PART I – THE NEW PRESIDENT’S CARIBBEAN
The New President, whoever it is, will need to confront a growing set of connected problems in our own backyard. These involve the extra-territorial ambitions of Russia, China, Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers. These ambitions affect every nation in the Western Hemisphere, and are concentrated at the moment within the Caribbean.
The Caribbean Sea can be bisected by a line drawn between two very strategic points . . . Guantanamo Bay in the far Northeast and the Panama Canal in the extreme Southwest. The Canal is owned by Panama and operated by China. Guantanamo Bay, an unusually deep and well-protected harbor, is under lease from Cuba to the United States for use as a naval base. It’s no secret that we’re using it for other things.
If you bisect the Caribbean on the other diagonal from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in the West to Venezuela in the East you get a much longer line that envelopes Columbia, Venezuela, and all of Central America in the southern half. It is this half where the largest of the current risks lie, just as it is on the Guantanamo/Panama line where the conflict will play out a few years from now.
Let’s take the immediate first. Castro and Chavez are at the center of a propaganda campaign being waged by those two with Russia. At the same time, emboldened by their new wealth and spurred on by Nato’s spreading its wings into Eastern Europe, Russia is arming Chavez with warplanes and missiles. Cubans can still remember the Russians from their partnership in the 1960’s and 70’s, and, while that memory is not sublime, the Russian flirtation plays into Castro/Chavez anti-US propaganda. The people of both these countries apparently need a constant reminder that Washington is at the root of all their problems – not Bolivarian socialism.
China has been making deal after deal in Latin America . . . mostly trading rights for the raw materials they know they’ll need in the future for cash, of which China has plenty. They’re also involved with Cuba to drill for oil off the coast, and with Venezuela to widen the Panama Canal.
Havana is entwined with Hugo and his attempts to spread the Cuban form of Bolivarian populism (communism) to South and Central America. To date, the effort has gained traction in Bolivia, Uruguay, Honduras, and Nicaragua; came very close in Mexico and Brasil; and the vote is still out in Argentina and Peru. The U.S. Congress hasn’t helped by refusing to affirm the treaty with Columbia on Democratic/Republican political grounds. We’ll explore this populist movement in the coming weeks, look at the effect it will have on all U.S. citizens, and what the new President will need to do to enhance our influence in the region.
If he can establish a leadership posture in this Hemisphere, we may be able to avoid the strategic risks involved in having both the Panama Canal and the Guantanamo Bay facility outside our sphere of influence (or needing a military solution to avoid such an outcome).