3 Takeaways - Former Foreign Minister of Mexico, Jorge Castañeda: America Through Foreign Eyes (#21)
Episode Date: December 29, 2020Jorge Castañeda, former foreign minister of Mexico, provides a unique perspective on America and the world, including American interventions abroad, American exceptionalism and how it has changed ove...r time, and how Latino immigrants are changing the US. Learn how transforming inventions into consumable goods continues to be an almost uniquely American talent and capability.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers.
Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers.
And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman.
Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone.
It's Lynn Thoman.
Welcome to another episode.
Today, I am delighted to be here with Jorge Castaneda, former foreign minister of Mexico.
He will provide a unique perspective on America and the world, both as a former foreign minister
of Mexico, as well as someone who has lived the American experience as a student, a recurring
visitor, and now as a university professor. Welcome, Jorge, and thanks so much for being
here today. Thank you, Lynn. It's a pleasure to be with you. Let's start with some perspective
of America through foreign eyes by talking about U.S. interventions around the world.
Americans don't see themselves as interventionists,
and if asked about American interventions, most would mention World Wars I and II,
Vietnam and Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. But you, as a former foreign minister of Mexico,
and now as a university professor, would cite many others. Since about 1900,
how many interventions have there actually been?
Well, I guess it depends how you add them up. In a recent book, America Through Foreign Eyes,
I tried to come up with a table of different forms of intervention that have taken place
in Latin America since the first part of the 19th century. and the number goes well over 50. Some of them are very well
known to Americans. The invasion of Mexico in 1846-48, the involvement in what Americans call
the Spanish-American War in 1899 in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the agreement signed with a country
that was invented in order to build a canal there with Panama,
and then throughout most of the first half of the 20th century, countless disembarkments or
invasions or occupations, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti.
Then we go on to the less well-known or less direct forms of intervention that came later, although,
of course, it's worthwhile recalling that of the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Linda Johnson
was president, but also forms of intervention that, as I say, were less direct in Guatemala in 1954,
in Chile in 1970-73, in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the late 70s and early 80s,
so-called Contra War, in Panama again in 1989.
What do you see as the number one issue and objective for America today regarding Mexico?
Well, I think it continues. The overriding American interest in Mexico since the beginning
of the 20th century,
since the Mexican Revolution, really has been Mexican stability. The United States has
basically formulated a foreign policy with regard to Mexico that says, one, Mexico has to remain
stable. It doesn't have to be governed democratically or honestly. We prefer that.
If that doesn't happen, it doesn't matter so much as long as the place is stable. And secondly, no Mexican foreign alliances with
enemies of the United States, whether it be Germany during World War I or Germany during
World War II or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Mexico wants to be friends with this country, that country, that's
fine, we don't care, but no fooling around with adversaries of the United States. And those two
pillars of American policy toward Mexico continue to be in place. The United States has recently
and often looked the other way with regard to Mexican corruption, with regard to Mexican
authoritarian rule and human rights violations, with regard even to Mexico having a certain
independence in its own foreign policy, with regard to other countries, be it in Latin America
or elsewhere. As long as the place is stable and there are no alliances with adversaries of the United States,
today that would probably be China, then it's okay.
We're clearly in a world where issues are global and transcend borders,
issues like health and COVID, climate change, the environment, human rights and immigration.
And yet our multilateral institutions in general are not
playing a leading role. How do you see multilateralism going forward?
The United States is the irreplaceable or unique partner in these multilateral institutions.
Without the United States there, they are not meaningless, but they are much weaker
and less effective than with the United States being there.
We're in a situation today where we need multilateralism more than ever.
But the main actor in that world, in that area of human endeavor, is reluctant to take it on.
And that's the United States.
And there is no substitute for it.
I think that perhaps things
will change again. The Biden administration seems to be much more interested in multilateralism,
in bringing the United States back to the organizations and or agreements where it was
before, and even expounding on what's going forward on them beyond where things were before.
If that turns out to materialize,
that would be very constructive for everybody. The COVID, I think, pandemic showed how difficult it
is to fight this kind of challenge, meet these challenges by individual countries. It's almost
impossible because you have travel, you have tourism, you have trade, you have disease spreading
all over the world instantaneously, almost. You can't fight something like COVID country by
country. It just doesn't work. Let's talk a bit about America and American culture.
Do Americans today partake of culture more than other countries? Do Americans read more books per person,
watch more movies, and partake of culture generally to a greater extent than other countries?
And if so, what has been that impact? When I try and debunk the traditional foreign view of American culture as cheap culture, shallow culture, insignificant culture, and to show on the contrary
that the United States, not only now, but for many years now, has been the main cultural producer,
if you want to use the term, in the world, and not only of mass culture or of elite culture,
but of both. And it has been so for a series of historical reasons,
which are very important and not often seen by foreigners, sometimes not really appreciated by
Americans themselves. Just point to two, there are more, but one is, of course, that the United
States, when it begins to produce cultural goods, let's say the second half of
the 19th century, obviously before then, it couldn't produce American cultural goods because
there was no America. You couldn't have an American author in the 16th century because
there were no Americans. There were people from the 17th century onward in the United States, but they were not Americans. When America begins
to produce cultural goods, it begins to do so almost from the get-go for a much larger market
than the European countries or the Asian countries, even in the case of China or Japan.
