WASHINGTON — Sugar. From the sound of it, the thing alternately
known as CAFTA or DR-CAFTA or CAFTA-DR is primarily about facing
down the bitter remnants of U.S. protectionism. Sweet the rhetoric
isn’t. “Like Lenin,” former Delaware governor du Pont wrote tartly
— in the Wall Street Journal — “U.S. Sugar seems to
think that Americans should suffer economically rather than have a
free market in sugar.”
It has a nice ring to it, or about as nice a ring as the
equation of obdurate sugar lobbying with the picking of famine over
private farming can have. Deputy Secretary of State Zoellick put it
a little less rudely, and with a better sound bite, too: “We must
decide whether we will sacrifice the strategic interests of the
United States and the future of Central America for a spoonful of
sugar.”
Zoellick frames the debate so neatly one almost forgets the
golden phrase “strategic interests” before one hears it. But there
it is. The sugar issue in CAFTA is only the twinkling tip of a
whole iceberg of semisubterranean American strategic interests.
Passage of CAFTA matters for reasons that have less to do with the
price of beets in Montana and more with international terrorism,
the projection of soft power, and the ominous trajectory of South
American politics. CAFTA is the only way the United States can
synthesize or orchestrate its non-economic policy
objectives south of Mexico; the imposition of formalized rigors —
friendly to transparency and hostile to corruption, friendly to the
environment and hostile to nationalization — beyond the reach of
NAFTA is a calculated play for the entrenchment of American
interests in a zone of political instability, on par with the
invasion of Iraq as an expression of grand strategy.
CAFTA CAN’T BE SOLD on the TV interview circuit as the spearhead of
a multilayered intelligent American design meant to permanently
guide the Western Hemisphere toward the expression of U.S.
objectives. Even today we are inclined to blanch at the idea that
free trade agreements should be passed into law in order to
accomplish things that have nothing to do with economics. But the
Bush administration believes, at home and abroad, that everything
has to do with economics. Zoellick: “Free markets, development,
opportunity, and hope are the best weapons against poverty,
disease, and tyranny.” Bush: “By transforming our hemisphere into a
powerful free trade area, we will promote democratic governance,
human rights, and economic liberty for everyone.”
Take the Dominican Republic as a case study. Because of their
“sad past,” Zoellick declared as the DR signed on the dotted line,
“hundreds of thousands of Dominicans left their homeland for the
United States, where they enriched our society.” That sort of
backhanded compliment makes it ironically clear that the
administration believes local foreign populations can benefit the
U.S. in an even more powerful way by enriching their own
societies.
And the definition of enrichment goes far beyond mere trade.
William Cohen, Clinton’s defense secretary (and no Contra
apologist), knows “the roots of democracy are not deep and [Central
American] economies need to grow. In our own backyard we might have
a breeding ground for terrorists.” John Murphy, VP for Latin
America at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warns of a CAFTA defeat
“that will be seen as a kick in the teeth to Latin America. And
that will harm not just on trade but anti-terrorist and
anti-narcotic efforts.” And Zoellick himself raises the question of
“what message” the defeat of CAFTA would “send to struggling
democracies in other regions, such as the Middle East, Southeast
Asia, and Africa, where economic reformers are pushing for freedom
and need our support.”
The idea that we might have a national security imperative in
ramming CAFTA through a recalcitrant Congress can only be
reinforced by the following battery of scheduled meetings among the
CAFTA nation leaders: International Relations Committee chairman
Henry Hyde; House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security
chairman Harold Rogers; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Donald Rumsfeld? Yes — the Secretary has already been to
Guatemala, as recently as this March. And the CAFTA heads of state
have caught on. When Honduran Ambassador Mario Canahuati proclaims
that CAFTA is “about more than just trade,” we are free to reflect
upon what “more” really means — in both political and geographical
terms: Zoellick, while plugging CAFTA, mentioned almost in passing
that the United States is “now deep into negotiations with Panama
and the Andean nations.”
