I'd guess we'd get more results sooner if we totally re-thought our longest Endless War, the War on Drugs.That certainly is a major factor in the failed/failing Central American states.
In addition, a revised War on Drugs could reduce urban crime, gun violence and incarceration.
I am not sure it is moral for the USA to go in to another country and "help" even if it is partially our fault like climate change. I am not sure the USA can or should really help. Claire C lays out a great case for the moral reason why we should go in but she does give practical examples like look at what we did in Somalia in 1992. Or look what we did in Libya in 2012. Giving those problematic governments money is not necessarily moral. Sending in the Marines and Army core of engineers is not necessarily moral. If those are my only 2 choices I will consider doing nothing as the most moral even though I know that does have human suffering .
We could pour money into training the security services of Central American states. That would definitely solve the violence problem, and nothing could possibly go wrong.
There is a saying that "What are the causes of poverty?" is the wrong question. The better question is "What are the causes of prosperity?". Certainly a prerequisite is a reasonably honest and competent government that can protect life and property and enforce contracts. The Central Americans countries in question lack this prerequisite.
So what's the answer? As a libertarian, I will pivot me from a conservative complaint to a progressive solution. Open borders. Let people leave countries that don't work. Contrary to Janet Yellin, I believe that governments should have to compete for the allegiance of individuals as well as industries.
For my eight bucks a month, can I please have the ability to edit a comment after posting? In your mind, please consider the "me" after "pivot" deleted.
It’s only 33 million people in those 3 countries; let’s just get settled into some high-density housing and be that much closer to 1 billion Americans.
And it just turns out agroforestry, a high carbon sequestration land use method, works really well in the Central American climate and the crops grown natively there. Stable income and food while drawing some carbon down.
As per usual more thoughtful and knowledgeable commenters have added great thoughts already.
So I'll chime in on the margins to ask why on earth poor countries would need or want fitness trails, when we are also talking about people in these areas having to sell their land to survive? Am I being patronizing and shuttered in thinking that fitness trails are not a priority? What do I not know about these countries and situations that turns this comment of Claire's into something other than absurd?
I mean a fitness trail might be good if brings in tourism. And that has long been an environment conservation tactic. Development of tourism industry to provide an economic incentive to protect the environment. I see that as a harder sell in El Salvador. Because crime is bad for tourism.
That climate change affects the region seems worth emphasizing. However, climate change is a global phenomenon, and focusing on (for example) reducing greenhouse gas emission in the Northern Triangle would have very modest effects on climate change and no special impact on this region. In contrast, better land management, including controlling zones of dense habitation and controlling erosion, especially via reforestation, could directly impact the region.
I am at bottom an open borders person on the belief that many people will go back and forth if it’s easy to do that. That said, I think it’s wrong to suggest we can fix the problem of migration when it essentially is unfixable. This is a problem we can at best manage using the tools that people like Claire have suggested. Anything more is a pipe dream the seeking of which will lead to no end of painful and expensive trouble.
This was an interesting and well-written piece, but unfortunately, I think most of it is not relevant to the fundamental problems of this region.
The endemic problems in Central America generally and the Northern Triangle specifically predate climate change and US meddling and would exist even if the US zeroed out carbon emissions tomorrow. And the root problem is weak governance that has allowed space for corruption and competing governing institutions, including the gangs.
Well-intentioned programs that purport to improve some metric by "x" percentage by doing "y" are not new, but such ivory-tower estimates always crashed into the reality of the fundamental issues of governance and corruption. Money and effort are sapped away and even when projects are completed, there is very rarely follow-through in terms of sustainment. US development efforts in the region end up very much as they have in Afghanistan - another country with weak governance, endemic violence, rampant corruption, and a low-trust society.
Weak governance in this region goes back to the mid-19th century when these countries became independent. Many local governments cannot provide basic services and are under the influence of organized violent groups. The notion that what local governments need is "better planning strategies" assumes a level of capacity, capability, independence, and influence that few local governments actually have.
These are problems the US can't really solve. The best things we could do are end the drug war and focus on efforts designed to improve governing capacity in these countries. But we shouldn't expect that even these things will do much considering the history of failure of historic US efforts to improve governance.
