Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations

Soft Balancing, Binding or Bandwagoning? Understanding Institutional Responses to Power Disparities in the Americas

“…11 Note that it is not possible to use shared frailty (equivalent to random effects for survival data) in this particular instance since countries typically sign more than one treaty per year, meaning that multiple subjects (signatures) from the same country are at risk of failure (ratification) at the same time. 12 Cold War historiography has shown that Latin American governments frequently exaggerated or downplayed their ideological affinity with the United States in order to gain support against domestic contenders (see Friedman, 2003). Although our approach does not capture the complex interplay between domestic and international factors, we expect countries to signal their ideological alignment if they do not perceive the United States as (the principal source of) a threat.…”

“…12Cold War historiography has shown that Latin American governments frequently exaggerated or downplayed their ideological affinity with the United States in order to gain support against domestic contenders (see Friedman, 2003). Although our approach does not capture the complex interplay between domestic and international factors, we expect countries to signal their ideological alignment if they do not perceive the United States as (the principal source of) a threat.…”

“…17There is not sufficient room to do justice to this literature here. Examples include, but are not limited to, Friedman (2003), Harmer (2011), Darnton (2013), Long (2015), Keller (2015) and Tulchin (2016). …”

The US, Brazil and Latin America: the dynamics of asymmetrical regionalism

“…It is often noted that US goalsanti-fascism/anti-Peronism and then anti-communismdominated neighbourhood diplomacy during the Cold War. That was certainly the case, those these paradigms were often embraced by many of the region's leaders and hardly elided Latin American's own agency (Darnton, 2013;Friedman, 2003;Harmer 2014;Long, 2015). Still, US dominance in the formation of post-war regional structures has not been interrogated deeply.…”

Forget the Maine! The Legacy of “The United States and the Americas”

“…Yet of the wide variety of works cited in Friedman's article, none came from "The United States and the Americas" series. 69 Perhaps this is because the books give the surface impression of being traditional "textbook" narratives of diplomatic history. Yet as a whole the series' contribution to restoring Latin American agency is its major historiographical achievement.…”