What Would a Trump Presidency Mean for Latin America?

The Inter-American Dialogue's Latin American Advisor asks What Would a Trump Presidency Mean for Latin America? The short answer: not good. Here is Arturo Sarukhan, board member of the Inter-American Dialogue and former Mexican ambassador to the United States:

Current U.S. policy in the Americas, eschewing grandiose, over-arching and all-encompassing themes, and focusing instead on approaches à la carte—mostly issue-driven and sub-regional in nature—has been, given the real limitations in U.S. foreign policy bandwidth in a geo-strategically fluid and challenging 21st century, relatively successful. The fact that this pragmatically inspired policy has been accompanied by a reframing in the messaging, narrative and substance of U.S. inter-American diplomacy, could in fact leave, by the end of the Obama administration, a generally positive legacy and footprint for the United States across most of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric threatens to jeopardize these small but significant gains in hemispheric relations. For starters, his Mexico and immigrant bashing, though targeted solely at a NAFTA partner, is seen by many around the region as a worrisome sign of the potential return of an arrogant and overbearing, ‘my way or the highway,’ U.S. posture. In a region that highly values predictability in its relationship with the continental hegemonic power, his foreign policy maxim—articulated in his recent first foreign policy speech—postulating that the United States will become ‘unpredictable’ has, unsurprisingly, raised eyebrows in capitals throughout the Americas.

Moreover, as President Obama has sought to deepen and expand Washington’s soft-power capabilities and tools in the region, Trump’s discourse, measured both in terms of nation-branding and winning the hearts and minds of societies around the continent, is an unmitigated disaster for the United States’ public diplomacy footprint there. By talking about building walls, resorting to demagoguery and xenophobia to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and blasting trade deals, Trump is undermining efforts in recent years by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to develop new paradigms and a rules-based system with like-minded governments and with citizens and NGOs in the Americas.

The Obama administration did not handle the 2009 Honduran coup very well and its approach to immigration has been disappointing to say the least. However, the US' relations with Latin America seem so much better today than they did during the Bush years. A Trump presidency might make us wish for a return to the Bush years.