I just don’t understand how having a weak and corrupted neighbor makes you as a nation stronger. It seems imbecilic at best, and especially naiive considering the history of free trade agreements between the US, Canada, and Mexico. I think its rather, an issue of competing factors, and because of arcane drug policy, the US has exceptionally weakened its self from an international trade perspective. Having a strong, very close, very large border sharing neighbor with a good manufacturing economy would be great for the US. The less stable they are, the worse the US is.
So I reject your premise. I think ‘they’ have no fucking clue what they are doing and have implemented competing, irrational agendas over the previous 2-3 decades, resulting in a compromising of the Mexican national government, where cartels fill the void because of a dysfunctional state. In fact your premise is so weakly thought out, it can’t possibly be so.
So the US doesn’t have a century long record of meddling in Latin America in order to keep the governments weak and societies easily exploitable? No coups, no United Fruit, nothing?
Yes, but also of free trade agreements to keep the wheels on the capitalist wagon rolling. Doing both at once is bad state craft, because we’re inevitably dependent on Mexico for manufacturing (because we dismantled/ sold our own) and yet we’ve de-stabilized the entire hemispheres political order for the purposes of… well… for supposed purpose. You aren’t obligated to believe the people who provided the reasons for doing so. In retrospect, much of the destabilization seems to be about very short term access to markets and ‘because we can’. There doesn’t appear to have been any kind of decadal project around state building to have better allies and partners to work with, which again, is my main premise. The people who have historically decided and determined the paths of foreign policy have no fucking clue what they are doing, and implement often contradictory approaches, that have the long term consequence of putting the country the policies are supposedly there to benefit, into the weakest position possible. A ‘worst of all worlds’ approach.
I just don’t understand how having a weak and corrupted neighbor makes you as a nation stronger. It seems imbecilic at best, and especially naiive considering the history of free trade agreements between the US, Canada, and Mexico. I think its rather, an issue of competing factors, and because of arcane drug policy, the US has exceptionally weakened its self from an international trade perspective. Having a strong, very close, very large border sharing neighbor with a good manufacturing economy would be great for the US. The less stable they are, the worse the US is.
So I reject your premise. I think ‘they’ have no fucking clue what they are doing and have implemented competing, irrational agendas over the previous 2-3 decades, resulting in a compromising of the Mexican national government, where cartels fill the void because of a dysfunctional state. In fact your premise is so weakly thought out, it can’t possibly be so.
So the US doesn’t have a century long record of meddling in Latin America in order to keep the governments weak and societies easily exploitable? No coups, no United Fruit, nothing?
Yes, but also of free trade agreements to keep the wheels on the capitalist wagon rolling. Doing both at once is bad state craft, because we’re inevitably dependent on Mexico for manufacturing (because we dismantled/ sold our own) and yet we’ve de-stabilized the entire hemispheres political order for the purposes of… well… for supposed purpose. You aren’t obligated to believe the people who provided the reasons for doing so. In retrospect, much of the destabilization seems to be about very short term access to markets and ‘because we can’. There doesn’t appear to have been any kind of decadal project around state building to have better allies and partners to work with, which again, is my main premise. The people who have historically decided and determined the paths of foreign policy have no fucking clue what they are doing, and implement often contradictory approaches, that have the long term consequence of putting the country the policies are supposedly there to benefit, into the weakest position possible. A ‘worst of all worlds’ approach.