Is it not true that the US *could* solve these issues with a more interventionist foreign policy? Money and aid but backed up by military force and direct intervention in the government. The US has helped create successful countries in other parts of the world. Just because it failed in Afghanistan doesn't mean it could not succeed in another country.
I'm not aware of an instance where intervention has worked to create successful countries. People always point to Germany and Japan, but those examples are sui generis. There were no comparable examples before WWII and there have been none since. The most recent attempt was South Sudan which hasn't worked out well. We've been working on Somalia with several other countries and Somalia's neighbors for decades.
I don't think the historical record is good for pro-intervention policies.
And Germany and Japan were counties with high levels of industrial and organizational skill before U.S. intervention—we just didn’t like the ends of that organization. No wonder they were able to become stable and prosperous again after.
Yes, it's helpful in clarifying the problem that needs to be addressed. We can pump in resources to a country but if its government is weak and corrupt, and the resources get diverted to other actors and used for other purposes, then it's just a waste. You can write down all the budgets and plans you want, but that doesn't mean anything unless the resources are actually spent on the things they're supposed to be spent on. Weak governance is a real issue and one that needs to be addressed ahead of or at least alongside the other real issues facing these Central American countries.
Helpful for what? I don't understand the question.
Weak governance is a fundamental problem in any US effort to improve the domestic situation in any other country, not just those in Central America. The historical evidence for this is vast. It's a very real obstacle to actually accomplishing things, one that can't be ignored.
It's a tedious restatement of a critique that is oh - 40 years old at this point? And that has had several decades of responses as well.
It's entirely possible to have effective interventions in countries that seem like they have crappy governance. In fact the evidence for crappy governance is usually... the failure of interventions. The entire enterprise seems to post hoc theorizing to make people feel comfortable doing nothing.
'It's entirely possible to have effective interventions in countries that seem like they have crappy governance'. This is demonstrably untrue, but let's pretend that it isn't- shouldn't we, uh, start with Afghanistan, where we've been at war for 20 years now? Can you export your effective intervention strategies there first? Curiously the US & NATO have I guess simply chosen not to use said effective intervention, but seeing as you know more than the military, the State Department, USAID, the UN and so on- can you help fix Afghanistan first? Then once the obvious success is evident, you can export your methodologies to the Northern Triangle along with Syria, Libya and so on
If it's entirely possible to have the kinds of effective interventions described, then what real-world examples can you provide that prove this assertion?
Also, if crappy governance is the result of failing to intervene, then how do you explain Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.? Or the fact that the Northern Triangle countries are still a complete mess despite hundreds of millions a year in US aid and development programs?
I'd submit that history shows that successes are both rare and fleeting when governance is unstable and weak.
The "post hoc theorizing" is actually an analysis of the historical effectiveness of these kinds of programs and determining the reason why most of them do no live up to the promises of proponents.
Finally, I'm pointing this out not to make people feel comfortable about doing nothing, but to note that effectiveness matters as opposed to wishful thinking and good intentions.
The article is almost a parody of leftist thinking. We must solve climate change to solve immigration and gang violence and all these problems were created by the CIA so the US is morally culpable.
You know I try and say smart things in the comments here. But there’s always someone like you who are even smarter than I am. OK who am I kidding, 95% of you guys are smarter than me. It’s a very good analysis though
This article seems rather thin. We probably could’ve asked the average left-leaning highschooler what we should do, and they would’ve said the same thing. Take in refugees, give them money, build solar farms.
Quite frankly, if the root cause really is climate change, which I am not at all convinced it is. (I’m not saying that climate change is not happening, I’m just saying that these countries were poor and have been poor for a long time), Then any localized fix of building clean energy there won’t even make a dent to the global contributions of the issue.
As far as TPS goes, it’s almost never temporary, and should probably be reserved for immediate natural disasters. Perhaps we should allow more refugees and immigration from Central America, in a organized way, but I don’t see how this will really help the region. The latest studies show that 33%, or 10 million people would move to the United States if they could. Any TPS program would be looked upon as a permanent visa. We need to be real about these numbers. They are regions in the world which have it even worse than Central America.
