The Burden of Proximity
It is difficult to expect that the fate of countries south of the Rio Grande will serve as a lesson to anyone. Yet what unfolds there offers a useful reflection point for all large powers. It raises a simple question: what should a great state’s strategy toward its immediate neighbors actually look like?
The dramatic events that followed the elimination by Mexican security forces of one of the country’s major organized crime leaders revealed to the world the fragility of Mexico’s institutional structure. More precisely, they revealed something deeper than fragility - the absence of the state in the classical sense, as the sole authority capable of organizing legitimate violence.
This should not surprise anyone who has studied international relations. States construct their strategies in accordance with the balance of power vis-a-vis those closest to them. The larger and stronger the country, the more it shapes the entire political and economic ecosystem of its smaller neighbors. Internal politics, external alignment, development models - all orbit the gravitational field of the nearest giant.
This places immense responsibility on the major power. Even fully sovereign states calibrate their strategies in constant awareness of the dominant actor beside them. The decisive question is how the great power chooses to use the structural advantage geography has granted it.
More than a century ago, Mexican president and general Porfirio Diaz captured the dilemma in a single sentence: “Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.” Geography can be destiny. In the Western Hemisphere, no country has carried a heavier version of that burden.
This does not necessarily mean that the northern giant consciously keeps its southern neighbors weak or deliberately mistreats them. The explanation is more structural. The United States is not a conventional state in historical terms. It emerged as a project built by European settlers on the rejection of many foundational principles that defined governance in the Old World.
The American model rests on minimal state responsibility for the ordinary citizen and an equally limited expectation of social solidarity. It produces extraordinary wealth and technological achievement alongside visible deprivation. It rewards individual success without requiring collective moral restraint. That combination attracts millions.
It would be unusual to expect a government structured around limited responsibility toward its own society to operate as a benevolent custodian of its regional environment. The external behavior of a state often mirrors its internal design.
This dynamic helps explain why, with the exception of Canada, the neighbors of the United States have struggled to build stable institutional orders. Canada developed comparatively resilient institutions and norms of social balance before consolidating its independence. Mexico and the rest were less fortunate. They gained sovereignty in the shadow of a rapidly consolidating American power and became structurally exposed to it.
American political culture does not treat weakness as something to be sheltered. It treats it as something to be leveraged. That pattern is not a moral accusation. It is a cultural observation.
Washington’s policy toward its southern neighbors reflects the logic of its own internal organization. There is little reason to assume that other large powers could sustain a similar model even if they wished to. Russia, China, or the European Union operate within different historical frameworks. The
European Union extracts economic advantage through labor flows and market access, but it does not replicate the same civilizational asymmetry embedded in the American model.
Russia, for example, belongs to a European political tradition in which state paternalism - in its constructive form - forms part of the social contract. When the Russian Empire expanded into Kazakhstan and Central Asia, it carried this paternalistic framework with it. After the capture of Tashkent in 1865, one of the first acts of the new administration was the abolition of slavery. Travelers in the early twentieth century recorded shock at the medieval practices that persisted in territories not yet fully integrated, such as the Emirate of Bukhara.
American observers do not display comparable alarm at social conditions in Mexico or El Salvador. Nor does domestic poverty within American cities generate sustained political outrage. The model accepts inequality as a byproduct of freedom.
For Central America, proximity to such a system has shaped institutional outcomes for more than a century. Geography cannot be renegotiated. Strategy can.
The broader lesson is not about Mexico alone. It concerns the structural obligations of great powers toward their immediate periphery. Dominance always creates dependency. The question is whether that dependency is managed, stabilized, or simply exploited.
History suggests that the answer determines the long-term architecture of a region.