Our Special Correspondent

Although the United States must think and deploy strategically in every hemisphere, it is here in its own that it confronts some of the greatest challenges to American peace and prosperity. Richly provided with energy, farmlands, potable water, and other natural resources, Latin Americans have nevertheless stumbled from one failed regime to another, often looking to fulfill the words of the real author of the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Ad- ams, who saw in 1823 a continent “stamped with arbitrary power and civil dissension,” far more likely to become “a domicile of despotism” than “a house of freedom.