• Washington's Latin American policy: a casualty of the Iraq distraction
• The region is going through a definitive transformation, with autonomous policymaking now becoming the norm
• Bush may be known as the U.S. President that inadvertently provided the coup de grace to the remnants of the Monroe Doctrine

Polycentrism has been reborn in Latin America, and Washington would be wise to adapt to that fact. Polycentrism is a system of interpreting a country's political activity around multiple and co-equal centers of sovereignty, characterized by parity and pluralism. While the rights and responsibilities to its citizens and to the international community are immutable, sovereign equality is at the core of the region. At the time that polycentrism first emerged as a concept in post-World War II Europe, its author, Italian Communist Party chief Palmiro Togliatti, represented it as an anti-Stalinist, but not necessarily as a pro-democratization initiative within the Soviet bloc. Translated to a Latin American context, polycentrism reflects an accelerated unraveling of the asymmetrical, post-Cold War hemispheric relationships in which U.S. influence was paramount.