Essays on Latin American Security
The Collected Writings of a Scholar-Implementer
by
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Setting
"World Systems, Challenges: 1993-2025," Reserve Officers Association National Security Report, The Officer, April, 1993.
"What national security strategy now should the West pursue?" is the question being asked. Everything from "keep the big stick" to "pass out the peace dividend" is being offered by politicians, intellectuals, and columnists.
National security professionals must begin the "what policy/strategy now?" exercise by examining a paradigmatic array of likely world systems, and next by determining a logical spectrum of challenges, threats, and destabilizers. Policy and strategy options can then flow logically with coherence.
The Tri-Polar Economic World replaced the Bi-Polar Political World in 1989, and it will define power well into the 21st century. Its components are, in descending order, the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA); the European Community (EC ’92); and the Pacific Rim Constellation. Their respective power components, until 2025, may be ranked.
Power |
Economic |
Political |
Military |
NAFTA |
1 |
1(tie) |
1 |
EC ’92 |
2 |
1(tie) |
2 |
PAC RIM |
3 |
3 |
3 |
Each giant in the triad has sub-constellations, some of these shared. For example, South America links to NAFTA, EC ’92, and PAC RIM, in that order, while Islamic North Africa links mostly to EC ’92.
The Two-Plus-Ten Military World is an arguable alternative, especially in view of Russian strategic rocket and submarine forces, which exist almost undiminished, while the US giddily devalues its strategic margin.
The "Ten" in this array are the regional powers, selected for regional military impact, not on a descending world military power scale. The "Ten" are, at present: Europe-Germany, France, and the United Kingdom; Asia-China, India, and South Korea; Middle East-Israel and Iran; Latin America-Brazil; Africa-Republic of South Africa.
Obviously, Ukraine, Cuba, Nigeria, Egypt, North Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Iraq and others would find advocates for inclusion, making the paradigm less clean but more durable.
The central idea is that there still are two military superpowers with global projection (the US and Russia), and an array of regional military powers with varied inter-regional projection.
Although the former East-West Power World died politically in 1989, its old paradigmatic rival, the North-South Economic World, is pragmatically alive. It is a by-product of Alfred Sauvey’s 1952 First World, Second World, Third World triad, a scheme that still appears in much international relations literature.
Little more than an intellectual parlor game at its inception, Sauvey’s paradigm was wildly outdated by the late 1960s and should now be allowed to expire quietly, and not to be confused with an arguably valid North-South Economic World array.
The Northern Constellation is a longitudinal arc stretching from Tokyo across the southern US to London, thence eastward to Warsaw. The Southern Constellation is the Group of 77, abandoned now by a few neo-giants from its original ranks and no longer able to spout with impunity the heady doctrines of neo-Marxist exploitation with supporting cheers from Moscow and Havana.
The central notion in this array, however, remains the Southern Constellation’s complaint that their lesser economic development is the fruit of unjust Northern Constellation policy.
Crossing political, economic, and military parameters with abandon is the Theologically Determinist World. Major components are: Protestant Christendom; Roman Catholic Christendom; Sunnite Islam; Shiite Islam; Pacific Islam; Marxist-Leninist Communism; Eastern Orthodox Christendom; Maoist-Leninist Communism; and loose constellations amid the global imprints of Africa’s Animism, South Asia’s Hinduism, mainland Asia’s Buddhism/Confucianism, Southeast Asia’s lesser Buddhism, and the Pacific Rim’s Shintoism.
Obviously, this paradigm is difficult to conceptualize, and yet threads of political, economic, and military power do, to some degree, track religious alignment. Also, Communism, viewed as a state religion, rates a sector in the calculus and competes for influence against older deistic faith systems.
The Mixed Paradigm World merits consideration. A single issue, say, access to minerals or regional pan-ethnic tension, can define itself within the political, economic, and military triad, and cross-paradigmatic alignments then arise. Thus, there could be, in a period, unification of economic interests with a religious interest, resulting in an altered military calculus. The 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War showed these tendencies.
The largest challenge to world peace, 1989-2025, is Regional Ethnic Conflict, the 200 vs. 4,000 Scenario. Since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, nation-states, a Western invention, have directed the world.
They are historically defined as global units of land and people having sovereignty, identified borders and population, acknowledged government, accepted themes of national unity, and functional economy.
While there are about 180 such nation-states in 1993, arguably 200 by the early 2000s, there already existed by 1989 some 4,000 ethnic minorities who do not accept their present nation-state affiliation. Rabid pan-Serbianism, in 1993, covets land in Bosnia and Croatia; comparable pan-Kurdish militancy envisions a kingdom composed of land in five existing nation-states; and French separatists in Canada’s Quebec crave autonomy. Non-acceptance of the nation-state fuels perhaps 20 armed conflicts in 1993 and is the greatest threat to world peace until 2025.
The second most likely challenge to world peace is Arms and Engineers for Hire. This syndrome arises from the confluence of three chilling trends: a flood of arms and weapons experts now available from the former USSR, contract-hungry Western arms producers, and the crescendo of regional conflict.
The Tri-Polar Economic World lacks the political and military control mechanisms to restrain this syndrome; indeed, both the Tri-Polar Economic World paradigms, if anything, fuel the arms-cum-engineers-for-cash traffic.
The third most likely cause of world conflict is Regional Pariah Regimes. Prototypical are Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim II Sung, and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Their support rests upon a mixture of perceived economic deprivation, national political ineptitude, and fantasy material. The ability of these regimes to initiate and sustain armed conflict is heavily dependent upon, and intertwined with, Regional Economic Conflict, and Arms and Engineers for Hire. Mass ideological movements
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Book Details
About the Book
"Security Issues in Latin America" is a compilation of previously published work by Dr. Russell W. Ramsey, from 1961 to 2002. The articles were published in academic journals such as Hispanic American Historical Review, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Inter-American Studies, Human Rights Review, and North-South Magazine; and in journals covering strategy and military affairs such as Parameters, Naval War College Review, Journal of Comparative Strategy, Strategic Review, Military Review, Infantry Magazine, and Journal of Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement. Latin American policy analysts will take note of Hemispheric events occurring at the time of each article's publication.
The book is divided into five topical sections. First, Ramsey lays out his own historiographical orientation, calling the region a unique amalgam of non-Western Africa, indigenous America, and late medieval Europe. The section on regional literature is his evaluation of several hundred works published during a long career. The section devoted to sub-regions examines areas that were once contested between communism and democracy. A section on the Republic of Colombia displays the author's long fascination with that tempestuous democracy. Finally, Ramsey's section on the US military tutelage of the Latin American armed forces contends that the US Army, primarily, took on the small but corporatist latino military forces in 1940 and contributed greatly to their professionalization under western democratic concepts by Cold War's end.
About the Author
Russell W. Ramsey, Ph.D., D. Min. is Graduate Professor of Hemispheric Security Studies for Norwich University and Troy State University. He is the nation's longest-standing and most published scholar who analyzes the Latin
American military and police forces, plus regional security issues. His philosophical outlook differs with standard ideological interpretations; he has military and national security service against which to measure his academic analysis of the Hemisphere; and his writings are offered here in their original published form, unedited, so that the reader can evaluate them against the events occurring at the date of original publication. Ramsey lectures at academic conferences frequently and directs his own Conference series at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, Ft. Benning, Georgia.