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For Colette Perold, seeing an imperial power throw its weight around in Latin America isn’t news—she’s an expert on how multinational IT companies have exerted influence in this part of the world.

What she finds curious about Donald Trump’s approach to diplomacy is how out of step it is with the desires of many businesses.

Colette Perold

While the interests of the state and corporations don’t always align, “what’s fascinating about the second Trump administration is that much of its foreign policy appears to undermine the liberalized overseas markets that allowed U.S.-based multinationals to become dominant,” she said. “For that to be replaced by this scattershot, unpredictable type of foreign policy execution is new terrain for them.”

Perold, an assistant professor of media studies at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, researches the relationship between media technologies, labor and foreign policy. It’s work she became interested in following her work as a labor organizer and an editor for NACLA Report on the Americas, a quarterly journal on Latin American politics and social movements.

In her best-known work, Perold traces IBM’s investment in Brazil—the company was a dominant force in the country from the 1930s into the late 1970s, and was effectively a monopoly in the region for decades—including how the company contended with, and overcame, labor movements and domestic pressure for economic autonomy. That research is the subject of a forthcoming book, which was supported by the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

The rise of IBM

IBM’s priorities largely reflected those of the U.S. government, which was eager to build a liberal international order as it expanded its influence and economic might in the post-World War II era. By kidnapping a foreign head of state and exhorting American oil companies to reinvest in Venezuela, Trump has signaled a return to a time when the nation’s interests were less global in scope.

When Franklin Roosevelt introduced the Good Neighbor Policy, committing the United States to nonintervention in Latin American affairs, “that became the starting point for building a liberal hemispheric and international trade order, to remove barriers to trade and open markets,” Perold said. “Trump is retreating from all of that through his ‘America First’ diplomacy.”

IBM, she said, is a perfect example of how companies benefited from that liberal order. When the company arrived in Brazil in 1917, the tech industry looked nothing like it does today, but as it went from tabulating machines to mainframe computers, IBM was increasingly able to benefit from changing legal obligations, new regulations and shifts in labor markets. ��

“My interest here is understanding the technological changes alongside the political and economic changes, and how those feed each other,” she said. “By looking at these different players—the IT companies, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, labor—we can understand, strategically, how we got to where we are today.”

The United States’ decades of commitment to that international order allowed it to stifle political movements in Latin America, most visibly to the benefit of companies like United Fruit, or industries like mining, Perold said. “But while no one really thinks about the unbelievable amount of political power IBM exerted in Brazil, it was very much part of building a liberal international order from the 1930s until its influence started to wane in the late 1970s.”

Signals in foreign policy noise

In examining the White House’s national security strategy, released late last year, she has found some potential signals in Trump’s noisy foreign policy execution.

“It seems like a lot of this strategy is motivated by the last two decades of increasing Chinese investment in Latin America,” she said. U.S. strategy, she said, is about expelling foreign powers, including a return to military force. China, Perold added, “is the subtext throughout the section of the document on the Western Hemisphere.”

“From the Trump administration’s perspective, the liberal trade order that gave us the rise of China is what’s hurting U.S. interests in Latin America. In other words, liberal internationalism was working for American interests in Latin America until it wasn’t—so now, our foreign policy is to directly dominate a sphere of influence, rather than manage it through markets.”

One of her favorite things about teaching this research, Perold said, is that few students are aware of the history at a time of both fast-moving foreign policy and rapid change driven by the tech industry. When she teaches students about the rise of Japan as a semiconductor giant in the 1980s, many are surprised to see, in U.S. media, the same language and signals aimed at China today.

“Two of the most influential of the so-called Atari Democrats,” who guided their party from organized labor to the largely nonunion information economy, “were senators from Colorado, and we have their papers right here at Norlin Library,” she said. “So, my students were looking at these documents about the supposed threat of Japan—and the real threats to organized labor—and going, wow, this is so similar to how politicians talk about China today.

“The beauty of teaching history classes about media and computing is seeing students get that shock, that this isn’t all new. It’s such a cool experience to watch them recognize that there is precedence to the cultural and technological phenomena they are steeped in every day.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.