Extending membership north-to-south

If you can't pull off an FTAA at this point in history, then open up USMCA

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

When I brief America’s New Map, I usually get the question, “Well, what can be done I the short term to get ready for this future?”

The answer is simple enough: create and/or enhance connectivity between North and South. As I say in the book:

After decades of East-West competition, conflict, and cooperation, there exist plenty of international institutions, rulesets, and negotiating venues to manage inter-superpower relations. What is missing is similar transnational tissue connecting North and South, just as the latter’s economic emergence is subject to sabotage by climate change’s expanding impact. Our five superpowers (US, EU, Russia, India, China), whether they realize it or not, are already engaged in a competition to invent, propagate, and secure those North-South lines of social networking, security cooperation, economic integration, and political consolidation.

To the victors go the spoils.

I did not offer a step-by-step agenda in the book, because I thought any such effort would be extremely presumptuous:

I have chosen not to present any detailed plan for executing the grand strategy here proposed. That is an admission of both how early we are in any such campaign—despite the clear strategic urgency—and the great complexity awaiting our future engagement. It is also my recognition that plenty of models exist out there for our examination, comparison, and reconfiguring—a task beyond any one book and arguably only achievable through listening to, and dialogue with, those hemispheric neighbors we deem most suitable for pioneering this path [emphasis mine]. Finally, I did not wish to impart the impression of this vision being somehow limited, in any application, to a small number of US government offices and agencies. As with all things globalization, I think our government enables while our business community creates and thereby leads.

This is why I and Throughline have already begun discussions with significant private-sector players in Central America: they see the long-term logic and want to do things to both un-encumber that pathway and socialize its validity across wider communities of interest.