Farewell to Empire? USSOUTHCOM and Security Cooperation, 1977-1997

• In Event: Civil-Military Relations

Abstract

Ironically, as the US escalated its involvement in armed conflicts in Latin America in the late Cold War and into the unipolar 1990s (proxy war in Nicaragua, counterinsurgency in El Salvador, counternarcotics in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, intervention in Haiti, and invasion in Grenada and Panama), the US military’s organizational footprint was retrenching dramatically. The defining parameter of US military planning in the Western Hemisphere in the late 20th Century was neither threats nor budgets, but the Panama Canal Treaties. The Canal Zone had served since 1917 as a US forward base not simply for operations and logistics, but as a home for several military units, components, commands, and schoolhouses, which began uncoupling in the 1980s in preparation for handing over the Zone to Panamanian control in 1999. This transformation produced a more networked, decentralized, contractual mode of force posture for the globalization era, with “cooperative security locations” (bases, essentially) from Honduras to Ecuador to Curação—but it also involved a retreat to scattered bases across the US homeland from Arizona to Georgia.
How did US officers interpret their changing missions, and how did they engage Latin American counterparts, in an era of increased operations but decreased “forwardness”? What was the impact of relocation and reorganization on theater security cooperation strategy and the level of allied trust? In contrast to existing international system-level arguments about the end of the Cold War (unipolarity, peace dividend, extrahemispheric security priorities), or individual-level arguments about the variation in policy priorities of Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton (especially in how they ranked concerns with democracy, human rights, drugs, and communism), this paper takes a domestic, organizational politics perspective: if “where you stand is where you sit,” where the US military sat was changing radically. The geographic and organizational fallout from the Canal Treaties catalyzed innovation in security cooperation: to do more, with less, and from further away. Empirically, the paper draws on extensive archival research with declassified US military records, focusing on the files of US Southern Command and its subsidiaries.
This paper would fit particularly well with panels on grand strategy and force posture; bases and alliance politics; security assistance and cooperation; the armed forces and US defense policy in the post-Cold War era; Latin America; and archival and historical methods.

Author

• Christopher Darnton, Naval Postgraduate School