Berkley Center

Every four years, on the first Tuesday of November, our country elects its president. The United States’ influence is apparent in the news, in my international relations courses at Georgetown, and even in the status quo presumptions of the grand majority of Americans. However, this fact is often de-emphasized. Here in Argentina, everyone knows who President Obama is and everyone cares about our elections.

This past Monday I watched the foreign policy presidential debate from Buenos Aires and witnessed first-hand the salience of our elections in Latin America. I used to think the maxim “leader of the free world” was an overstated and contrived cliché. In Monday’s debate, Governor Romney even asserted a growing belief that the age of American exceptionalism is over and US global influence has decreased in the last four years.

However, from my experience in Argentina, that is not the case. The person who occupies the position of president of the United States of America is an important and critical figure for Argentines and the rest of the world.

The day after the third and final debate, my fourth year "International Organizations" class went to a university-sponsored panel about the US elections. The panel consisted of an American researcher, an Argentine expert on the United States’ political system, and a political science professor from my university here in Buenos Aires. It seemed strange to me that they hosted this panel on our elections, when Argentina itself was not mentioned once in the debate.

In general, the presidential candidates rarely reference the region of Latin America apart from the topics of our borders with Mexico, immigration, and drug trafficking. On Monday, Governor Romney did tout his intent to increase trade with Latin America as a means to decrease our trade deficit with “currency manipulating” China. However, the region was quickly forgotten as the debate moved forward.

The panel I attended, like the debate, spent little time on Latin America. It focused on the current polls, the Electoral College, the policies and campaigns of President Obama and Governor Romney, as well as President Obama’s actions in Libya. Concerning Latin America, the Argentine expert on the United States and the American himself both stated that the region is not geopolitically important to the United States and therefore will play a minimal roll in the elections and the policies of both candidates. Still yet, the two and a half hour panel captured the unwavering attention of about 100 Argentine students and professors.

On Thursday, the conversation continued in my "Argentine Foreign Policy" class, where we discussed the debate and a text by Roberto Russell titled, “Las relaciones argentino-norteamericanas: ¿el fin del desencuentro?” ("Argentine-US Relations: The End of Disagreement?") In this class, my Argentine peers were more cynical about the United States. However all of them agreed that US foreign policy has a direct effect of Argentine foreign policy.

The discrepancy between our government’s importance to Argentina and the reverse is unsettling. The same goes for our relations with the entirety of Latin America and the greater part of the globe. And although our massive southern neighbors, Latin America and Argentina, were left out of Monday night’s discourse, the significance of this coming Tuesday’s elections will remain.

This week I observed how our elections do not only decide the president of the United States; our elections dictate the geopolitical climate of the world and elect the individual that will lead the free world forward.