Becoming a Good Neighbor among Dictators by Jorrit van den Berk

Author:Jorrit van den Berk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319699868
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

With Friends Like These …

During World War II, Washington had no policy aimed specifically at Central America. Its plans for the region were part of a larger hemispheric policy, which was itself part of a larger strategy to fight the war and, roughly from 1943 onward, to shape the postwar world. United States hemispheric policy as it concerned Central America was a strange mixture of feverish activity and negligence. The activity sprang entirely from the multifaceted efforts to win the war. Meanwhile, Washington also neglected the region in the sense that matters not related to the war, matters that had no significance beyond the strictly Central American context, received no attention. There was only wartime policy and Central America played a very small role in that policy, but there was no Central American policy as such.

Perhaps as a consequence, historical assessments of the diplomatic and political importance of U.S. wartime involvement in Central America are relatively recent. Bryce Wood’s classic, two-volume account of the rise and decline of the Good Neighbor policy, for example, almost entirely ignores the war. The first book ends in 1939 with the observation that “[j]ust before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor … it may be said that the United States had established, with the assistance of certain Latin American states, an unprecedented set of relationships productive of a nearly solidary American attitude toward threats from without.” Especially as compared to inter-American cooperation during World War I and the later Korean War, the support that the United States received from its Latin American allies was, according to Wood, the greatest triumph for the Good Neighbor. Wood’s second monograph, this time on the decline of the Good Neighbor, picks up the story in 1944, with Ambassador Spruille Braden ’s attempts to block the rise of Juan Perón in Argentina in 1944. From that time onward, the Good Neighbor was steadily “dismantled.”3

Wood represents a generation of historians who regard U.S.–Latin American cooperation during World War II as a high point for the Good Neighbor policy, before the relationship soured again during the Cold War . More critical voices emphasize the continuity between the early twentieth century and the Cold War.4 According to Lars Schoultz, for example, the Good Neighbor represents only a tactical break with the interventionist past. While military incursions ended, Washington started to rely on local dictators to protect its interests during the 1930s. The war only strengthened these ties and, in that sense, should be considered a continuation of the 1930s situation, according to Schoultz. The U.S. supported the dictators in the interest of local stability and the dictators supported the U.S. in order to be illegible for lend-lease aid, flexible trade and financial agreements, and prestigious United Nations status. After the war, the relationship continued into the Cold War as the strong bonds with local military regimes “would facilitate the transmission of anticommunist values to Latin America.”5

The wartime alliance of American republics, which eventually included every nation but Argentina, was undoubtedly a great diplomatic victory for the Roosevelt administration.

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