Pan-American Rivals
Book Review, by Max Paul Friedman
Diplomatic History, Volumen 37, Número 2, Oxford University Press, abril 2013.
Leandro Ariel Morgenfeld, Vecinos en conflicto. Argentina y Estados Unidos en las Conferencias Panamericanas (1880-1955) [Neighbors in Conflict: Argentina
and the United States in the Pan-American Conferences (1880-1955)]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 2011. 448 pp. Notes, bibliography. $26.00. (paper)
“The friendly face of U.S. dominance in
the hemisphere” was David Sheinin’s description of Pan-Americanism, the
effort to
unify the Western Hemisphere behind U.S. leadership
through a series of international meetings from the 1880s up to our own
time.1 At
most of those meetings, Argentina appeared as the United States’ chief
antagonist, putting spokes in the wheel of various
U.S.-sponsored projects aimed at political,
commercial, juridical, and military cooperation. For its pains,
Argentina was
cast as the hemispheric villain, whose actions many
U.S. officials and academics in both countries judged to be spiteful,
irrational, and self-defeating.
Leandro Morgenfeld, a research fellow at
Argentina’s Instituto de Estudios Históricos, Económicos, Sociales e
Internacionales
who teaches history at the Universidad de Buenos
Aires, has produced the most extensive and detailed examination of
Argentina’s
role in the Pan-American process available. His
impressive work, based on archival research in both countries,
challenges
a number of claims about Argentine foreign policy.
For example, Argentina’s most famous diplomatic historian, Carlos
Escudé,
argued that his country’s leaders hurt their own
interests by picking unnecessary fights with Washington out of pride
instead
of pragmatically seeking the rewards of cooperation
with the hemisphere’s strongest power.2
Joseph Tulchin understood strained relations between the two countries
as a long series of misunderstandings and missed opportunities
that were the fault of both sides.3 These and other scholars have echoed some variant of Napoleon’s maxim that the politics of states is to be found in their
geography: Argentina’s …
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