NAFTA: Integrating Mexico or Exploiting it?

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War finally rolled over, the United States emerged the victor. And with it, the notions of democracy, capitalism and constitutional law achieved hegemony on a global scale. The nation-building siege perpetrated by two battling superpowers was, at least on a superficial ideological level, a showdown between totalitarian communism and electoral democracy. So an American victory implied to many a validation of all those values for which the Cold War had been fought. This philosophical resolution, crossbred with a vacuum in adversarial power, has given way to the twenty-first century American crusade. Labeled imperialism and colonialism by critics, the overarching aspiration in determining U.S. behavior on an international scale is regarded as globalism by idealists. In particular, those in service of America on a level of federal governance tend to refer this way to the economic, military and diplomatic initiatives that make up our foreig...