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Air University Review, September-October 1976
Lieutenant Colonel John Child, USA
The concept of Latin America I held by United States military strategic planners has varied considerably in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reflecting fundamental changes in the relations between the United States and the other American republics.
Any attempt to isolate and identify U.S. strategic approaches to Latin America is complicated by the fact that at any given moment there may be several competing strategies. At times these military-strategic conceptions converge with the overall political and diplomatic strategy toward Latin America; at times they diverge and tend to produce conflict within the foreign policy decision-making machinery. Further complicating the process of identifying military strategies is the matter of priorities as the global strategic concerns of the United States make it necessary to assign a less-than-high priority to Latin America.
Despite these complications, it is possible to discern a series of strategic conceptions of Latin America that have been held at one period or another by U.S. military strategists:
the American Lake concept (mid-nineteenth
century to 1933)
This strategic vision, which was the primary military strategy until the advent of the Good Neighbor Policy, saw U.S. strategic concerns in Latin America predominantly (sometimes exclusively) in terms of the Caribbean. During the 1898-1933 period the Caribbean was frequently referred to as the "American Lake" or the "American Mediterranean."1 (See Figure 1.)
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The strategic conception of Latin America in terms of the American Lake is based on the overwhelming importance of the Caribbean in U.S. relations with Latin America:
--Eleven of the Latin nations are "Caribbean."
--The Caribbean is the main U.S.--Latin American interface.
--Major U.S. trade routes (both national and international) cross the Caribbean.
--U.S. control of the Caribbean denies a hostile power access to the soft underbelly of the United States.
--Control of the Panama Canal allows U.S. naval forces to be rapidly shifted from one ocean to the other. Although this factor is not so decisive at present, in the dark days immediately after Pearl Harbor it was one of the cornerstones of U.S. naval strategy.
Underscoring this strategic conception is the fact that for many years U.S-Latin American policy was in effect a Caribbean policy, with little attention being paid to the rest of Latin America. Our diplomacy, investments, interventions, and strategic concerns were focused almost exclusively on this area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As advocated by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt, the American Lake concept is clearly related to the Manifest Destiny, Big Stick, and Dollar Diplomacy facets of U.S.-Latin American relations.2 This concept belongs in the category of the "America for the [U.S.] Americans" modification of the Monroe Doctrine and is also in the "realistic" current of our foreign policy in that it converged with the overall political and diplomatic policies of the United States toward Latin America until the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy. In serving these needs the concept ran counter to the growing Pan-Americanist current in the early twentieth century and was a growing irritant in U.S.-Latin American relations.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America was based on initiatives taken in the last years of the Hoover administration. It was clearly incompatible with the American Lake strategic concept, forcing a departure from this approach in the early 1930s.
benign neglect concept (1933-1939)
The abandonment of the American Lake strategy created a void from 1933 to 1939 in U.S. strategic approaches to Latin America. This vacuum was benign in the sense that the United States was improving relations with Latin America but can also be labeled "neglect" in that the U.S. had no military strategy for Latin America and almost no presence in that area, a situation that is understandable in the absence of any perceived threat. U.S. military interventions in the Caribbean ended when troops were withdrawn from occupation duty in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti by 1934. With the exception of less than a dozen attachés and two small naval missions in Brazil and Peru, the U.S. military was indeed benignly neglecting Latin America.3
The strategic vacuum resulting from the abandonment of unilateral military measures was not replaced by bilateral or multilateral military strategies until the outbreak of World War II, when it became evident that this strategic void had to be filled. Although some U.S. military strategists in the late 1930s argued for a return to the American Lake concept, the strategic debate just before World War II involved the conflict between the quarter-sphere and the hemisphere defense concepts.
quarter-sphere defense (1939-1942)
The quarter-sphere defense concept held that U.S. military strategic concerns in Latin America should be aimed at establishing a limited but defendable perimeter against the external enemy. This perimeter would have embraced the northern half of the Western Hemisphere (hence, "quarter-sphere") and the area contained within a line running from Alaska to the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, across South America to the Brazilian "bulge" at Natal, then north to Newfoundland.4 (See Figure 2.)