SOUTH AMERICA IS THE HORIZON over which CAFTA necessarily looks. In
his biography of Dean Acheson, James Chase called the measure of
greatness “the ability to seize the moment and to create out of
chaos the enduring structures of success.” In a different context,
Hunter Thompson once wrote in the National Observer that
the function of art “is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a
tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in
a time when chaos is multiplying.”
Chaos is multiplying in South America. Readers of Foreign
Affairs can find Michael Shifter (“Breakdown in the Andes,”
“Bonfire of the Andes”) bemoaning the madness in Ecuador, Peru, and
Bolivia that is now receiving popular news coverage. And this is to
say nothing of Hugo Chavez. This is not the place to rehash the
reportage. What is worth mention is that, thirty years ago, Hunter
Thompson traveled through South America in a pre-gonzo mode,
writing for the National Observer sharp and sad commentary
on the Andes that sounds as if nothing whatsoever has changed in
that part of the world since Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress.
“Today the ‘wealth of the Andes’ is no longer gold,” Thompson wrote
on June 10, 1963, “but the political power lying dormant in the
Indian population.” This sentence could appear in Foreign
Policy today. All the fissures and pressures present today
echo in Thompson’s old headlines: “Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow
South of the Border;” “Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to
Mourn Its Passing;” “The Inca of the Andes: He Haunts the Ruins of
His Once-Great Empire.”
The South American Problem is one that will not remain
contained. Chavez continually courts anti-American friends. And a
fellow named Gary Marx has written an article at the Chicago
Tribune with the anxious headline, “China ‘invading’ Latin
America with investments.” The content of that article is even more
anxious. China is now Brazil’s third-largest trading partner, and
Argentina’s fourth-largest. China is negotiating a free trade
agreement with Chile. Every fact brings a deeper brow-furrow. Marx
reports that Hu Jintao, visiting Brazil’s legislators, confessed
that “Sino-Latin American co-operation is facing an unprecedented
historical opportunity.”
Meanwhile the United States struggles to keep Costa Rica — as
well as House Republicans — at the bargaining table. It is not out
of casual interest that CAFTA passage is top priority for the House
leadership.
WE DO HAVE A NATIONAL security imperative in passing CAFTA — and
it’s already on the move. Failure in Congress wouldn’t just prevent
American grand strategy in the Western Hemisphere from moving
forward — it would yank it backward several steps. There are those
who can continue to worry when free trade agreements become host
bodies for a series of non-economic objectives, but when push comes
to shove, who can come forward with a more honest plan that’s
equally effective? Even environmentalists get a ride on the
coattails — Zoellick’s willingness to play ball on robust green
regulations for CAFTA is the object of praise from Democrat
negotiators. The administration, unused to placing environmental
strictures at the heart of its policy decision-making, clearly
feels they’re worth the trouble in order to secure CAFTA. Without
CAFTA, our “deep” negotiations with Panama and “the Andean nations”
will be nonstarters, floating in the same piecemeal limbo as Chile.
And our efforts to freeze out MS-13 and other narco-terrorist gangs
will be crippled.
Everyone except American and Mexican farming and labor interests
has something to gain from CAFTA. The course of American foreign
policy and grand strategy within the ambit of the Monroe Doctrine
is something that would be determined, in a perfect world, without
having to package it all under the half-ingenuous auspices of a
simple free trade agreement. But the difference between CAFTA and
NAFTA is not just a matter of years. America’s geostrategic play
for Latin America as well as the Middle East not only creates
barriers to the expansion of Chinese economic influence, but it
controls — one can hope — the vast arc of disorder reaching from
Cali to Kinshasa to Tikrit to Tashkent. The trick is to accomplish
this without creating more resentment than benefit. As has always
been the case in Latin America, appealing to the people as well as
their leaders is often times an impossibility. And, in the end,
CAFTA seems as good a chance as any to chip away at that truth.
