March 28, 2012
By Robert D. Kaplan
While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000
deaths in a conflict in Syria -- half a world away from the United States --
more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A
deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United
States' southern border, Mexico will
affect America's destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination
of states in the Middle East. Indeed, Mexico may constitute the world's
seventh-largest economy in the near future.
Certainly, while the Mexican
violence is largely criminal, Syria is a more clear-cut moral issue, enhanced
by its own strategic consequences. A calcified authoritarian regime in Damascus
is stamping out dissent with guns and artillery barrages. Moreover, regime
change in Syria, which the rebels demand, could deliver a pivotal blow to
Iranian influence in the Middle East, an event that would be the best news to
U.S. interests in the region in years or even decades.
Nevertheless, the Syrian rebels are divided and hold no territory, and the
toppling of pro-Iranian dictator Bashar al Assad might conceivably bring to
power an austere Sunni regime equally averse to U.S. interests -- if not lead
to sectarian chaos. In other words, all military intervention scenarios in
Syria are fraught with extreme risk. Precisely for that reason, that the U.S.
foreign policy elite has continued for months to feverishly debate Syria, and
in many cases advocate armed intervention, while utterly ignoring the vaster
panorama of violence next door in Mexico, speaks volumes about Washington's own
obsessions and interests, which are not always aligned with the country's
geopolitical interests.
Syria matters and matters momentously to U.S. interests, but
Mexico ultimately matters more, so one would think that there would be at least
some degree of parity in the amount written on these subjects. I am
not demanding a switch in news coverage from one country to the other, just a
bit more balance. Of course, it is easy for pundits to have a fervently
interventionist view on Syria precisely because it is so far away, whereas
miscalculation in Mexico on America's part would carry far greater
consequences. For example, what if the
Mexican drug cartels took revenge on San Diego? Thus, one might even argue that
the very noise in the media about Syria, coupled with the relative silence
about Mexico, is proof that it is the latter issue that actually is too
sensitive for loose talk.
It may also be that
cartel-wracked Mexico -- at some rude subconscious level -- connotes for East
Coast elites a south of the border, 7-Eleven store culture, reminiscent of the
crime movie "Traffic," that holds no allure to people focused on
ancient civilizations across the ocean. The concerns of Europe and the Middle
East certainly seem closer to New York and Washington than does the
southwestern United States. Indeed, Latin American bureaus and studies
departments simply lack the cachet of Middle East and Asian ones in government
and universities. Yet, the fate of Mexico is the hinge on which the United
States' cultural and demographic future rests.
U.S. foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its
society, and nothing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of
Latin history northward. By 2050, as much as a third of the American population
could be Hispanic. Mexico and Central America constitute a growing demographic
and economic powerhouse with which the United States has an inextricable
relationship. In recent years Mexico's economic growth has outpaced that of
its northern neighbor. Mexico's population of 111 million plus Central
America's of more than 40 million equates to half the population of the United
States.
Because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, 85 percent of
Mexico's exports go to the United States, even as half of Central America's
trade is with the United States. While the median age of
Americans is nearly 37, demonstrating the aging tendency of the U.S.
population, the median age in Mexico is 25, and in Central America it is much
lower (20 in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). In part because of young
workers moving northward, the destiny of the United States could be
north-south, rather than the east-west, sea-to-shining-sea of continental and
patriotic myth. (This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the
Panama Canal, which will open the Greater Caribbean Basin to megaships from
East Asia, leading to the further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in
the United States, from Texas to Florida.)
Since 1940, Mexico's population has increased more than five-fold.
Between 1970 and 1995 it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose
by more than a third. Mexico's population is now more than a third that of the
United States and growing at a faster rate. And it is northern Mexico that is
crucial. That most of the drug-related homicides in this current wave of
violence that so much dwarfs Syria's have occurred in only six of Mexico's 32
states, mostly in the north, is a key indicator of how northern Mexico is being
distinguished from the rest of the country (though the violence in the city of
Veracruz and the regions of Michoacan and Guerrero is also notable). If the
military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels launched by conservative
President Felipe Calderon falters, as it seems to be doing, and Mexico City
goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a
functional sense lose even further control of the north, with concrete
implications for the southwestern United States.
One might argue that with massive
border controls, a functional and vibrantly nationalist United States can
coexist with a dysfunctional and somewhat chaotic northern Mexico. But that is
mainly true in the short run. Looking
deeper into the 21st century, as Arnold Toynbee notes in A Study of History (1946),
a border between a highly developed society and a less highly developed one
will not attain an equilibrium but will advance in the more backward society's
favor. Thus, helping to stabilize Mexico -- as limited as the United
States' options may be, given the complexity and sensitivity of the
relationship -- is a more urgent national interest than stabilizing societies
in the Greater Middle East. If Mexico ever does reach coherent First World
status, then it will become less of a threat, and the healthy melding of the
two societies will quicken to the benefit of both.
Today, helping to thwart drug
cartels in rugged and remote terrain in the vicinity of the Mexican frontier
and reaching southward from Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso,
Texas) means a limited role for the U.S. military and other agencies --
working, of course, in full cooperation with the Mexican authorities. (Predator
and Global Hawk drones fly deep over Mexico searching for drug production
facilities.) But the legal framework for cooperation with Mexico remains
problematic in some cases because of strict interpretation of 19th century
posse comitatus laws on the U.S. side. While the United States has spent
hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, its leaders
and foreign policy mandarins are somewhat passive about what is happening to a
country with which the United States shares a long land border, that verges on
partial chaos in some of its northern sections, and whose population is close
to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Mexico, in addition to the obvious challenge of China as a rising
great power, will help write the American story in the 21st century. Mexico
will partly determine what kind of society America will become, and what exactly
will be its demographic and geographic character, especially in the Southwest. The U.S.
relationship with China will matter more than any other individual bilateral
relationship in terms of determining the United States' place in the world,
especially in the economically crucial Pacific. If policymakers in Washington
calculate U.S. interests properly regarding those two critical countries, then
the United States will have power to spare so that its elites can continue to
focus on serious moral questions in places that matter less.
