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Great discrepancies of power are called asymmetries, a concept that many Latin American nations find most useful for describing their relations with the United States. The author differs with many social scientists who assume that the United States can always calibrate its power to achieve a desired outcome. He focuses on the way asymmetries operate in the relations of the United States with Cuba, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Chile. This book is an exercise partly in historiography, partly in political science, and partly in the larger study of international relations. It explores those "gray areas" where national power is often a matter more of perceptions than of actuality, and it examines how perceptions themselves become an independent variable in the relations between nations.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.