MEXICO CITY — On his way to glad-hand Hugo Chávez and Daniel
Ortega at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last weekend,
President Barack Obama did a one-day drop-by in this capital. His
meetings with President Felipe Calderón were cordial but not very
productive, according to Mexican observers.
Telling was the coverage in the influential daily El
Universal, whose editorial line is considered nonpartisan
and centrist. The newspaper’s Alejandro Páez Varela put an edgy
English-language headline above the angry Spanish of his
editorial column following Obama’s visit: “Yes we
can…wait. Again.”
Making clear that he is no admirer of former President Vicente
Fox, Páez Varela said nevertheless that Fox recently had spoken
the truth in calling United States policies toward Mexico during
his and George W. Bush’s tenure palmaditas — little
pats on the back. As translated, the El Universal
editorialist wrote: “Mr. Obama, I could have done without your
visit. We received palmaditas a few days ago from
Hillary. And now we get more of the same.”
Policies and ideologies have flipped in the United States and
Mexico since the administration of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s
opposite number in Mexico was opposite in every imaginable way —
President José López Portillo, one of the most corrupt and
left-wing leaders of the last generation of the one-party rule of
the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. In an early indication
of the shrewd personal statecraft he later would practice with
Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan waged an intensive charm offensive with
López Portillo.
As the New York Times reported, June 14, 1981: “The
relationship between Presidents Carter and José López Portillo of
Mexico got off on the wrong foot and stayed there. The one
between President Reagan and Mr. López Portillo has been publicly
less awkward, despite their greater ideological divergence. ‘I
confess for the first time now, I have felt totally relaxed,’ the
Mexican President told Mr. Reagan at a White House luncheon last
week. His visit to Washington also included horseback riding at
Camp David.”
As two-term governor of California, Reagan had extensive
experience with Mexican culture and economic relations between
Mexico and the United States. From the earliest days of his
presidency, Reagan promoted his vision of a “North American
Accord” involving Mexico, Canada, and the United States. This led
in stages to the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, then the
tripartite North American Free Trade Agreement.
This month American history’s most left-wing President on social,
economic and security issues visited the competitively elected
president from Mexico’s pro-business, socially conservative
party, the Partido Acción Nacional. Obama expressed continued
support for United States assistance in the Mexican government’s
fight against drug cartels, but he offered awkward silence on the
vital but strained trade relations between the two countries.
“Even though Mexico is the third largest trading partner with the
United States,” Major Garrett reported April 17 on Fox News, “the
President didn’t even discuss it in his opening remarks at the
press conference today.”
Across the political spectrum there are misgivings about Obama’s
reported nominee for United States Ambassador to Mexico. Carlos
Pascual is one of the United States’ leading theorists and
practitioners of the ideological doctrine of “failed states.” In
the main, the project to make the world safe from “failed states”
is a one-size-fits-all outlook and action plan of
“nation-building” whose most lasting and coherent impact may be
as a full-employment program for the Birkenstocked utopian
bureaucrats at the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) — a failed agency if ever there was one.
The great realist Jeane Kirkpatrick was sharply critical of the
“failed states” ideology. As Edward Luttwak noted in his review
(The New Republic, August 9, 2007) of Kirkpatrick’s
posthumously published Making War to Keep Peace, “After
carefully examining the new ‘failed states’ doctrine that would
abrogate sovereignty to justify benevolent interventions where
government has broken down and the state no longer functions…she
concludes that this new colonialism was worse than the old,
because at least some incidental good was done while extracting
gold and such, while attempts to synthesize modern democracies
for populations with quite other priorities can only turbo-charge
their travails.”
Inauspiciously, before jumping to the Brookings Institution three
years ago, Pascual spent his entire career as a foreign service
officer of the USAID hive of failed statists.
In fairness to Pascual, he has accomplished one almost
unimaginable feat: uniting Mexico’s Left, Right, and Center on an
issue — his appointment. One factor is a mere accident of birth:
he was born in Cuba 50 years ago and came to the United States
with his parents as a two-year-old. Mexican leftists fear he is a
closet Miami-exile-bomb-thrower intent upon trying to pry the
Mexican Left from its embrace with the Castros. Mexicans of the
Center and the Right are leery of him not for ideological but for
cultural motives. Unfair though it may be, one of Mexico’s
deepest ethnic prejudices is a dislike of Cubans. (Mexican
leftists love the Castros because they are Communists, in spite
of the fact they are Cubans.)
Pascual’s more significant problem is the “failed states” matter.
María del Rosario Green Macías was foreign minister of Mexico
under Ernesto Zedillo, the last and most reputable of the PRI
presidents. Now the left-of-center chairman of Mexico’s Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, she said Pascual “has developed a
whole theory about states either failed or in crisis, and that’s
quite close to what they [North Americans] say we are.” She
added: “We will never acknowledge that we are a failed state,
because that is not true.” In this last statement, Senator Green
Macías echoes almost exactly the views recently expressed in the
New York Times by a leading Mexican right-of-center
intellectual and best-selling author, Enrique Krauze. Of the
“failed states” doctrine and its application to Mexico, Krauze
said,
“America’s distorted views can have costly consequences,
especially for us in Latin America.”
After palmaditas from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
and considering Carlos Pascual’s provenance, Mexicans are not
expecting anything better from the Obama-Clinton choice for
Ambassador. Political columnist Katia D’Artigues yesterday in
El Universal said of Pascual’s expected nomination: “The
message comes with the messenger: an expert in ‘failed states’ —
just in case we need one.”
Mexican politicians and media are trying mightily to tell Obama
and Clinton to keep their pet social engineer at home. But what
none of the Mexican coverage or commentary has noted is that the
appointment is not a fait accompli. One or more
determined United States Senators can prevent an ambassador’s
confirmation. Sen. Christopher Dodd’s “hold” stopped a number of
George W. Bush’s diplomatic nominations, including John Bolton’s
as Ambassador to the United Nations. In recent memory, the late
Sen. Jesse Helms halted Bill Clinton’s nomination of
Republican-in-Name-Only William Weld as Ambassador to Mexico. All
it takes is one or more Senate conservative realists with
vertebrae to spare both the United States and Mexico from an
awkward diplomatic mission that portends to play out as a utopian
failure.
(Mr. Duggan, an advisor to Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick, 1981-1985, is a visiting professor at Tecnológico de
Monterrey in Mexico City.)
