Development and security but no free trade

A tragedy in three acts

The third debate between Barack Obama and John McCain converged to free trade. The elephant in the room was NAFTA. In spite of being the largest and most successful such agreement, the presidential contenders failed to acknowledge either Canada or Mexico as important trade partners. In this light, to McCain the strongest ally of the United States in the Americas is Colombia. To Obama, it seems that Peru, with improved trade union and environmental policies, could make an ideal partner. Either way, there are reasons to fear a tragedy in three acts.

Act one: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy

Shortly after 9/11, a Muslim woman was walking down the street in an affluent Mexico City neighborhood. A group of construction workers shouted at her ‘terrorist’ and some other unflattering terms. Noting their ‘unjustifiable ignorance’, quote, a businessman came to the rescue. Similar popular reactions were reported in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Sao Paulo, and other Latin American metropolis. Building on shared expectations that the administration of George W. Bush would work to strengthen the political and economic foundations of the emerging democracies in the region, Latin Americans rallied behind the US. Eight years down the road, the opposite turned out to be the case: Bush discontinued the Latin American project. Feeding on popular disappointment and the debacles of the Iraq war, Marxist agitators have partly filled the gap left by the departure of the US from what used to be considered its natural sphere of influence.

McCain might choose to downplay Canada and Mexico as important free-trade markets in favor of Colombia, but Obama’s policies undermine development and security aspirations south of the border altogether. Moreover, Obama’s protectionist policies are like music to the ears of the rising Marxist-oriented elites. He criticizes the capitalist model in a manner that echoes in and enhances their cause.

Act two: Common sense becomes the antithesis

Certain father, let us call him Joe Sr., worked hard to send Joe Jr. to the best university he could afford. Five years later, Joe Jr. told dad what he learned: there appears to be a correlation between development and security. “But son”, Joe Sr. muted as not to offend young Joe, “we have known that all along. They key is finding a way to get there.” Joe Sr., busy working on his pluming business to pay for the tuition fees, was unaware that development discourse found a new lease of life when theorists and practitioners, finally, started to link economic well being with raising levels of security (or the mirror image linking underdevelopment to insecurity, if the reader prefers). Careers were launched, countless books written, international programs engineered, emerging democracies embraced free trade, and Joe Jr. attained his degree on development studies.

McCain was shy to straight talk the common sense of free trade familiar to Joe Sr., who sees it as an opportunity to tackle the current economic downturn. Joe Jr. was bewildered too. He knows that jobs lost in America have gone to China and other countries in Asia opting for circumventing trade agreements. The two Joes are therefore unable to understand why Obama is making NAFTA a centerpiece of his attacks.

Act three: Free trade as a forgone conclusion

Chronic corruption continues to affect Latin American constabularies, hence undermining the development and security aspirations of countless communities. Nevertheless, due in part to the diminished engagement of the US in the region, the problem has been exacerbated over the last few years. This, at the same time, has lent momentum to a dangerous shift to the left. Marxist-oriented leadership, higher levels of corruption, and the spread of violence associated with the drug trade appear not to make strange bedfellows. In this respect, some of the latest tactics employed by Chavez followers, including the use of grenades against the civilian population, can only be characterized as acts of terrorism.

In addressing all these connection, there is hope McCain would reassert the importance of Latin America for the longer-term strategic interests of the US. He might wake up one day thinking about the implications of free trade (or the absence of it) for the development and security of the region. We stress 'hope' and 'might' because, although security is his strong suit and he has held meetings with the presidents of Colombia and Mexico, his campaign lost direction the moment Sarah Palin walked in. If Obama is elected president, on the other hand, he is only likely to disengage further from Latin America, a place he has never set foot. Besides that for sure China will step in, do not doubt for a second the trinity of Marxist leadership, corruption, and narco violence would only strengthen and inevitably create a feedback effect in the US.

Epilogue: the Africanization and Iraqization of violence

The reader might ask where private security is here. The answer is simple. In the absence of law and order in the manner known to advanced democracies, development and free trade in Latin America have progressed with a private security cover attached to them. We will wait for the outcome of the election before properly exploring the likely implications of ‘free trade as a forgone conclusion’ for the security industry. Alongside the possibility that parts of the continent (and the security industry) would be Africanized, narco forces are already posing a bigger challenge by modeling themselves on al-Qaeda. While Obama has been discussing the option of effectively terminating NAFTA and McCain the success of the surge in Iraq, severed heads have been rolling down Mexico’s badlands.

John McCain and the military-industrial complex

As the global financial crisis has inevitably taken center stage, security contractors are not likely to figure in John McCain’s election agenda. In fact, other than a collection of brief statements, concrete policy proposals pertaining their use and control failed to materialize. Nevertheless, there is an item about the military-industrial complex that throws some light on his views about military outsourcing and contracting-out, broadly.

First, to recap, the notion of the military-industrial complex acquired a distinct meaning in the powerful farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. There, he warned us that: “…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. …We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In the 2005 documentary by Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight, the evolving relationship between the defense sector and government were given an up-to-date exploration. This is a well-researched and stimulating film. However, the approach towards Private Military Companies (security contractors on our terminology) is problematic. This is because PMCs are understood as part of the ‘military machinery of defense’. Indeed, training and support services linked to the supply of military hardware are aspects covered by some PMCs. Yet they render many more services in areas such as protection, risk assessment, intelligence, reconstruction assistance, and homeland security that are not strictly linked to defense. That is, the private military industry overlaps the defense sector in certain areas, but the two are not the same.

Senator McCain was twenty-five years old when Eisenhower issued his warning. Assimilating this knowledge during his formation years, he tends to see PMCs as a logical extension of an expanded defense sector and the military-industrial complex. In this light, in Why We Fight he states that over-billing abuses should be addressed. He had in mind certain controversies involving Halliburton-KBR. While we welcome stricter scrutiny and better regulation, McCain’s (and Jarecki’s) approach fails to capture the broader challenges and opportunities inherent in the use of PMCs. For instance, the over-billing in question involved services that fall outside defense.

PMCs are service oriented rather than capital intensive like the defense sector. Their control and regulation require flexible frameworks that do not necessarily apply to defense. It is somehow a different matter regulating services associated with the longer-term production and maintenance of defense capital than, for example, the fulfillment of a task order focusing on the swift deployment of security details or a mine-clearance team to the latest humanitarian crisis. This is not just a matter of semantics. If elected, McCain needs to acknowledge the distinctiveness of PMCs in order to coherently control force while harnessing PMCs’ potential to enhance global security in the twenty-first century.