Bush's Latin Beat: A vision, but a faulty one - George W. Bush seeks united Americas to compete with Europe and Far East

National Review, July 23, 2001 by John O'Sullivan

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, American presidents did not really need "the vision thing." The Cold War itself gave them a wonderful pair of spectacles that enabled the most short-sighted observer to see the world as it was. These suddenly became useless in 1989-90.

As a president famous for not knowing foreign leaders and rarely traveling abroad, George W. Bush would not generally be expected to supply a geopolitical vision. But this assumption underestimates Bush. His early speeches and presidential actions suggest that he has a far- ranging and original vision, even a doctrine, covering mainly foreign policy but also taking in economics, domestic social affairs, and electoral politics. The Bush doctrine begins by holding that the future of the United States is to be the political leader of a Pan-American, free-trading bloc of countries from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego-the so- called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The first major diplomatic forays of the new president were his meeting with Mexican leader Vicente Fox and his signing of the FTAA at the Quebec "Summit of the Americas." And Bush laid out the underlying idea in clear terms: "We have a choice to make. We can combine in a common market so that we can compete in the long term with the Far East and Europe, or we can go on our own. Going on our own is not the right way."

That is not strictly correct. America has a considerably wider range of choices than that between economic isolationism and economic hemispherism. Alternatives range from a transatlantic free-trade area that would unite NAFTA and the European Union to global free trade achieved under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Bush's hemispheric trade bloc is merely one possible future.

In Bush's vision, FTAA would be firmly rooted in free markets. Indeed, the president and his allies see FTAA as a body that will tend to entrench free markets in the Western hemisphere through the magic of "jurisdictional competition." This is the theory, advanced by the distinguished legal theorist John O. McGinnis, that free trade compels nations that have chosen different systems of tax, welfare, and regulation to compete with one another. It creates a marketplace of governments. Businesses and taxpayers vote with their feet by moving from one jurisdiction (i.e., country) to another in order to enjoy the system of tax and regulation that best suits them. That system "wins" that attracts the most high-earners and businesses and so creates the most jobs and prosperity. And experience suggests that in this marketplace the winners tend to be low-tax, lightly regulated economies with modest levels of social benefits. The Bush vision is of the Americas not only integrated by free trade, but also transformed by it into successful market economies.

Hemispheric free trade is, however, only the foundation of the Bush vision. As Colin Powell made clear in a New York Times op-ed piece, published on the day before the Quebec summit, a great deal of political cooperation is already being erected on this foundation: "Ministers of trade, justice, finance, labor, environment, transportation and energy now meet regularly to tackle the problems we all face and identify ways in which we can help each other." Powell's list of possible areas of cooperation included labor rights, sustainable development, the status of women, education, information technology, health care, and disaster relief. Such political integration would transform Latin America from an economic hinterland into a political and diplomatic ally of the U.S. Not only in economics, but on these other matters, the Americas would increasingly attend international conferences as a united bloc like the EU. And as the habit of cooperation grew over time, the U.S. might even be able to call on its hemispheric allies for diplomatic and even military support in solving crises around the world.

This growing interdependence plainly has domestic U.S. consequences for such matters as immigration policy, cultural identity, and electoral politics; such changes are already in train. Vicente Fox has called for open borders and free labor mobility on the EU model between Mexico and the U.S. Although that goes too far for current American opinion, President Bush is on record as favoring a more generous immigration policy. His administration has sought to extend amnesties to illegal Latin American immigrants in the U.S. And he has asked a task force to examine the virtues of a temporary U.S. "guest worker" program for Mexican workers. All of these signs point ultimately to a single U.S.-Mexican market with full labor mobility and, as the FTAA expands to cover all Latin America, to a much broader version of the same thing.

Bush has also sought to help this process along by making the U.S. culturally hospitable to Latino immigrants-opposing "English First" laws and endorsing the argument that the U.S. is no longer united by a common culture and language but bilingual and multicultural. In the course of assuming the leadership of a continent divided mainly between Hispanic and Anglophone traditions, the U.S. will adapt to a new identity, one that is in theory multicultural, in practice bicultural: