Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Map of the Caribbean Basin area
- Part I The problem at the interstate level
- 1 Security: the issues
- 2 The Caribbean as a focus for strategic and resource rivalry
- 3 Challenges to security in Central America and the Caribbean
- 4 The 1990s: politics, drugs and migrants
- Part II The problem at the state level
- Part III Solutions
- Index
4 - The 1990s: politics, drugs and migrants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Map of the Caribbean Basin area
- Part I The problem at the interstate level
- 1 Security: the issues
- 2 The Caribbean as a focus for strategic and resource rivalry
- 3 Challenges to security in Central America and the Caribbean
- 4 The 1990s: politics, drugs and migrants
- Part II The problem at the state level
- Part III Solutions
- Index
Summary
If we turn to future developments, in the very long term, the most significant development within the Caribbean and Central America is the relative decline of US power, not only in the Caribbean and Central America, but globally. The main security threats, therefore, are of two kinds. The first is of groups or forces, some or all of whose objectives are in conflict with US policy, resorting to aggression in order to change the status quo. The second is of an exaggerated and disproportionate US reaction to these forces resulting, not simply from the local reality, but from deeper insecurities which stem from difficulties in the United States’ international position. These threats could perhaps be resolved by some form of regional consensus based on a realistic view of US power capabilities and US (and other) interests but a more likely outcome is a frustrated (and frustrating) extension of US involvement without a corresponding increase in its ability to control events.
There can be little doubt that, at a global level, US power has declined from the peak it reached just after the Second World War. Such a decline has not been drastic; indeed it has often been exaggerated. However even a modest loss of international prestige and influence from so high a level is hard to take. Public opinion in the United States (as once in Britain) tends naturally to regard the period of its previous ascendancy as normal and any subsequent decline as an unexpected and sinister deviation.
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- Information
- The Central American Security SystemNorth-South or East-West?, pp. 60 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988