I think we can do more, and I know it will take money, but I want to see concrete proposals. I suspect we should probably help them with their infrastructure as a whole. How to do this, technically in specifically is what I want to know.
I went down to Honduras when I was in the military, to help build roads with the army reserve. The poverty was striking. It would probably take one or two decades of enormous educational and infrastructure improvements to fix the problems.
And yes the United States is capable of that, but probably not at the same time as our haphazard efforts to try and fix Afghanistan or Iraq.
I think Noah Smith has the best solutions. We need to put massive amounts of research into new technologies, especially clean energy, and then license this to other countries for free.
Anyway, I’m hanging out in South Bend. Have to go to work at 1 PM to inspect a power plant that is having issues. I did spend the morning driving around the campus. It is beautiful, and I say that is a USC fan that doesn’t like Notre Dame.
We don't need to address all problems at the root cause. It's a perfectly reasonable worldview to say, "Climate change isn't at the root of poverty in the Northern Triangle, but it is an exacerbating factor and it's one we can address and make an effect at the margin."
But I'm skeptical. Climate change seems like a uniquely hard margin on which to drive meaningful change. The climate change we'll be experiencing for the next few decades is "baked in" now -- even if we stopped emitting carbon today, worldwide, we'd see decades of warming. Given that, how much meaningful change can we drive specifically for the Northern Triangle with policy today?
Yeah, I don't love takes that talk about how the US can solve an issue by reducing our emissions. As you say the effects are baked in and so any action we take (and we should take action, don't get me wrong!) is going to take a long time to show up - not applicable to reducing migration, wildfires, hurricanes, etc. over the next few years. And beyond that, the US is only responsible for 15% of world carbon emissions (https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions) so America is not close to solely responsible for climate change and cannot solve the problem itself regardless.
The Northern Triangle countries and Nicaragua are too small and resource-starved. They used to be states of Federal Republic of Central America and before that they were states within Mexico. It may be time to go back to one of those arrangements.
The U.S. could offer significant resources for rebuilding to help with the transition. The people of those countries deserve to be part of a larger country with sufficient resources to give them good lives. The current arrangement is unworkable.
For comparison purposes - Guatemala has a population about the same as the Netherlands and is about two and half times larger in land area. Honduras has about the same population as Switzerland with about twice the land area. Or slightly smaller population than Sweden but much one fourth the land area (though most of Sweden is very sparsely populated).
All to say that its not resources or population that is causing these countries to be impoverished. If they were able to institute a strong civic society, they would be just fine. The problem is that they have been unable to do that.
I do wonder whether these microstates are actually viable in the modern world. I know self-determination, national pride, ethnic & cultural identity and all that but still...I can't help but feel that the world is trending towards a kind of "scale is necessary". No one is going to bother negotiating a trade deal or setting up factories or warehouses or importing fruit or whatever if your scale is too small to make it worth the organizational overhead of yet another supplier.
On the other hand we have lots of experience with Belgium, the UK, the US, Italy, etc that internal transfers to support perennially lagging regions aren't exactly super-popular and unquestioned either.
So just merging them back into larger polities doesn't seem like a great path forward, either. Dunno. But it seems unlikely they are all going to develop in New Zealand. Heck, even New Zealand is kind of struggling to stay New Zealand.
I'm suspicious of mixing up policy objectives. I can see no more reason to subsidize reduction in CO2 emissions in CA than in Canada or Chad (apart from not thinking that subsiding clean energy instead of taxing net CO2 emissions is a bad idea).
TPS is as valid as it is whether the disaster is climate change related or not.
I'd guess we'd get more results sooner if we totally re-thought our longest Endless War, the War on Drugs.That certainly is a major factor in the failed/failing Central American states.
In addition, a revised War on Drugs could reduce urban crime, gun violence and incarceration.
Great article - enjoyed it and look forward to the next one!
