Latin America, the Good Neighbor, and the Global Second World War

This lecture, presented to the ground-breaking conference on “The Good Neighbor Policy in Time of War” in Rio de Janeiro, seeks to locate the Good Neighbor Policy—and U.S. relations with Latin America more broadly—in the context of the global crisis produced by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the world war that followed. We argue that the Good Neighbor is best understood as a war policy, designed first to advance the construction of a U.S.-led autarkic bloc in the Americas—in parallel to other autarkic-imperial projects developed during the 1930s—and then to leverage hemispheric hegemony to support the creation of Washington’s global predominance after 1945. From this point of view, we conclude that rather than being marginal to historical accounts of the world war—or even absent entirely—Latin America should be placed at the center of the story, functioning both as a ‘springboard’ to the U.S. victory and as the indispensable regional bedrock of Washington’s coming global hegemony.