Coming in the wake of growing tension with Brazil over Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to Latin America—her seventh in 18 months—provided a boost for Washington’s uneasy relations with the region. Despite continuing discord over Honduras, the OAS’s annual gathering of the hemisphere’s foreign ministers was largely free of the contention of last year’s session. In Quito, Secretary Clinton managed to put a smile on the face of Venezuelan ally President Rafael Correa and defuse some of the strains in US-Ecuadoran relations. Her visit to Bogota helped reassure Colombians of a sustained US commitment to their battle against guerrillas and drug mafias, even if final approval of their free trade agreement was still a way off. In Barbados, the Secretary announced stepped up US funding for fighting drug criminals in the Caribbean, which the island countries had been clamoring for for some time.

It was, however, jarring to hear Secretary Clinton’s frequent reference to the nations of the Western Hemisphere as a “community.” At the OAS meeting, she talked about values that “bind us together as a community of nations.” Speaking in Ecuador, she pledged to foster a “truer community of the Americas.”  I must admit that I wrote a report in 1993 on hemispheric relations entitled “Convergence and Community.” But, that was when US, Mexico, and Canada pledged to join their economies by ratifying the NAFTA free trade agreement. The following year every nation of the Americas (except Cuba) agreed to negotiate a hemisphere-wide free trade arrangement, to create a trade and economic bloc that could compete globally.  Also in the early 1990s, OAS resolutions called for collective action by every member country to defend democracy when it is threatened. Since then, however, negotiations toward an economically integrated hemisphere have broken down. Although the Inter-American Democratic Charter, extending the earlier OAS resolutions, was approved in 2001, it has, sadly, gone unused, and today there is no serious consensus on how to deal with violations of democratic practice. The fact is that the concept of a Western Hemisphere community no longer fits very well with the realities of Inter-American affairs, and that not much can be done to resuscitate it.

It is not simply that progress toward economic and political cooperation in the Americas has stalled. A variety of centrifugal forces have also come into play.  Some Latin American countries are busy promoting new multilateral arrangements that would exclude the United States and Canada, and define a narrower community of South American nations, or of Latin American and Caribbean nations. This is not necessarily an unhealthy trend nor should it be considered a blow to US interests, but it raises doubts about the notion of a hemispheric community. So do the cross-cutting ideological and political divisions among the countries of Latin America, compounded by their disagreements over the appropriate US role in the region. Although it may be a passing phenomenon, Washington today confronts a larger number of declared adversaries than any time in recent memory (although aside from Venezuela, they are so far all relatively small, unstable countries). Moreover, the US is increasingly competing with external actors for influence in the region–particularly China, which is now the leading trade partner for South America’s two largest economies, Brazil and Argentina.

To be sure, almost every Latin American nation wants good relations with the US, especially on the economic front. Every government, including US adversaries, understands how vital the US economy is to their economic future, how much they need US investment capital, export markets, family remittances, and technology. Yet, not many Latin American leaders would today endorse Secretary Clinton’s view of the hemisphere as a community.

The central question is whether that view is an innocuous overstatement, or whether it distorts the reality of US relations in the Americas in a way that produces bad policy. My sense is that Secretary Clinton’s portrayal of the hemisphere as an aspiring community has not yet much affected political judgments or policy decisions. The danger is that Washington may begin to believe that the manifest strains in the hemisphere can somehow be easily remedied because we are all part of a community.  I would urge the Secretary to travel even more frequently to Latin America, where she has amply demonstrated the value of  personal diplomacy—and encourage her to discontinue, at least for a time, efforts to devise a conceptual approach to inter-American relations, and instead, focus hard on addressing the concrete challenges confronting the US in the region—including the need to strengthen economic ties, contain the growing frictions with the Brazil, and forcefully deal with immigration reform and drug policy issues which are so central to US relations with Mexico and to other near neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean.