Yanqui Go Home

Simon Romero of the New York Times reported a couple of days ago that the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, will not renew an agreement made in 1999 to keep a United States military base in Manta (the original agreement expires next year).  The city on the coast is apparently crucial in the US led "war on drugs" for spotting cocaine traffickers moving product from Colombia up the coast and up your nose.

The classic leftist critique of US military bases abroad is of course based on the belief that the global capitalist leader, in order to maintain control of economic resources, must expand the empire as part of its endless accumulation of capital.  This critique manifests itself in popular anti-imperialist slogans encouraging Yanquis to go home.  Let me say, first off, I find these critiques useful, in the sense that they mobilize popular support, and also generally accurate.  

I recently revisited a framework first argued by Charles Tilly and reworked by Giovanni Arrighi in Adam Smith in Beijing which brings a broader perspective to this relatively minor international incident.  Tilly argues that the state often acts as a racketeer which "produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it."  The US has acted in this way in Latin America and around the world for years with impunity.  Arrighi shows that with the decline of US power and legitimacy, the artificial danger and the protection provided no longer seem relevant.  Correa's refusal of the US base should be examined in this light.  Although this incident may seem like another leftist Latin American president rejecting Yanqui imperialism, it is in fact a reasoned dismissal of a very hollow empire that can neither produce real danger nor force tribute for protection.  

Much has been made in recent years of Latin America's turn toward the left.  Immanuel Wallerstein's Commentary 233, released this morning, attempts to explain this political phenomenon.  Professor Wallerstein cites four examples as evidence of this leftward swing. The rejection of the United States' political and economic project for the hemisphere and the world is one.  The neoliberalism 1980's and 90's failed and is now dead.  There is no sane government in the world that would ever consider the economic shock therapies offered just a decade or so ago.  The changes seen in Latin America are not particularly radical.  Most of the so-called leftist governments that have taken power in the region are relatively moderate.  A new set of world historical conditions has presented itself to the states.  Some governments, like Ecuador's, are responding appropriately.