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Joseph S. Tulchin, Latin America in International Politics: Challenging US

Hegemony (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016), pp. vii + 235,
$62.00; £60.50 hb.

Article  in  Journal of Latin American Studies · May 2018

DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X1800024X

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 Book Reviews 
hostile regimes. Dario Moreno and María Ilcheva of FIU provide a particularly
compact and coherent summary of US relations with Cuba and the details of the deci-
sion to restore diplomatic relations, Obama’s one major shift in policy towards the
region during his administration.
Bradford McGuinn, University of Miami, is one contributor who does focus on the
Obama Doctrine, which he considers to be a form of liberal institutionalism with its
more pragmatic, multilateral and case-by-case approach. In his treatment of El
Salvador, however, he worries that the US administration’s hardline approach to crim-
inal violence there endangers the Doctrine with ‘re-securitisation’.
The study of US–Mexico relations, by Roberto Zepeda Martínez (Universidad
Autónoma de México – UNAM) and co-editor Jonathan Rosen offers a detailed dis-
cussion of the Bush and Obama administrations’ immigration policies and the Mérida
Initiative. They lament Obama’s tendency to privilege rhetoric over action, including
failures to maintain funding for the Mérida Initiative and to secure immigration
reform, as well as to significantly increase deportations during his years in office.
The value of the policy analyses by long-time country specialists is amply reflected in
the case studies of relations with Peru (Cynthia McClintock and her PhD student
Barnett Koven of George Washington University), Bolivia (Eduardo Gamarra of
FIU) and Venezuela (Orlando Pérez, Millersville University). Productive continuity cap-
tures US–Peru dynamics; on the contrary, a more pragmatic US approach to both
Bolivia and Venezuela has failed to produce positive or tangible results. For Canada
as well (Athanasios Hristoulas and Oliver Santín Peña, Instituto Tecnológico de
México and UNAM), pragmatism and continuity in US policy prevail, along with a
focus on specific issues (e.g. the XL pipeline and competing Arctic sovereignty claims).
The most effective edited volumes contain a concluding chapter which brings
together its main themes as fleshed out in the case analyses of contributing authors,
lays out any tensions or contradictions which appear there, and presents an integrating
corpus of key insights. Unfortunately, this is not the case with The Obama Doctrine in
the Americas. Whatever the merits of individual chapters, and they are many, the
editors fail to provide in their concluding contribution an integrating comparative
analysis of US relations in the region during the Obama years, much less a ‘doctrine’.
Instead, their final chapter provides what could be a useful theoretical focus, but
frames the differences between the Bush and Obama ‘Doctrines’ almost exclusively
in the Middle East with little reference at all to Latin America. In so doing, it fails
to bring together the lines of analysis of the individual chapter case studies. Nor
does it assess the degree to which anything resembling a coherent doctrine framed
US policy in the Western Hemisphere during the Obama administration. As a
result, the sum of such a potentially promising book is, quite unfortunately, a good
deal less than its individual parts.
Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University DAVID SCOTT PALMER

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.  (). doi:./SXX

Joseph S. Tulchin, Latin America in International Politics: Challenging US
Hegemony (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, ), pp. vii + ,
$.; £. hb.
Historian Joseph S. Tulchin offers a sweeping account, laced with detail, of two cen-
turies of international politics in the Americas, drawing on his own distinguished

