“Being the Good Guys”: SOUTHCOM’s Monroe Doctrine — CEPR

In testimony earlier this month, Admiral Craig S. Faller told Congress: “This Hemisphere in which we live is under assault…. We are losing our positional advantage in this Hemisphere and immediate action is needed to reverse this trend.” Faller was appointed commander of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM, responsible for overseeing US military activities in Latin America) by the Trump administration in 2018, despite his ties to a notoriously corrupt defense contractor. On March 16 of this year, he spoke at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing on the FY 2022 military budget. Hearings of this kind often serve as a platform for government officials to argue for larger budgets by highlighting both their agency’s successes and remaining challenges.

Given this context, the general thrust of Admiral Faller’s testimony is unsurprising: the US is under attack, and SOUTHCOM is defending it valiantly, but will need even more money to keep doing so. “The very democratic principles and values that bind us together,” he argues in the written version of his testimony, “are being actively undermined by violent transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and [China] and Russia.” Iran also aims to “take advantage of the nascent, fragile democracies in the region and look to exploit the region’s resources and proximity to the United States.” Finally, “malign regional actors” are “opening the door” to foreign influence and criminal organizations. However, Faller offered little evidence that these threats are really as dire as he made them out to be.

You can read the rest of this article at CEPR’s The Americas Blog.

Originally published at https://cepr.net on March 29, 2021.