I am not sure it is moral for the USA to go in to another country and "help" even if it is partially our fault like climate change. I am not sure the USA can or should really help. Claire C lays out a great case for the moral reason why we should go in but she does give practical examples like look at what we did in Somalia in 1992. Or look what we did in Libya in 2012. Giving those problematic governments money is not necessarily moral. Sending in the Marines and Army core of engineers is not necessarily moral. If those are my only 2 choices I will consider doing nothing as the most moral even though I know that does have human suffering .
We could pour money into training the security services of Central American states. That would definitely solve the violence problem, and nothing could possibly go wrong.
There is a saying that "What are the causes of poverty?" is the wrong question. The better question is "What are the causes of prosperity?". Certainly a prerequisite is a reasonably honest and competent government that can protect life and property and enforce contracts. The Central Americans countries in question lack this prerequisite.
So what's the answer? As a libertarian, I will pivot me from a conservative complaint to a progressive solution. Open borders. Let people leave countries that don't work. Contrary to Janet Yellin, I believe that governments should have to compete for the allegiance of individuals as well as industries.
Yeah. Poverty should be considered the default norm. Anything more than "abjectly poor" requires some form of societal effort.
For my eight bucks a month, can I please have the ability to edit a comment after posting? In your mind, please consider the "me" after "pivot" deleted.
It’s only 33 million people in those 3 countries; let’s just get settled into some high-density housing and be that much closer to 1 billion Americans.
Yes!
And it just turns out agroforestry, a high carbon sequestration land use method, works really well in the Central American climate and the crops grown natively there. Stable income and food while drawing some carbon down.
Yes. Planting more fruit trees is also a really good idea.
As per usual more thoughtful and knowledgeable commenters have added great thoughts already.
So I'll chime in on the margins to ask why on earth poor countries would need or want fitness trails, when we are also talking about people in these areas having to sell their land to survive? Am I being patronizing and shuttered in thinking that fitness trails are not a priority? What do I not know about these countries and situations that turns this comment of Claire's into something other than absurd?
I mean a fitness trail might be good if brings in tourism. And that has long been an environment conservation tactic. Development of tourism industry to provide an economic incentive to protect the environment. I see that as a harder sell in El Salvador. Because crime is bad for tourism.
That climate change affects the region seems worth emphasizing. However, climate change is a global phenomenon, and focusing on (for example) reducing greenhouse gas emission in the Northern Triangle would have very modest effects on climate change and no special impact on this region. In contrast, better land management, including controlling zones of dense habitation and controlling erosion, especially via reforestation, could directly impact the region.
I am at bottom an open borders person on the belief that many people will go back and forth if it’s easy to do that. That said, I think it’s wrong to suggest we can fix the problem of migration when it essentially is unfixable. This is a problem we can at best manage using the tools that people like Claire have suggested. Anything more is a pipe dream the seeking of which will lead to no end of painful and expensive trouble.
Thanks for the interesting article on this important topic, Claire. Looking forward to future articles
Climate Gangs.
That is all.
This was an interesting and well-written piece, but unfortunately, I think most of it is not relevant to the fundamental problems of this region.
The endemic problems in Central America generally and the Northern Triangle specifically predate climate change and US meddling and would exist even if the US zeroed out carbon emissions tomorrow. And the root problem is weak governance that has allowed space for corruption and competing governing institutions, including the gangs.
Well-intentioned programs that purport to improve some metric by "x" percentage by doing "y" are not new, but such ivory-tower estimates always crashed into the reality of the fundamental issues of governance and corruption. Money and effort are sapped away and even when projects are completed, there is very rarely follow-through in terms of sustainment. US development efforts in the region end up very much as they have in Afghanistan - another country with weak governance, endemic violence, rampant corruption, and a low-trust society.
Weak governance in this region goes back to the mid-19th century when these countries became independent. Many local governments cannot provide basic services and are under the influence of organized violent groups. The notion that what local governments need is "better planning strategies" assumes a level of capacity, capability, independence, and influence that few local governments actually have.
These are problems the US can't really solve. The best things we could do are end the drug war and focus on efforts designed to improve governing capacity in these countries. But we shouldn't expect that even these things will do much considering the history of failure of historic US efforts to improve governance.
