No region has a more direct impact on the everyday lives of U.S. citizens than does the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Canada and Mexico are our first and second largest trading partners. We sell more to Brazil than we do to China, more to Chile than to India. Venezuela is our number-one energy supplier. We are committed to establishing a Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2005. But the relationship goes well beyond economics.

We are inextricably and increasingly linked politically by immigration, drug policy, environment, human rights issues, and regional security. This volume offers a vision of hemispheric relations for the twenty-first century that corresponds to that reality.