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  Book Reviews
career and forays into international relations theory for insights. His key argument
focuses on the concept of ‘agency’, which Tulchin boils down to ‘what space in
the international system Latin American leaders believed they had’ and how they
went about using it (p. ). Contrasting himself with more deterministic accounts of
US–Latin American relations, Tulchin sees a fair amount of ‘wiggle room’ under
US hegemony (p. ). However, from the end of Iberian empires, through independ-
ence, to the rise of the United States of America, and well into the Cold War, Tulchin
is sceptical that Latin Americans demonstrated much agency. He sees ‘little evidence’
of Latin Americans taking a ‘proactive stance’ during the nineteenth century (p. ).
Contrasting Latin America to the United States during independence, there was ‘vir-
tually no discussion’ in Latin America of an ‘active role in world affairs’ (p. ). In the
twentieth century, Latin American foreign policies were largely limited to ‘strategies to
avoid US bullying’ (p. ). In Tulchin’s view, it was not until the Cold War ended and
democracy expanded in the s and s that Latin America started demonstrat-
ing agency in international affairs.
Ultimately, it is hard to assess Tulchin’s claims about agency against his own evi-
dence. The criteria for agency are not sufficiently defined, and he implies different
standards for Latin America from those one might apply to other states. Regional com-
petition in Latin America during the nineteenth century does not count as agency;
states were ‘inhibited from expressing agency’ due to internal and boundary disputes
(p. ). However, most states spend considerable energies dealing with their immediate
neighbours. The expanding United States – which Tulchin contrasts with Latin
America – was often at war with Indian nations, bordering colonial empires,
Mexico, and itself. Tulchin points to the US Civil War, noting that the Union and
Confederacy reached out to allies as part of a ‘realist tradition’ of foreign affairs.
Many of the parties to Latin America’s civil conflicts also searched for allies abroad,
but what counts as agency for the United States is the opposite for Latin America.
Often, Tulchin’s application of ‘agency’ to Latin America implicitly requires intra-
Latin American cooperation as a criterion. There was ‘no strategic opposition’ to
US expansionism, Tulchin asserts (p. ), perhaps questionably. Why one would
expect a united Latin American front is not clear, nor does Tulchin demand
unified international cooperation from the United States or European powers as a
standard for agency. Tulchin qualifies Latin American engagements with the
United States as ‘partial agency’. If engagements with neighbours are not agency
and dealings with the United States are indicative of ‘partial agency’, what would
satisfy the criteria for ‘agency’?
Instead of using ‘agency’ to explore Latin American worldviews and actions,
Tulchin often uses the concept to deny their significance. This is unfortunate.
Tulchin mentions Latin American traditions of international law, but gives them
little credit, saying ‘there was very little sense that [Latin Americans] could play a
role in setting these rules’ (p. ) for the hemisphere or beyond. Latin America’s
role in the League of Nations is briefly mentioned, but as an example of lacking
agency because ‘There was no attempt to bring the Latin American nations together
in a bloc to reform the new organisation’ (p. ). He is similarly dismissive of Latin
American participation in World War  and its aftermath. He writes that ‘the United
States had sufficient leverage to force them to behave, but not sufficient resources – or
will – to provide for them, a situation that would maximise the hostility generated in
the region’, claiming rising ‘ill will’ against the United States during the war (p. ).
Frustrations over wartime shortages notwithstanding, in many countries there was

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 Book Reviews 
voluntary cooperation with the United States and identification with the Allied cause.
Postwar economic disappointments seem to be read backward into wartime, or the
Argentine discord extrapolated. In planning the postwar order, it is clear that Latin
American states were outside the inner sanctum of the Big Three. But to conclude
that they lacked agency underplays Latin American advocacy (even if not always suc-
cessful) of regionalism, international law and the inclusion of human rights. Recent
work by Eric Helleiner (Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International
Development and the Making of the Postwar Order, Cornell University Press, ),
for example, highlights Latin American influence at Bretton Woods. Tulchin sees
agency as lacking throughout the Cold War, offering Costa Rica’s José Figueres as
the exception that proves the rule. Figueres showed that ‘agency can be achieved by
a deliberate compromise of autonomy’ (p. ). But surely, there are many such
cases, even if they occurred with structures of asymmetry and bipolarity.
For Tulchin, the picture changes in the post-Cold War era, the focus of three of the
book’s eight chapters. He proclaims that ‘autonomy and agency of the countries in the
region have reached historic levels and cannot go back to an earlier level’ (p. ).
Despite Tulchin’s initial claims of dramatic difference, many sections question
Latin American agency. Soviet collapse and democratisation allowed Latin
Americans to ‘begin to seek their own agency’ (p. ), though this was distorted by
‘Anti-Americanism’. The ‘only significant initiative to form community in the
region’ came from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (p. ), who was mostly
‘interested in tweaking Uncle Sam’s nose’ (p. ). Tulchin emphasises regional
cooperation as key to Latin American agency, but is ambivalent about new bodies
like the Economic Community for Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAC)
and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Mexico’s agency is
limited by its human rights record, Colombia’s by its conflict, Brazil’s by internal
debates over whether to be a global or regional player.
Given its broad chronological and geographical scope, Tulchin’s book provides an
engaging introduction for students of Latin America’s international relations. Looking
across Tulchin’s account of that vast sweep, however, one may be left wondering if
Latin America’s new age of agency is in fact such a sea change.
University of Warwick TOM LONG

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