GO SOUTH, YOUNG MAN (via Tom Morin):

The Atlantic Century (Ralph Peters, Autumn 2003, Parameters)

As with Africa, if we look only for problems in Latin America, we will have no difficulty in finding so many that we might easily convince ourselves to stay home. But the current trend in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom to downplay our recent differences with France, Germany, and other European powers is wrongheaded. Increasingly, continental Europe’s interests, values, and aspirations diverge from our own. Certainly, we will continue to work together productively in many spheres. But the United States and Europe are growing apart, not converging.

The future—our future—lies elsewhere, in those long-neglected realms where human wastage has been blithely dismissed and every local misfortune was seized upon as proof that “they” simply weren’t in our league. We have been seduced into playing 19th-century European great-power politics in the 21st century; indeed, considering our current involvement in the Middle East, one is tempted to claim that we’re playing 12th-century European power politics.

To the extent strategic requirements allow, we need to reduce our commitments to Europe, as well as combating our psychological dependence on the Eurocentric worldview. We are the children of Mark Twain, not of Proust. Like Huck Finn, we need to avoid Aunt Polly’s attempts to put too many table manners on us. We always need to light out for new frontiers. And the human frontiers of the 21st century are in our own country, in Latin America, and in Africa.

Try a simple experiment. Lay out a map of the world. With a pencil and ruler, connect the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal with all the countries in the Americas or in Africa to which they have historical or cultural ties. Next, connect the countries of Africa to those states of the Western Hemisphere to which they have ethnic and cultural ties. Now connect the United States to the countries in Latin America and Africa to which we have ties of population and culture. You have just drawn the most promising strategic network of this century.

It is time for the United States to begin making Castro’s dream a reality, leaving behind his socialist baggage and replacing it with respect for the popular will, individual rights, and truly free markets. We need to begin to bind together North America, Latin America, Africa, and the Atlantic powers on Europe’s western frontier in a mutually beneficial, ocean-spanning network of rule-of-law democracies. Our history laid the foundation. Now we need to build the Atlantic Century.

Other than the fact that such Atlantic-exclusive line-drawing leaves out places like Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines, etc., this is extremely sensible. What's fascinating though is the glaring omission in the Atlantic: France. They've had a bad couple centuries and show no signs of improving, eh?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2004 11:23 AM