The Formulation of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Caribbean

Abstract

This article argues that U.S. policy toward the Caribbean Basin is dominated by domestic political forces and by the history of our nation's involvement in the internal affairs of the nations in the region to such a degree as to make our relations with the region fundamentally different from our relations with the rest of Latin America. It opens with a brief history of the evolution of U.S. geopolitical schemes concerning Latin America to indicate that there are idealist and realist traditions that agree on U.S. exceptionalism and on the importance of the region for our nation's strategic interests. This brief history also indicates the significance of past episodes of intervention both for local politics in the region and for the nature of domestic political debate in the United States. The remainder of the article explains how domestic political forces are linked to foreign policy toward the region and then uses four case studies—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Cuba—to explain how domestic political forces become involved in foreign policymaking and how they influence the contours of crises in the region and the U.S. response to crisis management.