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The quarter-sphere defense line was essentially the optimum World War II outer defense perimeter of the continental United States. As such, it involved Latin America only to the extent that specific areas of Latin America could contribute to the defense of the continental United States. Latin nations within the perimeter had a role to play and would be protected by the U.S.; those nations lying outside the perimeter were in effect neglected or given a very low strategic priority.
The quarter-sphere approach can be seen as an expansion of the American Lake concept to accommodate the technological and geopolitical realities of World War II.
The line was extended to the Galápagos because Japanese aircraft operating from that point, or any closer, would pose a direct threat to the Canal. The Brazilian "bulge" was included because of its proximity (about 1500 miles) to Dakar in West Africa, a French colony. When France fell in 1940, all former colonies became potential Nazi bases, and those in West Africa were seen as a direct threat to easternmost South America, the logical beachhead for a move against the soft underbelly of the United States.
In the quarter-sphere defense concept, the Latin American military played no role except local defense of proposed U.S. bases and as protectors of sources of strategic materials. In fact, two of the basic tenets of the concept were the belief that most of Latin America was a strategic liability and a general disregard for her potential military contribution, with the possible exception of a Brazilian role in the defense of South Atlantic shipping.5
There is no clear-cut philosophical basis for the quarter-sphere since it is a pragmatic and realistic assessment of the optimum defense perimeter in the context of the war. Even though it can be seen as an expansion of the American Lake concept based on the philosophies of Manifest Destiny and the Big Stick, the quarter-sphere was not consciously tied to these policies, which had been officially abandoned by World War II.
One disturbing overtone of the quarter-sphere was the contempt it implicitly carried toward Latin America. The quarter-sphere was frequently presented in terms of the U.S. having no obligation to protect all of Latin America because of Latin America's lack of democratic values, political instability, and limited cultural or economic ties to the United States.6 Proponents of the quarter-sphere frequently ridiculed Latin American military forces and asserted that the only valid strategic objective the U.S. had in Latin America was narrow self-interest. Because of these overtones the quarter-sphere concept is fundamentally anti-Panamericanist and against the Bolivarian or original Monroe Doctrine precepts of the indivisibility of the Americas.
The quarter-sphere as a strategic concept was one of two poles in the debate on U.S.-Latin American strategy from 1938 to 1942. As an operational concept it died when Roosevelt and the State Department came out in favor of hemisphere defense in 1942, and the U.S. military departments reluctantly accepted the hemisphere approach. Nevertheless, it can be argued that although the Army and Navy departments verbally supported hemisphere defense in the 1942-45 war years, they were in practice carrying out a quarter-sphere policy by means of special bilateral relationships with key countries in the quarter-sphere.
hemisphere defense (1939 to the present)
In this strategic conception the defense of the hemisphere is seen as a collective responsibility shared by all members of the Pan-American system. (See Figure 3.) Although military realities dictate that some nations (e.g., the United States) will make a larger contribution than others, all the countries in the hemisphere participate in the planning and execution of its defense.