The United States, up to a point, is born as a middle-class society,
with the exclusion, of course, of everybody who was not part of it. There was a lot of people.
But for those who were included, it was a middle-class society. And so there was a mass
market for cultural goods almost from the outset. One of the distinguishing features of this,
for example, was public education and much higher literacy rates in the United States towards the end of the 19th century than in Western Europe.
A far larger number of public libraries per inhabitant in the United States than in Western Europe.
Printing of books in much greater numbers even then than in the rest of Western Europe, with some exceptions every now
and then, Dickens, Victor Hugo, etc. But by and large, this was the case. And then, of course,
came movies, music, etc. Is that the United States has been incredibly receptive to receiving
cultural influences or inputs or goods, if you like, from the rest of the world,
starting with Charlie Chaplin, if you like, at the turn of the 20th century or 19th century,
but as recently as the Mexican filmmakers, the three great Mexican filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro,
Guarón, and González Iñárritu, who all have great Oscar-winning films
in the United States, not
as foreign films, but as
films made in the
U.S., in Hollywood, but by
Mexicans. And this was just two years
ago. And over the last hundred
odd years, under the 20, 130
years, whatever
realm of cultural
activity that you like, you see an incredible foreign influence
that the United States assimilates and then sends back to the rest of the world as something which
is American culture, it's American architecture, or it's American art, or it's American literature,
or it's American film, or American music, classical or contemporary or fashion or whatever you like.
But it's not just American because it has this influence from the rest of the world.
So we have these entrepreneurs that come to America and make films or other products
and then become leaders in their categories.
And we have leading entrepreneurs and the largest
companies in the world, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google are all American or founded in America,
some by immigrants. Why do you think there are no comparable companies that are global companies,
global brands that were founded in
other countries? Well, there are a lot of explanations for this American exceptionalism.
I think that they have to do with the way Americans have of transforming inventions
into technology and into consumable goods and services.
The Europeans, the Germans invented the car,
but Ford turned it into something people could buy.
The French invented the movies,
but Americans turned it into something that people could watch.
And we could go on and on with this, the iPhone, the iPad, whatever.
It's the same sort of principle. It's not
necessarily only the inventiveness or the producing of one product, but of transforming that into
what used to be called mass production. And this continues to be an American, almost uniquely American, talent and capability. Again, with great receptiveness
to influences from abroad, from Alexander Graham Bell from Scotland to Musk and Tesla. It's the
same principle. If you look at almost all of the great inventions that Americans are known for,
not all of them, but many of them,
they are attributable to foreigners who went to the United States,
came to the United States, and did their work there, from the guys who invented jeans to the guys who invented, as I say,
and then you have an educational system, which probably also helps because the elite part of that educational
system continues to be the best in the world. You just talked about American inventiveness
and ability to produce goods like the iPhone and others. Why is it that American leadership seems to also apply to services?
For example, the stock market in the United States is greater than the combined markets
of all the other stock markets in the world.
Why do you think that's so?
Again, we go to either American exceptionalism or American success in the case of the stock
market and other similar issues. The European Union,
for example, has not been able to really create enough companies or institutions that would be
competitive with the Americans, given the size of the US economy. The only case that is really
out there is Airbus and Boeing. It's the only area where the Europeans
were able to create a European company. There are German companies that operate in all of Europe,
or French companies that operate in all of Europe and all over the world. But there are very few
European companies. And really, the only very distinguished one is Airbus, which has, of course,
displaced Boeing
in many ways.
But you look, it's an exception.
You think a lot about American exceptionalism and how exceptionalism has changed from America's
founding as a democracy.
What do you see as America's exceptionalism, if any, going forward from where we are now?
Well, I'm particularly positive and optimistic about the approach that the United States has
in relation to immigration, despite all of the difficulties. But I'm also somewhat pessimistic
and negative on the unforgivables in American life, the death penalty, mass incarceration,
intelligent design, and the Second Amendment or the right to bear arms. On immigration, as I said,
very optimistic because despite the Trump years, and despite Obama having actually been, as he was
called, a deporter-in-chief, and despite the fact that for
20 years people have been trying, Bush and then Obama, to get some kind of real immigration reform
done, and it hasn't happened. Despite all of that, I think that the United States continues to enjoy
the benefits, the fruits of immigration, much more than the Europeans do, and with much fewer
complications than the Europeans have. The United States is a much younger country than all of the
European countries, or Europe as a whole. And the main reason it's younger is thanks to immigration.
Being a younger country is good. I'm not young, but I can say so. It's better to be a younger country, not too young
maybe, but a younger country than an older one because you have more people in the labor, in the
workforce, you have more people paying into the tax bag, the pension bag, the health care bag,
who are healthy, and fewer people, relatively speaking, who are benefiting from what everybody else pays.
