The president’s weakness has allowed Latin American countries to turn their backs to the United States.
The president’s weakness has allowed Latin American countries to turn their backs to the United States.
T he ninth Summit of the Americas, convened by the U.S. in Los Angeles this week, was supposed to demonstrate a friendlier American stance toward Latin America than in the Trump years and produce deals on Covid-19 recovery — perhaps even lend Biden the credibility to make deals to curb migration across the southern border.
So far, the summit, convening leaders of nations in the Western Hemisphere, is not working out that way.
Before it even began, the summit was causing global embarrassment for America, with Latin American leaders staging a mass boycott. After weeks of telegraphing his decision, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador snubbed the event and sent a lowly deputy instead. “There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all countries of the Americas cannot attend,” he said recently, objecting to the U.S. decision not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. “This is to continue the old interventionist policies, of lack of respect for nations and their people.”
Following suit was Nayib Bukele, the “Bitcoin bro” president of El Salvador, and his counterparts from Guatemala and Honduras — the leaders of Northern Triangle countries from which most migration to the U.S. originates. This was rounded out by the president of Bolivia, Luis Arce, who also declined to attend. It was reported that Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, a regional potentate, was planning to skip, though he’s now arrived.
All their complaints, like López Obrador’s, center on the administration’s exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on the grounds that their leaders are not democratically elected and shouldn’t be given a platform. “We just don’t believe dictators should be invited. We don’t regret that, and the president will stand by his principle,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
The administration has a fair point. Each of these three countries is led by socialist autocrats who have run them into the ground. After calling their elections a “sham,” it would have looked foolish for Biden to shake hands with Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega or Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Los Angeles. Neither, frankly, would it be good politics considering the large communities in the U.S. of people who fled Cuba and Venezuela — whose support is already trending Republican. What is alarming, however, is that any nation south of the Rio Grande would have the gall to snub an invitation from the United States of America.
To state the obvious, America is vastly more powerful than these countries. With the enormous value of its trade in the Western Hemisphere, worth close to $2 trillion annually, the U.S. controls their fate far more than the other way around. During the Trump administration, all the U.S. had to do was threaten tariffs to get López Obrador to deploy Mexican troops along the border to stop illegal crossings, or force the Northern Triangle to sign “safe third country agreements” to deal with the caravans streaming northward. López Obrador is right that America does not respect Maduro or Ortega, or Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, but that shouldn’t matter. Normally, they ought to be grateful for time spent around our president — to lobby him on myriad interests. The Monroe Doctrine held the entire region as America’s sphere of interest, and even today, a summit invitation should be seen as a summons to the court of American power.
This is no longer the case under Joe Biden. America’s leader is now disrespected by inferior heads of state, who defer instead to the interests of broken nations like Cuba and Venezuela. It’s clear these countries, sensing weakness in Washington, now feel confident in their ability to snub our president, unlike the last time the U.S. hosted in 1994, when Cuba was excluded. As Matthew Rooney of the Bush Presidential Center said, the snub “sends a political signal that the drawing power of the United States is not what it used to be.” This is a question not just of optics but of real policy consequences for America. Another migrant caravan — said to be the largest in history, estimated at 15,000 people — is headed northward. All this is happening as the reach of China’s Belt and Road Initiative has extended to 22 Latin American countries, with Chinese investments of $17 billion in the region last year and a 35 percent increase in trade.
Bizarrely, the summit invitees are being allowed to get away with the snub. In a month, Biden plans to host López Obrador at the White House. It’s like rewarding a delinquent student who doesn’t show up to class by giving him a hall pass. America cannot restore its respect by embracing nations that turn their backs to us.
Biden, the foggy professor, probably doesn’t understand the precedent he’s setting. His staff is too overworked or incompetent to fix it. The boycott of the summit, which was avoidable, has now embarrassed America and will reduce our standing in the future. In 1823, James Monroe laid the cornerstone for our power in the Americas. Two hundred years and 40 presidents later, Joe Biden is letting it all fall to pieces.