónoma de México – UNAM) and co-editor Jonathan Rosen offers a detailed discussion of the Bush and Obama administrations’ immigration policies and the Mérida Initiative. They lament Obama's tendency to privilege rhetoric over action, including failures to maintain funding for the Mérida Initiative and to secure immigration reform, as well as to significantly increase deportations during his years in office.
The value of the policy analyses by long-time country specialists is amply reflected in the case studies of relations with Peru (Cynthia McClintock and her PhD student Barnett Koven of George Washington University), Bolivia (Eduardo Gamarra of FIU) and Venezuela (Orlando Pérez, Millersville University). Productive continuity captures US–Peru dynamics; on the contrary, a more pragmatic US approach to both Bolivia and Venezuela has failed to produce positive or tangible results. For Canada as well (Athanasios Hristoulas and Oliver Santín Peña, Instituto Tecnológico de México and UNAM), pragmatism and continuity in US policy prevail, along with a focus on specific issues (e.g. the XL pipeline and competing Arctic sovereignty claims).
The most effective edited volumes contain a concluding chapter which brings together its main themes as fleshed out in the case analyses of contributing authors, lays out any tensions or contradictions which appear there, and presents an integrating corpus of key insights. Unfortunately, this is not the case with The Obama Doctrine in the Americas. Whatever the merits of individual chapters, and they are many, the editors fail to provide in their concluding contribution an integrating comparative analysis of US relations in the region during the Obama years, much less a ‘doctrine’. Instead, their final chapter provides what could be a useful theoretical focus, but frames the differences between the Bush and Obama ‘Doctrines’ almost exclusively in the Middle East with little reference at all to Latin America. In so doing, it fails to bring together the lines of analysis of the individual chapter case studies. Nor does it assess the degree to which anything resembling a coherent doctrine framed US policy in the Western Hemisphere during the Obama administration. As a result, the sum of such a potentially promising book is, quite unfortunately, a good deal less than its individual parts.
