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The Americas affect U.S. national and homeland security, economic prosperity, and stability perhaps more than any other region in the world. Collectively, they are the destination for more than 40 percent of all U.S. exports,¹ the source of 65 percent of all U.S. energy imports,² and the region of origin or heritage for 17 percent of the U.S. population.³

As the next administration looks to the Americas, it will have a fundamental choice: It can embrace the partnership model that seeks to work with those in the region willing and capable to engage on the wide range of bilateral, regional, and global issues that have predominated the past eight years. Or, in contrast, the administration can unreasonably attempt to wall the United States off from its closest neighbors.

In light of the remarkable political and economic development that has occurred across much of the Americas over the past two decades, the choice should be obvious—partnership instead of self-inflicted isolation. Nor should the United States revert to a bygone era in which it sought to impose its will and agenda unilaterally on countries in the region.

Gone are the days in which the United States could or should dictate the terms of engagement with countries in the Western Hemisphere. Countries across the region are not passive actors waiting for the United States to do things for them or to them. Instead, many are globally engaged countries looking to do things together and are more than willing to do things with others if the United States relinquishes its leadership mantel. This is particularly true as many countries across the region, including some of America’s closest partners, have looked with deep skepticism at what lies ahead for the United States’ place in the Americas and the world.

A positive, affirmative agenda in the Americas is critical to advancing core U.S. bilateral, regional, and global interests. Twin dynamics provide a strong foundation for a positive, partnership-driven agenda that could advance U.S. bilateral, regional, and global interests: the increasing global engagement of countries throughout the region and the deep interconnectivity that binds the United States and the rest of the Americas, which the United States cannot practically undo no matter how hard it may attempt to do so.

With that in mind, this report lays out five ways, beyond the press of inbox issues—continuing normalization with Cuba to support the Cuban people’s desire to determine their own destiny; defending democracy and human rights in Venezuela and Nicaragua; supporting Colombia’s construction of a just and durable peace; and encouraging Haiti’s democratic and economic development—in which the incoming U.S. administration can advance a meaningful partnership agenda in the Western Hemisphere:

• Embrace the fact that the countries of the Americas have global connections and goals—in short, that they are not the United States’ backyard
• Leverage the powerful people-to-people connectivity that exists between the United States and the rest of the countries of the Americas to advance U.S. regional interests and influence
• Promote the security of citizens of the Americas to ensure that pervasive violence, related in part to transnational organized crime, does not disrupt regional interests—or citizens’ daily lives
• Advance energy and climate cooperation to seize regional clean energy opportunities and band together with the Americas to confront climate change
• Reform the inter-American system to advance key U.S. policy objectives in the Americas

If the next administration takes these steps, it will be able to reassure a region placed on edge by much of the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign and ensure continued cooperation on a range of issues to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and across the Americas. 

Economic, political, social, and security commonalities in the Western Hemisphere have forged strong links between the United States and the rest of the Americas. Along with geographic proximity, U.S. policy toward the Americas has been fashioned in the context of the political and economic environment in the region. It is important to recognize that the United States is the main trading partner for many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; Mexico and Venezuela account for around one-third of U.S. imported crude oil; and the Americas are significant partners in security cooperation with the United States.⁴

Promoting economic and social opportunity; ensuring citizen security; strengthening effective democratic institutions; and securing a clean energy future in the region have been the guiding principles of engagement between the United States and the rest of the Americas in recent years.⁵

Nowhere in the world have the past eight years better positioned the United States to deepen partnerships that could advance its core economic and security interests than in the Americas. It is incumbent on the next administration not to forsake this opportunity by seeking to wall the United States off from its closest neighbors and pretending that the nation can somehow successfully go it alone in the Americas and the world.

Instead, it is essential for the next administration—through both words and deeds—to send an unmistakable signal to the rest of the Americas that they can prosper together. Prosperity can be achieved through cooperating globally; deepening people-to-people ties; ensuring citizen security throughout the hemisphere; tackling the effects of climate change while seizing clean energy opportunities; and revitalizing multilateral institutions that are essential to advancing shared values and shared prosperity in the Americas.

Embrace the global Americas

For most of its history, the United States has viewed the rest of the Americas as a world apart, as its backyard—or an area over which the United States exercised such dominion that outside powers were not permitted to enter. Those days are over, and with new realities come new possibilities for advancing U.S. national interests at the global level—but only if the United States chooses to work in partnership with countries that are increasingly globally engaged.

