Limits To Friendship: The United States And Mexico; The Challenge Of Interdependence: Mexico And The United States
Two important and innovative studies on the increasingly complex and important subject of U.S. relations with its large southern neighbor. In Limits to Friendship, two accomplished scholar-practitioners analyze why the U.S.-Mexican relationship is so often frustrating and conflict-ridden. In alternate and reciprocal chapters, they vividly illustrate the fact that the two countries are divided not only by vast asymmetries of power but also by a shared history each remembers and understands very differently. The Bilateral Commission report strives hard to overcome the differences and to present analyses and policy recommendations that can be endorsed by members of both the Mexican and the U.S. establishments; within the recognized limits of such consensual reports this volume is forthright on recommending that Mexico's debt service obligations be limited to levels consistent with the country's growth, and in proposing specific reforms on trade, immigration and investment policy.
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Survey of US economic problems, from budget deficits to the need for political and economic stability in Mexico.
As he reflected on the ironies of his first term, Ronald Reagan must have found it remarkable that so many difficulties had arisen in what he thought of as America's front yard. In comparison, the 1970s must have come to seem almost idyllic, at least on the surface; Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela had grown and prospered, the Panama Canal issue had been resolved. But then a double crisis--conflict in Central America and near bankruptcy almost everywhere--exploded just as Reagan's watch began.
Covers US foreign policy in Latin America during 1988, discussing (1) Nicaragua (2) Panama and the Noriega problem (3) drug trafficking (4) the progress towards democracy (5) the debt crisis. Concludes that future US policy will have to centre around Mexico and the Caribbean basin, but that this should not obscure America's long-term interest in a steadily-improving economic situation throughout Latin America.
