The first book-length treatment of the Clinton administration's Latin American policies, this timely study reads like an insider's account, based in part on interviews and roundtable discussions with more than 50 participants in the Latin American foreign policy process during these years--from career diplomats to political appointees, White House insiders to jaded professionals. In his balanced analysis of an administration that made some progress in Latin American relations, the author reluctantly concludes that the Clinton presidency failed to build on the favorable international and regional context and on opportunities inherited from the George H. W. Bush administration. The study offers a multifaceted explanation for why Clinton's Latin American policy was, on balance, not able to accomplish many of its objectives in spite of some important successes, including the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the historic Summit of the Americas. Citing the collapse of the Governor's Island accords to return democracy to Haiti and Clinton's reluctant signing of the Helms-Burton bill that imposed new restrictions on Cuba as among the administration's failures, the author allows that policymakers were often handicapped by limitations of leadership at various levels, bureaucratic politics, a lack of resources, unexpected events, competing policy priorities, and the influence of domestic politics. In addition, Clinton and his senior-level advisers showed only sporadic interest in Latin America, which, among other factors, had the effect of hamstringing mid-level policy advocates. Such constraints, rather than a lack of vision or a failure to articulate policy objectives, appear to explain why the administration failed to exploit effectively the historic opening for a new post-Cold War approach to U.S.-Latin American relations. This timely study will be a valuable reference for the foreign policy community at large and for students and scholars of international relations.

In January 1995, fighting broke out between Ecuadorian and Peruvian military forces in a remote section of the Amazon. It took more than three years and the interplay of multiple actors and factors to achieve a definitive peace agreement, thus ending what had been the region's oldest unresolved border dispute. This conflict and its resolution provide insights about other unresolved and/or disputed land and sea boundaries which involve almost every country in the Western Hemisphere. Drawing on extensive field research at the time of the dispute and during its aftermath, including interviews with high-ranking diplomats and military officials, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace is the first book-length study to relate this complex border dispute and its resolution to broader theories of conflict. The findings emphasize an emerging leadership approach in which individuals are not mere captives of power and institutions. In addition, the authors illuminate an overlap in national and international arenas in shaping effective articulation, perception, and selection of policy. In the "new" democratic Latin America that emerged in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, historical memory remains influential in shaping the context of disputes, in spite of presumed U.S. post-Cold War influence. This study offers important, broader perspectives on a hemisphere still rife with boundary disputes as a rising number of people and products (including arms) pass through these borderlands.