No abstract

The isolationist presidency of Donald Trump was only the last, albeit the most radical, of a series of United States administrations that have largely ignored fostering close relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. This apparent withdrawal has resulted in the steady rise of Brazil as a significant regional power as well as the incursion of Russian and Chinese influence in the region. In light of these developments, this article presents a historical overview of United States hegemony in the western hemisphere before outlining how recent setbacks have undermined this trend in the areas of regional trade, diplomacy, and security. As the Biden administration makes its transition, the article finishes by proposing how the United States could regain influence in the region by collaborating with its southern neighbors to promote economic development, defend human rights, and confront the region’s ongoing security issues.

Both the Soviet and United States military interventions failed in their respective efforts to establish stable regimes in Afghanistan, whose reputation for resistance to foreign occupation and state-building operations has earned it a near-mythical moniker: “the graveyard of empires”. This study examines the history of regime development in Afghanistan with a focus on the perennial challenge of finding a balance between the degree of centralized power necessary to maintain security and perform state functions, on the one hand, and the threshold of tolerance for centralized power among the country’s tribal population, on the other. The analysis shows how the highly centralized communist regime established through the Soviet intervention as well as the excessively decentralized democratic regime established through the United States intervention represent just two chapters in Afghanistan’s historical struggle to establish legitimate and enduring sources of centralized state power.

Despite historical perceptions of systemic communist-capitalist bipolarity in the Cold War world order, the international communist system was nevertheless affected by the same geopolitical realities that influenced the international system as a whole. By examining the seven cases of military conflicts between communist states from 1945 to 1991 – the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), the Sino-Soviet border conflict (1969), the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (1978-1989), the Chinese invasion of Vietnam (1979), the Somali invasion of Ethiopia (1977-1978), and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989) – this article challenges both the notions of Cold War bipolarity between communist and capitalist systems as well as the Marxist theory of peaceful coexistence between communist states.