It's good to be a younger country. And that's basically thanks to immigration. I also think
this is a delicate point. It's complicated. It's gotten actually more complicated in recent times,
France and in other Western European countries, that the type of immigration that the United States has, which is fundamentally from Latin
America, 70 odd percent of immigration, whether it's with papers authorized or not authorized
over the last 50, 60 years, or the United States has been from Latin America, continues to be so.
There are some Asian islands of immigration, Indians, Filipinos, but it's Vietnamese, obviously,
after the war, Laotians after the war, but overwhelmingly immigration is Latin American.
And at the end of the day, Latin Americans and Americans have far more in common from every point of view than Western Europeans with people of the Islamic
faith, whether they come from Syria, or from North Africa, or from sub-Saharan Africa.
Insist on using the term Islamic faith, because that is a fundamental difference. Islam, for many
people, is not just a religion, whereas Catholicism, which is what most Latin Americans are, is just a religion.
I don't think one religion is better or worse than the other, but they are very different in that sense.
And the Europeans are facing enormous challenges in dealing with mass immigration of people of Islamic faith because of this, of the existential
nature of Islam as a religion. Americans don't have to deal with that. Americans have to deal
with people from El Salvador, maybe who prefer to play with a round ball instead of an oval ball,
and they both call it football. All right, the people in Ohio maybe are
a little bit disconcerted by this difference. And Americans are challenged by people who
eat spicy food, and who listen to certain kinds of music and dance to certain kinds of music.
There's an enormous amount of common ground with all Latin American immigration. And this is something that I'm very optimistic about for the United States.
I think it does wonders for the United States and will continue to do so because I think
this immigration will continue for a long, long time still.
The unforgivables are complicated because they are exceptions and they are exceptions
that are increasingly incomprehensible to the rest of the world.
Whether it's something that is not terribly commonplace, like the death penalty.
It is true that fewer and fewer people are executed in the United States every year.
But even the few that are executed are seen as barbaric events by all people in the rest of the rich countries,
and by a lot of other people in the rest of the rich countries and by a lot of other people
in middle class of the poorer countries. And the same is true for, you know, every time you have a
mass shooting and the United States engages in this debate about gun control, background checks,
assault weapons bans, all of these things, people elsewhere sort of look at this as what is going on. It is very
complicated because the United States is discordant with the rest of the rich countries on these
issues. Nearly 20% of the U.S. population now is Hispanic or Latino. How do you see the Hispanic
or Latino presence changing the United States? Well, to begin with, it's changed the United
States like every previous immigration wave, except that this one has perhaps lasted longer
and continues because of a series of reasons having to do with contiguity, etc. And it's also
true that because of continuity and contiguity, it's not exactly the same as previous waves, because many Latin Americans continue to be able to live their Latin American life in the United States has brought an influx of cultural values,
cultural products in the broad sense of the word culture, language, very hard work.
People who are incredibly talented at doing things that perhaps Americans had stopped being used to doing also the way they used to,
because of automation or because of
prosperity, what have you. And I think this has been extremely positive for the United States,
particularly as Latino, the Latino presence has spread around the United States. This has
generated tensions. A lot of the anti-immigrant feeling that there is in the United States and
that has been present regarding Latinos for the past 20 or so years, at least, a lot of that
feeling comes from the fact that all of a sudden you began to have a Latino presence, a Mexican
presence in areas of the United States where there didn't used to be immigrants. All of a sudden,
Americans who had never heard anybody speak Spanish or be Catholic
and go to mass on Sundays or have quinceanera parties or whatever, were all of a sudden exposed
to this very unexpected and poorly understood presence, culture, life. But little by little,
once Americans, those Americans who were not like Texans or not like
Californians or not even people like Florida or New York began to know Latinos because they
began to arrive all over the United States, have achieved the same kind of very positive
understanding and cohabitation with Latinos that people in Texas and California and elsewhere have had for decades now.
Last question, Jorge. What are the three key takeaways or insights that you'd like to leave
the audience with today? One is on immigration, how important it is and how the contribution of
modern day immigrants to American society is at least as significant, as positive,
as constructive as the contribution that previous immigrant waves brought to the United States. And
this is something that Americans should appreciate and count their blessings. A second one has to do with the notion that the United States will still for a long time be the only truly world power,
that China and even India, because of population, will inevitably catch up with the United States
in other aspects, simply because of their size. They are, you know, four times more populated
than the United States, four and a half
times. And I mean, there's just a limit to how far that goes. But American military power, American
cultural soft power, American technological prowess remains. So that would be a second one.
And the third one is the challenge for the United States of reforming its democracy
and making it functional again, I think is increasingly important to be met. Because if
that challenge is not met, then these unforgivables, mass incarceration, guns, the death penalty,
and intelligent design cannot be overcome, cannot be set aside. People want reforms, for example, on some form of gun control,
but American democracy doesn't allow that kind of reform to happen.
So that would be a third takeaway.
This was terrific, Jorge. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much, Lynn.
I look forward to seeing you once this COVID event is over.
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