Is it not true that the US *could* solve these issues with a more interventionist foreign policy? Money and aid but backed up by military force and direct intervention in the government. The US has helped create successful countries in other parts of the world. Just because it failed in Afghanistan doesn't mean it could not succeed in another country.
I'm not aware of an instance where intervention has worked to create successful countries. People always point to Germany and Japan, but those examples are sui generis. There were no comparable examples before WWII and there have been none since. The most recent attempt was South Sudan which hasn't worked out well. We've been working on Somalia with several other countries and Somalia's neighbors for decades.
I don't think the historical record is good for pro-intervention policies.
And Germany and Japan were counties with high levels of industrial and organizational skill before U.S. intervention—we just didn’t like the ends of that organization. No wonder they were able to become stable and prosperous again after.
Is this "it's weak governance" throw up your hands-ism really helpful?
Yes, it's helpful in clarifying the problem that needs to be addressed. We can pump in resources to a country but if its government is weak and corrupt, and the resources get diverted to other actors and used for other purposes, then it's just a waste. You can write down all the budgets and plans you want, but that doesn't mean anything unless the resources are actually spent on the things they're supposed to be spent on. Weak governance is a real issue and one that needs to be addressed ahead of or at least alongside the other real issues facing these Central American countries.
Helpful for what? I don't understand the question.
Weak governance is a fundamental problem in any US effort to improve the domestic situation in any other country, not just those in Central America. The historical evidence for this is vast. It's a very real obstacle to actually accomplishing things, one that can't be ignored.
It's a tedious restatement of a critique that is oh - 40 years old at this point? And that has had several decades of responses as well.
It's entirely possible to have effective interventions in countries that seem like they have crappy governance. In fact the evidence for crappy governance is usually... the failure of interventions. The entire enterprise seems to post hoc theorizing to make people feel comfortable doing nothing.
'It's entirely possible to have effective interventions in countries that seem like they have crappy governance'. This is demonstrably untrue, but let's pretend that it isn't- shouldn't we, uh, start with Afghanistan, where we've been at war for 20 years now? Can you export your effective intervention strategies there first? Curiously the US & NATO have I guess simply chosen not to use said effective intervention, but seeing as you know more than the military, the State Department, USAID, the UN and so on- can you help fix Afghanistan first? Then once the obvious success is evident, you can export your methodologies to the Northern Triangle along with Syria, Libya and so on
You may find the truth "tedious" but Andy is, unfortunately, correct.
If it's entirely possible to have the kinds of effective interventions described, then what real-world examples can you provide that prove this assertion?
Also, if crappy governance is the result of failing to intervene, then how do you explain Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.? Or the fact that the Northern Triangle countries are still a complete mess despite hundreds of millions a year in US aid and development programs?
I'd submit that history shows that successes are both rare and fleeting when governance is unstable and weak.
The "post hoc theorizing" is actually an analysis of the historical effectiveness of these kinds of programs and determining the reason why most of them do no live up to the promises of proponents.
Finally, I'm pointing this out not to make people feel comfortable about doing nothing, but to note that effectiveness matters as opposed to wishful thinking and good intentions.
The article is almost a parody of leftist thinking. We must solve climate change to solve immigration and gang violence and all these problems were created by the CIA so the US is morally culpable.
The article literally doesn't mention the CIA anywhere. Have you actually read it?
You got me - I haven't read it. And regardless, the CIA has never interfered in LatAm elections, so I also apologize for sullying their good name.
You know I try and say smart things in the comments here. But there’s always someone like you who are even smarter than I am. OK who am I kidding, 95% of you guys are smarter than me. It’s a very good analysis though
Great work, thank you!
This article seems rather thin. We probably could’ve asked the average left-leaning highschooler what we should do, and they would’ve said the same thing. Take in refugees, give them money, build solar farms.
Quite frankly, if the root cause really is climate change, which I am not at all convinced it is. (I’m not saying that climate change is not happening, I’m just saying that these countries were poor and have been poor for a long time), Then any localized fix of building clean energy there won’t even make a dent to the global contributions of the issue.
