How U.S. Can Compete With China in Latin America.

• Author: Ellis, R. Evan

During the Cold War, the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union forced attention to the question of whether government, or free markets and private property, best supported achieving the broad range of human desires from prosperity to security to dignity.

That debate played out in a range of centers of thinking, political movements and insurgencies across the globe, although the core philosophical question was colored by perceptions in the developing world of the benefits that "capitalism" had brought to them, as well as the complex historical relationships with the United States and former colonial powers as its champions.

The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to settle the question in favor of capitalism, perhaps best symbolized in Francis Fukuyama's iconic essay "The End of History?" Latin America, among other parts of the world, was temporarily infected by the idea that capitalism was the best route, with a wave of conservative and neoliberal governments elected in the 1990s such as Raul Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, and Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in Bolivia, among others.

The diverse group of leftist governments that came to power in the early 2000s, from populist socialists such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia, to more moderate social democratic coalitions such as the Workers Party government in Brazil, the Concertacion in Chile and Frente Amplio in Uruguay, reflected the inability of neoliberal policies to satisfactorily address the region's problems.

Yet the range of political responses also reflected a diversity of thinking about why Latin America's neoliberal moment had not satisfied elevated hopes and what was the best path forward. Latin America's latest "turn to the left" is both broader than the region's last "pink tide," and arguably more problematic for the United States in strategic terms, with increased challenges to U.S. security, migration, and economic cooperation with the region's partners, decreased leverage to pursue its policy objectives in bilateral and multilateral forums, and possibly greater opportunities for the People's Republic of China to expand its presence in the region.

While Latin America's new left is diverse, in both its ideology and commitment to democracy, the new political landscape also highlights a monumental shift across the hemisphere, including in the United States, with respect...