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Proponents of the hemisphere defense concept argue that its genesis can be traced to Bolivarian Pan-American ideals (at the 1826 Panama Amphictyonic Congress, Bolivar had proposed a multinational hemisphere defense force) and the original expression of the Monroe Doctrine ("keep European conflicts out of the Americas"). An even more fundamental root is the idea that the Western Hemisphere has a geographic, historic, and cultural unity that sets it apart from the rest of the world.7
In the World War II context one man clearly emerges as the major proponent of the hemisphere defense idea: Sumner Welles, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Welles was convinced that hemisphere political and economic solidarity in World War II could be achieved only if the Latin nations had a sense of participation in the military defense of the continent.8 In this objective he was strongly opposed in 1940 and 1941 by the U.S. War and Navy departments, which argued that the only effective way to defend the Hemisphere (and the U.S.) was by bilateral agreements with key countries in the quarter-sphere. In effect, the U.S. military departments were arguing for the quarter-sphere on good military grounds while Welles was presenting the hemisphere defense concept as the indispensable military element necessary to gain Latin America's political, diplomatic, and economic cooperation in World War II. Welles was able to convince President Roosevelt to impose a compromise by which a multilateral military agency (the Inter-American Defense Board) would be created. The IADB had only advisory powers, thus leaving the U.S. military departments free to pursue substantive defense matters through their preferred bilateral channels.9
During the war years hemisphere defense was the military facet of the hemisphere's united front against the common and very real external threat of the Axis. Although all of the nations in the hemisphere did not feel the threat with equal concern, there was a remarkable degree of unanimity on the issue of military cooperation during the war. The concept of hemisphere defense played a vital role by giving the Latin nations the sense of military participation so essential to the creation of hemisphere psychological solidarity in World War II. 10 The specific vehicle for developing this sense of military solidarity was the Inter-American Defense Board, which many observers see as having had more of a symbolic than a direct role in the war.
After the war the idea of hemisphere defense was embodied in the Rio Treaty of 1947 ("Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance"). However, by 1947 the clear and present external threat had diminished, and the Rio Treaty fell far short of being a military alliance in the sense of NATO or even SEATO. For example, although the Rio Treaty does mention the use of military force as a possible (but nonobligatory) measure to be taken, it does not address the key questions of structure, organization, or planning for the use of this force.
The hemisphere defense idea remains a viable operational strategic concept to the present and formed the rationale for the U.S. Military Assistance Program in Latin America during the postwar period until the Kennedy years. The validity of the concept in recent years has been somewhat undermined by diverse perceptions of the nature of the threat to be defended against.
special bilateral relationships (1942 to the
present)
This strategic concept views Latin America in terms of substantive bilateral relationships with a very few Latin American nations which can make a direct, positive contribution to rather narrowly defined U.S. military strategic interests.(See Figure 4.) Multilateral military relations exist but only on a token basis.
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The Latin nations selected for the special relationships are those which by virtue of location, long historical association, or vital assets play a key role in a "realistic" U.S. hemisphere strategy. Some of these special relationships have long antecedents:
--Brazil, which has had an "informal alliance" with the U.S. since the late nineteenth century.11
--Mexico, whose relations with the U.S. have fluctuated greatly over the years, but whose proximity and 2000-mile border make her loom large in any U.S. hemisphere strategy.
--the Caribbean and Central American nations which were involved in Panama Canal considerations, either as actual or potential sites or by virtue of strategic proximity to the Canal.
During World War II these bilateral strategic relationships reached their peak due to the fundamental role they played in quarter-sphere defense. Using relations with Canada as a precedent (a U.S.-Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense had been created, based on the 1940 Ogdensburg Agreement), bilateral commissions were established: the Joint Mexican-U.S. Defense Commission (March 1942) and the Joint Brazil-U.S. Defense Commission/Joint Brazil-U.S. Military Commission (August 1942).
These commissions coordinated, and solved, the two fundamental U.S. World War II strategic problems in the hemisphere. One was control of the northeast Brazilian "bulge" in both defensive terms (denial of the area as a possible Axis beachhead and antisubmarine operation) and later in offensive terms (supply route to North Africa). The commissions also channeled Brazil's 80 percent share of U.S. Lend-Lease to Latin America when the 23,000-man Brazilian Expeditionary Force was organized to fight in Italy.
The other strategic problem was control of the southwestern approaches to the U.S. and the Caribbean across Mexico. Access to air bases in Mexico also provided an overland air supply route to the Panama Canal. The Joint Mexican--U.S. Defense Commission also coordinated the Lend-Lease and training support provided to the 300-man Mexican air squadron which fought in the Pacific.
After World War II these two special bilateral strategic relationships followed divergent courses. The Mexican one atrophied and demonstrated a clear reluctance to become too closely associated with the U.S. in military terms (for example, there is no U.S. military group in Mexico). The Brazilian special relationship flourished to the extent that postwar Brazil emerged as one of our closest strategic and diplomatic allies in Latin America.
Like the hemisphere defense concept, the special bilateral relationship strategy continues to be employed to the present.
secondary space (the Cold War years)
This Cold War strategic conception sees Latin America as belonging in a secondary and thus low-priority geographic area. In Cold War terms U.S. planners neatly divided the world into a "power belt" or "primary space" northern hemisphere and a third world "secondary space." (See Figure 5.) The "power belt" contained most of the world's industrialized nations and was the main arena in which nuclear confrontation and the Cold War would be fought. The "secondary space "nations had the peripheral responsibilities of supplying strategic raw materials and staying locked into the spheres of influence of the first and second worlds.12
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A somewhat similar idea is contained in a 1950 Department of Defense pamphlet13 that divides the continent into three zones: the North American "buffer zone" (Alaska, Northern Canada), the North American "industrial zone" (U.S., Southern Canada), and the Latin American "material supply zone."
Only on two occasions did Latin America become a primary theater in the Cold War. The first was the brief threat of a Communist government in Guatemala in 1954. The second and far more serious was the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the subsequent attempt to export his revolution.
The unfortunate tendency on the part of U.S. strategic planners to assign a low priority to Latin America during the Cold War eventually led to taking her support for granted. Although Latin America generally acquiesced in the assignment of a secondary role in the Cold War, the lack of attention paid to the area by the U.S. in the Cold War years caused a gradual erosion of U.S. leadership, prestige, and influence.
the Atlantic triangle (proposed in 1955)
This strategic vision sees Latin America as one of the apexes of a triangular security partnership comprising the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America based on common bonds and the common threat of Soviet expansionism. (See Figure 6.) In its more abstract dimension it argues the geographic, cultural, historic, and economic unity of the three apexes and concludes that the history of the Americas has no meaning unless it is related to the Atlantic triangle.14
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The narrower specific military argument proposes the triangle as the strategic concept that would merge NATO and the Rio Treaty into a triangular alliance relationship.15 Such a conception necessarily rests on the assumption that the Rio Treaty is, or could become, a tight collective security arrangement like NATO, which it clearly is not.
The Atlantic triangle strategic concept was proposed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the height of the Cold War, but the idea was quietly dropped when it became evident that the majority of the Latin nations would not support what they perceived to be a militarization of the inter-American system.
the antifoco (1960 to the present)
The antifoco strategic concept was the counter to the Castro-Debray-Guevara "foco" strategy by which they attempted to export the Cuban Revolution to Latin America by converting the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of America. (See Figure 7.) A primary Castroite objective was to create "one, two, three, many Vietnams" in the hemisphere which would provoke U.S. intervention and overextend her military resources. The antifoco thus represents the application of counterinsurgency and nation--building concepts to the Latin American environment.
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The first expression of the foco theory is contained in Che Guevara's La Guerra de Guerrillas (1961) in which, contrary to traditional Marxist-Leninist theory, he argued that it is not always necessary to wait for all the objective conditions for a revolution since the guerrilla "foco" can create them. Castro's effort to export the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s put the theory into operation and caused great concern among U.S. military strategists. The concern was linked to a growing belief in the quasi-invincibility of the guerrilla in a Cold War nuclear stalemate among the major powers. Obsessed by the victory in Cuba, Guevara and Debray argued that objective conditions were not as important as the example set by the mystical guerrillas fighting heroically in the mountain and jungle "focos."16
The proponents of the foco theory not only ignored the fatal lack of objective conditions in most of Latin America but also the corpus of counterinsurgency theory and techniques that were built up in the late 1950s and early 1960s based mainly on antiguerrilla experiences in Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines. While some of the techniques were strictly military and tactical in nature, others were aimed at ways in which the guerrilla could be denied popular support and thus end up being, in Chairman Mao's metaphor, "a fish out of water." The most enlightened of these techniques was the civic action philosophy of using the military in projects that would better the social and economic situation of the population. The argument held that civic action would not only help eliminate the causes of insurgency but would also cause the population to support the government actively against the guerrillas.
