President Bill Clinton made his first official visit to Latin America in December 2004, when he attended the Summit of the Americas. Notably, the meeting was held in Miami, Florida, which the president seemed to believe was the capital of Latin America. As David Scott Palmer recounts in this balanced, useful, and readable review of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Latin America, Clinton did not actually set foot in a Latin American country until his second term, when he made a brief 1997 trip to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Barbados.
For Palmer, the president’s evident lack of interest in the region, and more generally in foreign policy, during his first term explains much about why his administration “failed to seize the moment to build and sustain an effective Latin American policy around the opportunities available in the early 1990s” (p. xi). Yet Palmer is a careful scholar and his analysis...