An unmistakable characteristic of the opening years of the 21st century in the Americas is the increased global participation of key regional actors. Brazil’s participation in BRICS—an association of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—has provided a Latin American perspective in an assertive global south. And Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have played important roles in international economic policymaking through the G-20. Mexico hosted the G-20 in 2012, and in 2008 and 2016, Peru—as host of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit—played host to the last international trips of both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. Latin American and Caribbean countries have also collectively engaged in global diplomacy through forums such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, summit with China in January 2015; the 2005, 2009, and 2012 summits between members of the Union of South American Nations and members of the Arab League; and the 2013 and 2015 summits between CELAC and the European Union.⁶

Economically, the global engagement has been even more pronounced. Between 2000 and 2014, China’s explosive growth and its increased demand for commodities led to a 22-fold expansion of trade between China and countries in the Americas, resulting in China becoming the largest trading partner of Brazil, Chile, and Peru while becoming the second or third most important trading partner for many of the rest of the countries in the region.⁷ Chinese foreign direct investment, or FDI, has averaged more than $17 billion per year since 2009,⁸ although much of it has been geared toward the unsustainable and quasi-colonial acquisition of raw materials.⁹

China, however, is by no means the only trade partner for an increasingly diversified region. Chile has the world’s largest number of formal free trade agreements—56.¹⁰ And in 2015, Latin America and the Caribbean comprised the world’s fourth-largest FDI destination, behind only developing Asia, Europe, and North America.¹¹ Increasingly globalized Latin American companies, the so-called multilatinas, have reinforced the region’s political and economic global insertion, as outbound FDI from the Americas has increased 47.6 percent since 2005, reaching $47.4 billion in 2015.¹²

This increased economic and political engagement presents real opportunities for the United States to advance its global interests by cultivating more capable partners with shared interests. It also underscores the negative effects that alienating these potential partners could have.

Recent events underscore opportunities. Mexico, for example, which straddles the developed and developing world, has been an important player in recent global climate negotiations.¹³ In 2011, the United States and Brazil launched the Open Government Partnership to champion greater transparency and accountability around the world.¹⁴ Uruguay is consistently one of the world’s top troop contributors per capita to U.N. Peacekeeping Operations, or UNPKO,¹⁵ an area in which Brazil has been deeply engaged and in which Mexico and Colombia have committed to increase their respective participation.¹⁶

In short, the Americas’ growing global engagement means that the United States—if it chooses to engage and not to antagonize—has a broader set of potential partners with which to construct a modern, rules-based, liberal international order. To leverage that engagement, the United States must embark on a concerted effort to work with those countries that have shown both the capacity and the will to take on global responsibility, starting with those engaged in key existing global institutions, such as the G-20, APEC, and UNPKO, and those that have demonstrated a clear desire to engage constructively. Colombia, as Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and a key member of the Pacific Alliance, has also indicated such a desire through its efforts to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD,¹⁷ and its engagement with NATO and UNPKO.¹⁸

To that end, the next U.S. administration should:

• Make presidential- and vice presidential-level consultation a routine matter on global issues with Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru
• Create formal, cabinet-level, global dialogue mechanisms where they do not already exist, such as in Chile and Peru; bolster them where they do, such as in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia; and regularly consult on global issues through and beyond those formal mechanisms
• Continue to support Colombia’s accession into the OECD and work to include it in APEC in order to add another like-minded partner to a vital Asia-Pacific forum

Leverage connectivity

As countries across the Americas have become more globally engaged, some have fretted about a supposed loss of U.S. influence in the Americas.¹⁹

Although some commentators advocate for revitalizing 19th-century policies such as the Monroe Doctrine to impose greater U.S. influence, 21st-century realities require and provide a different set of tools to expand influence and advance U.S. interests.

In a competition for regional influence, it is incumbent on the next administration to maximize a unique U.S. comparative advantage—the deep interconnections that exist between the United States and the rest of the Americas at a people-to-people level that no other country can come close to matching. Instead of viewing the large immigrant community of Latin American origin as some sort of dangerous other, the new administration should recognize that those who trace either their origin or their heritage to the other countries of the Americas—similar to all those whose ancestors came to the United States—are an indispensable American asset. This is true both at home and in U.S. relations with other countries, given cultural, political, economic, and social connections.

A core source of the United States’ comparative advantage is that it is home to more than 54 million Hispanics—almost one-fifth of its total population. By 2043, when the United States is expected to reach the threshold of having no racial majority, nearly one-third of the U.S. population will be Latino.²⁰ Critical to understanding the full scope of this comparative advantage is a recognition that—as outlined in the CAP and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, or CIDE, report “Latinos Are Shaping the Future of the United States”²¹—the story of U.S. Latinos is not the stereotypical story of poor immigrants. Instead, U.S. Latinos have a combined purchasing power roughly equivalent to Mexico’s GDP²² and a per capita income higher than that of the populations of any of the BRICS countries.²³ U.S. Latinos are already marrying their economic success with their familial ties, directly affecting economies across the Americas as key drivers of U.S.-origin remittances that account for more than 10 percent of the GDPs of a handful of countries. The remittances totaled $65 billion in 2015.²⁴

To leverage these deep interconnections fully, the United States needs to get a key domestic policy right: bringing the U.S. immigration system into the 21st century. Although this should be done first and foremost to make good on the promise of America as a land of laws and immigrants, it is the single most important act the next administration could take to advance U.S. interests in the Americas.