In the early 1960s the new Kennedy administration, seeking a way to make its policy toward the Latin American military consistent with Alliance for Progress goals, seized upon the civic action concept as a means of providing a progressive and positive U.S. military strategy. This was reflected in the dramatic 1961-62 shift in rationale for the U.S. Military Assistance Program from hemisphere defense to the new realities of counterinsurgency and civic action. Sales and grants of equipment stressed those items suitable for nation-building, such as engineering and transportation vehicles. Training for Latin American military personnel provided by the U.S. stressed counterinsurgency tactics and the civic action concept. The limited amounts of purely military training and materiel provided were justified on the grounds of contributing to the stability required for orderly development under the Alliance for Progress.
Although the antifoco remains an operational strategic concept, its importance peaked during the period of maximum Cuban attempts to export revolution and has diminished somewhat in significance since the humiliating defeat of Guevara and Debray in Bolivia in 1967.
The following themes emerge from analysis of U.S. strategic visions of Latin America:
The only identifiable strategic concept in which high priority military realism and diplomatic-political Pan-American ideals have converged has been in the antifoco strategy, a factor that does much to explain its relative success and acceptance.
Any attempt to project the relevance of these strategies into the future must carefully consider the implications of the apparent hiatus in Cuban attempts to export revolutionary warfare in Latin America; the rising tide of Latin American nationalism, to include unprecedented currents of military populism, the strategic impact of raw material shortages, especially in the energy field; and Isthmian canal negotiations.
With these new factors in mind, an analysis of the eight strategic concepts in terms of contemporary and future relevance would yield the following results:
Recent changes in the inter-American system suggest the possible emergence of a ninth strategic concept, as yet undefined but which would be linked to U.S. and Latin American attempts to reach a relationship of mature partners with differences but also with significant convergence of interests. Such a concept, tentatively labeled "the mature military partnership," could rest on both the ideals of hemisphere defense as well as the more pragmatic realism of special bilateral relationships. It remains to be seen if the inter-American system is sufficiently flexible and the convergence of interests sufficiently broad to permit this ninth strategic concept to become operational.
Washington, D.C.
Notes
1. E. R. McLean, "The Caribbean: An American Lake," United States Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1941, p. 948.
2. H. Aptheker, American Foreign Policy and the Cold War (New York: New Century Publishers, 1962), pp. 100-101 and passim.
3. Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History. Department of the Army, 1960), p. 173.
4. Arthur Krock, "The Quarter Sphere Theory of Our Security," New York Times, July 11, 1940, p. 18.
5. Stetson Conn, Rose Engleman, and Byron Fairchild, The US Army in WW II: Guarding the United States and Its Outpost (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1964), p. 8.
6. Harold P. Stokes, "Limiting Hemisphere Defense," New York Times, July 9, 1940, p. 20.
7. See Lewis Hanke, editor, Have the Americas a Common History? (New York: Knopf, 1964).
8. Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild, p. 194.
9. Ibid, pp. 198-99.
10. Hanson W. Baldwin, United We Stand: Defense of the Western Hemisphere (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941), p. 92.
11. See Frank D. McCann, The Brazilian-American Alliance (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
12. John E. Kieffer, "Defending the Western Hemisphere." Americas, August 1955, p. 4.
13. U.S. Department of Defense, Inter-American Defense (Washington, Armed Forces Talk #327, 1950), p. 2.
14. B. D. Mason, editor, The Political-Military Defense of Latin America (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona State University Press, 1963), p. 146.
15. Joseph W. Reidy, "Latin America and the Atlantic Triangle," Orbis, Spring 1964, p. 63.
16. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 119-20.
Contributor
Lieutenant Colonel John Child, U. S. Army, (M.A., American University) is JCS Military Secretary of the U.S. Delegation to the Inter-American Defense Board, Washington, D. C. He is an Army foreign area specialist on Latin America and has resided in South America for 18 years. He has taught Spanish at the U. S. Military Academy, West Point, where he prepared an award-winning educational TV program on Che Guevara in both English and Spanish. Colonel Child is a graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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