It’s right next door. It’s the region of origin for almost 19% of the American population. It’s the home to our #3 trading partner. And we don’t seem to know or care much about it.

Why is Latin America, a region of more than 600 million people that is right on the United States’ doorstep, an afterthought in our foreign policy conversations? To be clear, I understand that there are many dedicated government employees who are dedicated to shaping policy in Latin America. I’m writing more about the way foreign policy shows up in our media ecosystem and our politics. Why do Americans care more (and know more) about Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, or Taiwan than we do about Mexico and Brazil?

I should start by stipulating that most Americans don’t care about foreign policy very much at all. Though most Americans (57%) said in 2020 that foreign policy was “very important” to them in making election decisions, the topic ranked behind the economy (79%), health care (68%), the Supreme Court (64%), COVID (62%), and crime (59%). It certainly seems to be the conventional wisdom among pundits that very few Americans really base their votes primarily on foreign policy issues.

I should also be clear that most Americans have only a passing familiarity with the politics and history of the rest of the world. In 2019, the Council on Foreign Relations — one of the biggest names in the foreign policy establishment — gave a quiz to thousands of Americans to judge their “knowledge about the world.” The average score was a 53%. Only 18% of respondents were able to break 70% (which would get you a C- in school).

You can take a little sample of this quiz at the CFR website. If you do, you will find that a lot of the questions are actually about the United States and its government; the only specific questions about other countries are about Europe and Afghanistan.

I think that’s telling — when American media, politicians, and pundits think about “the world,” they’re often really thinking about the United States itself — our economy, our military, our politics. To the extent that they think beyond our borders at all, they tend to think about China, the Middle East, or Europe. This leaves out more than half of the world’s population, including the part of the world that is closest to us.

So why do we think about foreign policy this way? Why are we so concerned about faraway lands rather than our actual neighbors? The way I see it, most of America’s main foreign policy concerns over my lifetime (the last 40+ years) fit pretty neatly into two categories.

The first is economic rivalry. The current anxiety about China’s economic growth mirrors the 1980s freakout about Japan (something that seemed to shape the foreign policy views of a certain New York real estate developer at the time). This makes sense — Americans are concerned, first and foremost, with our economic well-being. We want the United States to be unchallenged in its economic supremacy, and we get a bit nervous when anybody else starts to catch up to us.

The second is a perceived military threat from an enemy with a clear ideology in opposition to the United States. Sometimes, these take the shape of an actual attack or the possibility of an attack on the United States (think the USSR or Al Qaeda). More often, the threat we are really concerned about is the possibility that the United States will lose some of its credibility, prestige, or authority.

Sometimes these threats are very real; sometimes, they’re overblown. I mean, we’ve spent decades obsessing about Iran, a country whose GDP would rank 34th — just below Kansas — among American states. But it’s a country with a clear ideology that seems opposed to many American values, so they make good fodder for cable news punditry.

We tend to get riled up about ideological opponents, arms races, and trade rivalries. All of these things are definitely important, but they dominate attention for another reason — they slot into political tropes and media narratives that feel familiar and are pretty easy to grasp.

Perhaps a glibber way to say this would be: unless you’re scary or white, America doesn’t care about you.

So what about Latin America? It’s neither scary nor white.

Latin American countries tend to have complex politics that don’t easily fit into the molds we’re familiar with in America. Ever since the deaths of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, there aren’t any scary ideological rivals (not that Cuba or Venezuela was ever a real threat to the U.S.).

It’s not a particularly militaristic region — defense spending is quite low, and wars between countries are quite rare. Most of the conflict in Latin America takes the form of insurgency or civil war, often over issues that don’t really map onto American concerns.

Though there are often complaints about “factories moving to Mexico,” no Latin American country really threatens our economic dominance.

There has, of course, been a fierce argument in the United States about immigration from Latin America. But that argument has been almost entirely about ourselves, and we have shown very little interest in the countries that immigrants are coming from.

Really, the only depictions of Latin America that we get on the news here — or from politicians — are occasional right-wing tirades about how socialism destroyed Venezuela or what a blood-soaked cartel hellscape Mexico is (it’s so terrible that Mexico City has become a big tourism and remote-work destination for Americans; I went there this summer, and it was lovely).

In short, most Americans seem to have no interest in anything that’s actually happening in the region closest to us.

But that doesn’t mean that Latin America isn’t important, either on its own merits or (given our solipsism) in terms of the interests of the United States. In fact, some of the most significant issues in the region may provide a good roadmap for what we may see over the course of the next century.

First, even if we are only self-interested, we might look to the region for lessons about how (and how not to) preserve democracy. Many countries in Latin America have had long struggles with weak democracies and authoritarianism, which is something that seems to be more and more relevant these days. Lots of people like to compare Donald Trump to Mussolini, but he actually better represents a classic Latin American figure — the caudillo.

There were many caudillos in Latin American history, but most of them were rich guys who sought political power through a combination of charisma, machismo, and threats of violence. They often promised populist reforms to help the ordinary people while tearing apart the government institutions that might have restrained them. Sound familiar?

The biggest issue facing all of us in the near future is climate change. Unfortunately, parts of Central America seem to be canaries in the climate coal mine. While anti-immigrant politicians still portray most migrants as illegal invaders who want to take your job or sell you drugs, the reality is that a lot of them are just desperate people fleeing the effects of climate change.

The region around Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador has been especially badly hit by crop failures, food shortages, and increasingly frequent hurricanes. These environmental disruptions have caused lots of migration, most of it within these countries, from the farms to the city, which has led to increasing unemployment, gang violence, and crime. It’s no wonder that some people try to make the perilous, uncertain journey north to America.

What we would see in these countries if we bothered to look is a window into the future. Climate change will disrupt economies, political systems, and everyday lives all over the world. We should be trying to help as much as we can. After all, we’ve done more than any other country to cause the problem. Plus, it might do us good to learn what does and doesn’t work when climate change attacks a country with a fragile political system, an unequal economy, and a ragged infrastructure. Just saying.

Rather than treating Central American migration as a nuisance or a threat, we should treat it as a harbinger. Even if we are somehow able to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, millions of people around the world will lose their livelihoods — or even their lives — through no fault of their own. Rather than showing irritation that some people occasionally show up on our doorstep, perhaps we should be thinking about how we will address the effects of climate in Latin America. They’re problems that we will soon face ourselves.

Take a moment to think about how much you hear about Latin America on the news or how much you learned about its history in school. That’s probably all it will take — a moment. It seems utterly backward that we know the least about the countries closest to us, but that seems to be the case. Maybe Americans would be better off focusing on our neighbors rather than conjuring rivalries with countries halfway around the world.

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