The lack of reform and the public vitriol surrounding the current U.S. immigration system undermine U.S. interests across the region. Current and former Latin American leaders—including Pope Francis, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and former Colombian President César Gaviria—have criticized the tenor of the current immigration debate in the United States and have expressed concerns for the underlying implications of anti-immigrant rhetoric.²⁵ Unless such rhetoric is abandoned and repudiated, it will have negative spillovers in the Americas that affect a range of U.S. policies and interests.²⁶

In addition to helping restore moral leadership and boosting the U.S. economy, reform that includes a pathway to citizenship and values family reunification would have a wide range of practical effects on separated families across the Americas. Many of the family members still in the Americas must wait years—if not decades—to access the United States’ legal visa system. A system that rationally addresses the future flow of workers would also have profound economic and societal effects by restoring at least some circularity to immigration patterns in the Americas.²⁷

Leveraging connectivity to advance U.S. national interests, however, requires more than restoring common sense to the U.S. immigration system. It also demands bringing coherence and scale to a series of initiatives—of varying size and impact—that have emerged in recent years. The Obama administration launched Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Americas, or WEAmericas²⁸; Latin America IdEA Partnership, or La Idea²⁹; the Small Business Network of the Americas³⁰; and the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative³¹ to deepen engagement with diaspora communities to help promote the economic development and innovation of small- and medium-sized enterprises across the Americas, particularly those owned by members of traditionally marginalized groups. Similarly, it launched 100,000 Strong in the Americas³² to raise previously anemic levels of student exchange between the United States and the rest of the countries in the region.

All of these public-private partnership initiatives stem from the understanding that connectivity and proximity can be used to advance core U.S. interests. To date, these initiatives have lacked coherence and sufficient investment to help make their aspiration a reality. Four of the five initiatives—WEAmericas, La Idea, the Small Business Network of the Americas, and the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative—amount to variations on the theme of empowering marginalized small-business owners.

To leverage connectivity in the Americas to advance U.S. national interests, the next administration should:

• Work with Congress to enact commonsense immigration reform that provides a pathway to citizenship for the current unauthorized population; places a premium on family reunification; and establishes a rational worker system—which, among other things, would align the need for workers in the United States with the availability of legal visas for these workers to use
• Preserve administrative actions designed to improve the U.S. immigration system and keep families together
• Consolidate and rebrand initiatives, including those listed above, that are aimed at leveraging diaspora connectivity with countries of heritage and of origin of U.S. diaspora communities as ConnectAmericas initiatives, as well as those that seek to leverage proximity, and organize them
• Invest adequate U.S. government resources to stimulate greater private-sector investment in the public-private partnerships at the heart of these initiatives

Prioritize citizen security

Insecurity plagues the Americas. Crime, violence, corruption, and weak rule-of-law institutions are defining characteristics of too many societies throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citizens throughout the region, meanwhile, regularly identify insecurity as the most significant daily challenge they face.³³

In 2015, countries in the Americas held 7 of the 10 highest per capita homicide rates in the world.³⁴ El Salvador, which experienced 103 homicides per 100,000 residents, replaced Honduras, which had 57 homicides per 100,000 residents, as the region’s most violent country; Venezuela suffered 90 homicides per 100,000 residents; and even traditionally tranquil Costa Rica experienced an unprecedented number of homicides with 11 homicides per 100,000 residents.³⁵

Until recently, U.S. security policy in the Americas was driven by two 20th-century frameworks—the Cold War and the war on drugs—that do not adequately address today’s insecurity. Countries across the region have increasingly rejected the war on drugs. In 2009, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy called for alternative strategies and a re-evaluation of prohibitionist-oriented international drug policies.³⁶ This call was adopted across the region in the wake of the sixth Summit of the Americas held in 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, as a growing chorus of leaders openly questioned the basic premises of the war on drugs.³⁷

Experience in the Andean region, in particular, calls for reflection on the efficacy of supply side-focused approaches to combating drug trafficking, especially as it relates to drug use in the United States. During the past four decades, the United States has invested billions of dollars in coca eradication efforts in the Andean region. From 2000 to 2008, the United States invested more than $4 billion in Colombia alone.³⁸ During the same period, the number of hectares of coca cultivation in the region remained steady, with decreases in one country offset by increases elsewhere.³⁹ The experience of Colombia certainly raises a cost-benefit question: The country eradicated more than 1 million hectares of coca from 2002 to 2015, yet the number of hectares under cultivation rose from 144,450 in 2002 to 159,000 in 2015.⁴⁰

To deal with the very real challenges of drug abuse in the United States, including the burgeoning opioid epidemic, the United States needs to turn to an approach that primarily deals with drug abuse as a public health crisis instead of as a law enforcement challenge or a challenge that can be overcome through eradication and interdiction.

