2012-02-21 How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power

with authors:

Stephen Clarkson, professor of political economy, University of Toronto, and former senior fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center
Matto Mildenberger, PhD student, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

discussants:

Francisco Gonzalez, associate professor, Riordan Roett Chair in Latin American Studies, The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Tamara Woroby, professor of economics, Towson University
In Dependent America?, Stephen Clarkson and Matto Mildenberger explore the extent to which U.S. power is a function of its capacity to mobilize other states’ material and moral support. Dependent America? establishes that Canada and Mexico are the largest of all these foreign determinants of U.S. power, particularly in matters of economic, security, and global affairs. At a time when the challenge to U.S. global hegemony is again on the policy agenda, the book has a message for U.S. policymakers: “do not throttle the goose that lays the golden egg by building security walls that are strangling the United States’ most productive foreign economic relationship.”