Robert A. Pastor

The new epilogue to Condemned to Repetition covers events, such as the Arias peace plan and the debate over funding for the Contras, through February 1988.

In its first seven years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tripled trade and quintupled foreign investment among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, increasing its share of the world economy. In 2001, however, North America peaked. Since then, trade has slowed among the three, manufacturing has shrunk, and illegal migration and drug-related violence have soared. At the same time, Europe caught up, and China leaped ahead. In The North American Idea , eminent scholar and policymaker Robert A. Pastor explains that NAFTA's mandate was too limited to address the new North American agenda. Instead of offering bold initiatives like a customs union to expand trade, leaders of the three nations thought small. Interest groups stalemated the small ideas while inhibiting the bolder proposals, and the governments accomplished almost nothing.To overcome this resistance and reinvigorate the continent, the leaders need to start with an idea based on a principle of interdependence. Pastor shows how this idea--once woven into the national consciousness of the three countries--could mobilize public support for continental solutions to problems like infrastructure and immigration that have confounded each nation working on its own. Providing essential historical context and challenging readers to view the continent in a new way, The North American Idea combines an expansive vision with a detailed blueprint for a more integrated, dynamic, and equitable North America.

هذا الكتاب قراءة أساسية لمن يرغب أن يفهم الشبكة المعقدة للقوة العالمية: إنجلترا، وفرنسا، وألمانيا، وروسيا، والولايات المتحدة، التى كانت - ومازالت - تهيمن على العالم مع مطلع القرن العشرين حتى الآن. إن مساهمة الكتاب البارزة هى تحليله الموثوق للسياسات الخارجية لكل الدول العظمى. المؤلفون خبراء مشهورون فى البلدان التى يغطونها، يحددون بشكل حاذق القوى المحورية التى شكلت سياسات كل دولة خلال السنوات المائة الماضية.

In this second edition of Exiting the Whirlpool, Pastor explores the continuities and the changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Whereas many foreign policy volumes neglect the role of Congress, Pastor devotes an entire chapter to explaining how it has shaped policy. Next, he looks at the recurring challenges that have often pulled the United States into the destructive whirlpool—how the United States has tried but often failed to manage succession crises, pre-empt or undermine revolutionaries, promote or manipulate elections, and encourage or neglect the region’s economic development. Pastor offers a series of far-reaching policy recommendations for exiting the whirlpool and forging a hemispheric community of democracies within a free trade area. The first edition was widely acclaimed. The second is thoroughly updated, offering analyses and recommendations for addressing the contemporary democratic and security challenges facing the hemisphere.

An unfettered, probing dialogue between Mexican and American political analysts on the complex relationship between their countries.Few nations are as closely interrelated as the United States and Mexico. Few relationships between nations are so prickly. America's inveterate problem-solving strikes Mexicans as clandestine imperialism. Mexicans are accused of ignoring the flow of drugs through their country; Americans are accused of saddling Mexico with their drug problem. Americans brood over the influx of Mexican immigrants; Mexicans worry that their culture and traditions are being diluted from the north.These differences are now aired−and their origins made clear−in this landmark book by a former official in the Carter administration and one of Mexico's most respected political scholars. In alternating chapters on foreign policy, economic relations, immigration, and social influence, Robert A. Pastor and JorgeC. Castañeda offer a multifaceted view of the ties and conflicts between their countries.

Through the fall of Anastasio Somoza, the rise of the Sandinistas, and the contra war, the United States and Nicaragua seemed destined to repeat the mistakes made by the U.S. and Cuba forty years before. The 1990 election in Nicaragua broke the pattern. Robert Pastor was a major US policymaker in the critical period leading up to and following the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. A decade later after writing the first edition of this book, he organized the International Mission led by Jimmy Carter that mediated the first free election in Nicaragua’s history. From his unique vantage point, and utilizing a wealth of original material from classified government documents and from personal interviews with U.S. and Nicaraguan leaders, Pastor shows how Nicaragua and the United States were prisoners of a tragic history and how they finally escaped. This revised and updated edition covers the events of the democratic transition, and it extracts the lessons to be learned from the past.

Robert Pastor maintains that the collapse of Communism is less important in permitting the United States to escape the whirlpool of Latin American politics than are the new trends of democracy and freer trade in the region.

The Mexican peso crisis struck in late December 1994, coinciding with a new Mexican administration and the end of the first year of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The crisis poignantly highlighted the success and the inadequacy of the treaty―success in the expansion of trade and capital flows, and inadequacy in institutional capacity. The Canadian, Mexican, and US governments defined the agreement so narrowly that they failed to devise a mechanism that could monitor, anticipate, plan, or even respond to such a serious problem. The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has boldly proposed transforming the free trade area into a common market like Europe's.In this visionary study, Robert A. Pastor seizes Fox's idea and maps out the paths toward making it a reality. He analyzes NAFTA's successes and shortcomings, extracts lessons from the European Union's 40 years of reducing disparities between rich and poor countries, and proposes ways that NAFTA can adapt and incorporate those lessons. The centerpiece of the book is a detailed proposal for new institutions and "North American plans" for infrastructure and transportation, immigration and customs, and projects aimed at lifting the poorer regions. This book is the first to propose a detailed approach to a North American Community―different from the European Common Market but drawing lessons from its experience. It will be of considerable interest to policymakers as well as researchers and students of international political economy, world trade, and foreign affairs.

El autor, antiguo colaborador en el gobierno de Jimmy Carter, llama “remolino” al involucramiento errático de Estados Unidos en conflictos latinoamericanos, y a su incapacidad para resolverlos adecuadamente. La invasión de Panamá es el último ejemplo. Tras el final de la guerra fría, el profesor Pastor ve perspectivas halagüeñas fundadas en la ampliación de las formas democráticas en Latinoamérica y en el crecimiento de las relaciones económicas entre los países del continente.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

In 1994, two political events occurred that would have been inconceivable just five years the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was launched, and Republicans took control of the U.S. Congress for the first time in 40 years. NAFTA aimed to bind the three North American economies after more than a century in which Mexico and Canada had struggled to keep their distance from the United States. Ironically, at the very moment that Canada and Mexico risked a closer embrace, a new inward-looking U.S. Congress took office, less sensitive to neighbors or international obligations. Concerned Mexicans and Canadians Was it possible to advance NAFTA's goals if the U.S. Congress stepped on the brakes? This book looks at the NAFTA integration process by focusing on the U.S. Congress. More independent and influential than the Canadian Parliament or Mexican legislature, the U.S. Congress seeks to shape the river banks within which North American integration runs its course, but often it just dams the river. The book presents the work of scholars from Mexico, Canada, and the United States who propose changes in congressional policymaking in order to facilitate a smoother and deeper process of integration within North America. The chapter authors are I. M. Destler, Neil Nevitte, Kim Richard Nossal, Miguel Basañez, Norman J. Ornstein, and George W. Grayson.

This book enters the complex discussion of trade relations between the United States and Mexico in the present global market. There are many options available for future policy in trade.