Overcoming international security rivalry: Parochial interest, anticommunism, and the domestic politics of rapprochement in Cold War Latin America

From Rome and Carthage to the United States and the Soviet Union, rivalries have defined international politics. Why and how do such protracted conflicts end? Are there paths to peace other than conquest or implosion? Conventional wisdom suggests that a common foe might induce even adversaries to cooperate; however, the effects of common threat on relations between rivals are remarkably inconsistent. In particular, I argue that the persistence of intra-bloc rivalries during the Cold War poses a fundamental puzzle for international relations theory: why did countries that aligned against the same superpower nonetheless continue to struggle against one another? To resolve this, I develop a parochial interest theory of rivalry and rapprochement. Agencies within each state's bureaucracy and armed forces develop vested interests in parochially beneficial missions derived from interstate rivalry, and defend these by sabotaging presidential rapprochement initiatives. A common foe provides alternative missions for state agencies, but they will attempt to add the new missions to their portfolio without giving up the old missions of rivalry. If the national economy declines, however, it forces state agencies to accept sharp policy tradeoffs and allows presidents a window of opportunity to achieve rapprochement. Against this argument, I test six alternative hypotheses drawn from realist, constructivist, and liberal traditions. Empirically, I turn to Latin America, home of nearly two thirds of the Cold War's intra-bloc rivalries. Why did consistent hemispheric anticommunism and the perceived threat of leftist insurgency usually not translate into effective regional conflict resolution? There are only two cases of successful rapprochement in Cold War Latin America, and I analyze each of them through rigorous qualitative comparisons to negative cases. Especially, field research in Argentina and Brazil, including archives and elite interviews, supports my within-case analysis of four sequential rapprochement attempts during the Cold War, including the summits of 1980 that set the stage for Mercosur. Why did repeated presidential efforts to achieve cooperation, under democratic as well as authoritarian regimes, fail so consistently and then succeed so dramatically? I find that national economic decline, triggered by the OPEC oil shocks, best explains the shift in foreign policy preferences. Second, through comparative analysis of Central American rivalries in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, drawing on declassified US foreign policy documents, I investigate why Nicaragua and Honduras achieved rapprochement in 1961 while Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and El Salvador and Honduras, did not. I find that national economic conditions (mediated, in these cases, by US foreign aid) exert powerful effects on the continuation or termination of rivalry. Finally, I extend my argument beyond Cold War Latin America, evaluating the prospects for the common foe of transnational terrorism to induce rapprochement among the governments of Muslim countries. I critique the uses and limitations of the Cold War analogy for the Global War on Terrorism, identify the most likely cases for rapprochement to emerge, conduct a preliminary out-of-area case study on the rivalry between Morocco and Algeria, and develop policy recommendations with respect to foreign military assistance, overseas troop deployments, and the promotion of human rights.