Monday, December 7, 2009

Oddness in the District

Agustín Carstens was in Washington today, and he found time to sign an agreement with Janet Napolitano to improve information exchanges and security cooperation between the US and Mexico.

This is kind of odd, in that Carstens isn't Napolitano's counterpart, his job is only secondarily security-related, and he has other rather important things to be worried about. Who knows exactly what the circumstance were leading to the agreement, but sticking the (round peg) finance secretary in the (square hole) security ambit certainly feeds the perception that the US is overly concerned about security.

Second, I wonder a) How many binational agreements like the above I've read about in the past five years, and b) how many of them have been utterly worthless beyond the photo op they generated. The second question isn't entirely cynical; some of these agreements are of course significant, but I can't imagine they all are. So what is the actual ratio?

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