As far as TPS goes, it’s almost never temporary, and should probably be reserved for immediate natural disasters. Perhaps we should allow more refugees and immigration from Central America, in a organized way, but I don’t see how this will really help the region. The latest studies show that 33%, or 10 million people would move to the United States if they could. Any TPS program would be looked upon as a permanent visa. We need to be real about these numbers. They are regions in the world which have it even worse than Central America.
I think we can do more, and I know it will take money, but I want to see concrete proposals. I suspect we should probably help them with their infrastructure as a whole. How to do this, technically in specifically is what I want to know.
I went down to Honduras when I was in the military, to help build roads with the army reserve. The poverty was striking. It would probably take one or two decades of enormous educational and infrastructure improvements to fix the problems.
And yes the United States is capable of that, but probably not at the same time as our haphazard efforts to try and fix Afghanistan or Iraq.
I think Noah Smith has the best solutions. We need to put massive amounts of research into new technologies, especially clean energy, and then license this to other countries for free.
Anyway, I’m hanging out in South Bend. Have to go to work at 1 PM to inspect a power plant that is having issues. I did spend the morning driving around the campus. It is beautiful, and I say that is a USC fan that doesn’t like Notre Dame.
Hope everyone is having a good weekend.
We don't need to address all problems at the root cause. It's a perfectly reasonable worldview to say, "Climate change isn't at the root of poverty in the Northern Triangle, but it is an exacerbating factor and it's one we can address and make an effect at the margin."
But I'm skeptical. Climate change seems like a uniquely hard margin on which to drive meaningful change. The climate change we'll be experiencing for the next few decades is "baked in" now -- even if we stopped emitting carbon today, worldwide, we'd see decades of warming. Given that, how much meaningful change can we drive specifically for the Northern Triangle with policy today?
Yeah, I don't love takes that talk about how the US can solve an issue by reducing our emissions. As you say the effects are baked in and so any action we take (and we should take action, don't get me wrong!) is going to take a long time to show up - not applicable to reducing migration, wildfires, hurricanes, etc. over the next few years. And beyond that, the US is only responsible for 15% of world carbon emissions (https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions) so America is not close to solely responsible for climate change and cannot solve the problem itself regardless.
And this region is probably only responsible for 1% of emissions, so giving them solar plants, while a good thing, won't change anything.
The Northern Triangle countries and Nicaragua are too small and resource-starved. They used to be states of Federal Republic of Central America and before that they were states within Mexico. It may be time to go back to one of those arrangements.
The U.S. could offer significant resources for rebuilding to help with the transition. The people of those countries deserve to be part of a larger country with sufficient resources to give them good lives. The current arrangement is unworkable.
For comparison purposes - Guatemala has a population about the same as the Netherlands and is about two and half times larger in land area. Honduras has about the same population as Switzerland with about twice the land area. Or slightly smaller population than Sweden but much one fourth the land area (though most of Sweden is very sparsely populated).
All to say that its not resources or population that is causing these countries to be impoverished. If they were able to institute a strong civic society, they would be just fine. The problem is that they have been unable to do that.
I do wonder whether these microstates are actually viable in the modern world. I know self-determination, national pride, ethnic & cultural identity and all that but still...I can't help but feel that the world is trending towards a kind of "scale is necessary". No one is going to bother negotiating a trade deal or setting up factories or warehouses or importing fruit or whatever if your scale is too small to make it worth the organizational overhead of yet another supplier.
On the other hand we have lots of experience with Belgium, the UK, the US, Italy, etc that internal transfers to support perennially lagging regions aren't exactly super-popular and unquestioned either.
So just merging them back into larger polities doesn't seem like a great path forward, either. Dunno. But it seems unlikely they are all going to develop in New Zealand. Heck, even New Zealand is kind of struggling to stay New Zealand.
I'm suspicious of mixing up policy objectives. I can see no more reason to subsidize reduction in CO2 emissions in CA than in Canada or Chad (apart from not thinking that subsiding clean energy instead of taxing net CO2 emissions is a bad idea).
TPS is as valid as it is whether the disaster is climate change related or not.