In fact, U.S. security policy in the Americas should pivot away from the war on drugs’ focus on eradication and interdiction and focus primarily on promoting citizen security, as the United States is more secure and its regional interests are more effectively advanced when citizens across the Americas are less vulnerable in their daily lives. This is particularly true because the drug trade is best understood as both a symptom and an accelerant of the underlying dynamics that feed insecurity, including weak rule-of-law institutions, endemic corruption, and uneven economic development.

A U.S. approach needs to prioritize the creation and bolstering of rule-of-law institutions to combat multifaceted transnational criminal organizations, or TCOs, as well as common crime. The approach also needs to factor in the crucial link between economic development and physical security.

The past eight years have seen a shift toward a citizen security approach to U.S. security cooperation in the Americas.⁴¹ More needs to be done, however. Nowhere is an emphasis on citizen security more necessary than in the Northern Triangle of Central America comprised of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. As outlined in CAP’s recent report “A Medium- and Long-Term Plan to Address the Central American Refugee Situation,” it is in the United States’ national interest to promote an integrated strategy that provides people—particularly teenagers and young adults—an option beyond being forced to join criminal gangs or fleeing their country of origin in hopes of arriving in the United States.⁴²

Advancing U.S. security interests in the Americas will require finding ways to maintain and deepen cooperation with Mexico—on security and the whole range of bilateral issues, as security issues cannot be addressed in isolation. Sparking a trade war or attempting to erect a wall between the United States and its most important partner would make such cooperation impossible. Instead, a pragmatic approach to Mexico is needed, as U.S. interests are more readily advanced through cooperation, not confrontation. Part of a pragmatic approach includes fostering needed security-related advancements in Mexico, a country that unquestionably confronts rule-of-law weaknesses to its own detriment and the detriment of its neighbors, including the United States. Again, an approach that leverages people-to-people connectivity and the promise of cross-border civil society cooperation would go a long way toward advancing U.S. interests.

To put citizen security at the heart of U.S. security policy in the Americas, the next administration should:

• Adopt the full range of recommendations described in “A Medium- and Long-Term Plan to Address the Central American Refugee Situation,”⁴³ including:
  • Ensuring a focused effort in spending the more than $1 billion in funds for the Northern Triangle by designating a senior-level, special presidential coordinator to bridge bureaucratic divisions in the U.S. government, as well as adopting an enhanced version of the Partnership for Growth in order to integrate cooperation across all departments and agencies supporting citizen security efforts in the Northern Triangle
  • Designating for sanctions additional criminal organizations that are responsible for the crime and violence, as well as the wide-scale human trafficking they engage in across the region and into the United States
  • Targeting bulk cash—the lifeblood of many TCOs—by, at a minimum, radically reducing—if not altogether eliminating—high-denomination bills
  • Leveraging the Inter-American Development Bank, or IDB—for which the United States is the largest shareholder—as a source of funding and technical assistance for development projects given the importance of the economic development component to a comprehensive approach to enhancing citizen security
• Apply a citizen security approach to ongoing support for Colombia as it seeks to reach and implement a formal and definitive peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, to continue Colombia’s evolution from a near-failed state into an OECD member
• Provide technical and indirect support to the greatest extent possible—by leveraging civil society ties—to Mexico’s continued economic development and growth and the building out of robust rule-of-law institutions and culture
• Ensure that efforts to improve citizen security in the region do not come at the expense of providing access to asylum in the United States and protecting asylum seekers throughout the region, as recommended in CAP’s “A Short-Term Plan to Address the Central American Refugee Situation”⁴⁴

Advance energy and climate cooperation

The importance of energy and climate dynamics in the Americas is near impossible to overstate.

Countries of the Western Hemisphere are the source of more than 65 percent of energy imported into the United States.⁴⁵ The Western Hemisphere is home to five of the world’s top 15 fossil fuel producers,⁴⁶ as well as the most diverse and cleanest energy matrix in the world. It includes a country—Costa Rica—that has relied solely on renewable energy sources for months at a time.^{https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2016/12/09/294651/5-big-ideas-for-u-s-policy-in-the-americas/}