The Biden administration once hoped the ninth Summit of the Americas would be a chance to showcase U.S. leadership in the Western Hemisphere and a move past the often tense relations that prevailed under the Trump administration. But the weeklong gathering, which starts Monday in Los Angeles, is so rife with ideological drama that it risks becoming one more headache for President Biden’s foreign policy agenda and his political standing at home.
The Summit of the Americas is the only formal gathering of the leaders of the countries of North, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. The event next week will be the first time the U.S. has hosted the summit since its 1994 inaugural in Miami.
What was supposed to be a muted celebration of hemispheric ties and cooperation has faced an unexpectedly rocky buildup.
Mexico’s leftist president hinted strongly last month that he wouldn’t attend the summit after objecting to U.S. plans to block representatives from the authoritarian regimes controlling Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Mexico would send a delegation but told reporters, “It’s just that I will not attend if all countries are not invited. … What is this supposed to be: the Summit of the Americas or the Summit of the Friends of America?”
With leftist political movements on the rise in the region, the list of no-shows may grow. The leaders of Bolivia, Antigua and Barbuda, and Guatemala have reportedly said they might not attend, and leftist governments in Chile and Argentina have been critical of the U.S. vetting of invitations.
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The standoff with Mr. Lopez Obrador stems from a long-standing division over whether nondemocratic countries should be included in regional diplomatic gatherings of the Organization of American States, which organizes the Summit of the Americas roughly every three years.
Mr. Biden has made the pursuit of stronger alliances among democracies a core pillar of his overall foreign policy. Although the administration has made some gestures to ease President Trump’s confrontational policy toward Cuba and Venezuela, Mr. Biden faces political pressure in Congress and in some electorally important states to stick to the hard-line approach.
The administration’s dilemma risks undermining broader White House efforts to reassert U.S. influence in Latin America while China makes inroads in the region, illegal immigration pressures soar at the Mexican border, and critics say democracy has been under attack across the region over the past decade.
“There are certainly signs that democracy has declined more in Latin America than in any other region over the past several years,” said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow with the Inter-American Dialogue.
He said Mr. Biden is likely to struggle to find common ground at the summit with populists in power in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Honduras and elsewhere.
“Without even mentioning Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, if you go country by country around the region, it’s hard to see that President Biden would have much affinity with any of the current cast of heads of state,” Mr. Shifter said. The reason, he said, stems largely from a “move toward greater populism in Latin America, with most of it, not all, but most of it being undemocratic.”
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The trend is evident even in Colombia, arguably the most stalwart U.S. ally in South America in recent decades. Two anti-establishment presidential candidates — a leftist and a right-wing populist — are headed for a June 19 runoff in Colombia, and the result stands to redefine the country’s relationship with the U.S.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former Sen. Christopher Dodd, the special envoy for the summit, have been racing to extinguish diplomatic fires ahead of the event as the president and much of his team are consumed by challenges from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Shifter said Mr. Biden’s best diplomatic scenario would be to “avoid a disaster or a fiasco” by pulling off a cordial if unproductive gathering of OAS leaders.
Others have been more blunt.
“The threat is not simply that this year’s summit will be a flop — yet another example of feckless U.S. policy toward Latin America,” said regional expert Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow with the U.K.-based think tank Chatham House.
“Rather, the real risk is that, after nearly three decades of summitry, this year’s event may be interpreted as a gravestone on U.S. influence in the region,” Mr. Sabatini wrote recently in a commentary published by Foreign Policy. The article’s headline: “Biden Is Setting Himself Up for Embarrassment in Los Angeles.”
Diplomatic tightrope
Mr. Shifter emphasized that scrambled regional politics have frustrated Washington’s hopes to rally the OAS’s 34 other member nations around a cohesive democratic vision. The regional group has long suffered from a far lower profile than other international groupings.
“Latin America is moving not so much to the right or the left, but a lot of different directions at the same time, and that makes it very hard to come up with a coherent approach to address democratic erosion and backsliding in the region,” he told The Washington Times in an interview.
The Biden administration has not been forthcoming about the guest list for the summit and has sought to downplay talk of friction.
Recent White House announcements easing pressure on Cuba and Venezuela have triggered speculation that the administration is trying to placate Mr. Lopez Obrador, or at least stave off the prospect of a major diplomatic embarrassment in Los Angeles.
The U.S. has defended the easing of some economic sanctions on Venezuela as a way of encouraging talks between the regime of socialist President Nicolas Maduro and the U.S.-backed opposition. U.S. officials have said they will loosen some restrictions on travel to Cuba and allow Cuban immigrants in the U.S. to send more money back to the island.
If Mr. Biden includes Cuba at the summit, he risks domestic political backlash. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and other Republican hawks on Cuba have warned Mr. Biden against inviting leftist authoritarian governments to the summit. Mr. Rubio said an invitation to Havana and Caracas would provide a “massive international PR boost” to the regimes and a “slap in the face” to the many Cuban Americans who have suffered.
“Making concessions to authoritarians in our hemisphere only empowers dictators worldwide,” Mr. Rubio said in a statement last month. “The regimes in both Cuba and Venezuela have been staunch defenders of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. If the White House cozies up to them, we may see more countries in our own region turn a blind eye to Putin’s invasion.”
The political flak isn’t coming just from Republicans. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, a Cuban American from New Jersey, and other key Democrats have long opposed moves to ease U.S. pressure on the communist government in Havana.
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters at a department briefing on May 20 that speculation about who may be attending is “understandable” given that Mr. Biden will be the first U.S. president to participate in the summit since 2015, when President Obama went to Panama. Mr. Trump skipped the summit in Peru in 2018 and sent Vice President Mike Pence in his place.
Mr. Price said the Biden administration intends to focus the Los Angeles summit on various issues, including migration, climate change and the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our agenda is to focus on working together when it comes to the core challenges that face our hemisphere,” he said. “We’re a region that has endured economic shocks that are generating unprecedented levels of migration — not just to the United States, but also to Mexico and Central America.”
The migration issue can also be tied to the collapse of Venezuela’s economy over the past decade. Mr. Shifter pointed to the struggle among regional governments to deal with some 6 million Venezuelan refugees living in countries across South America.
The China factor
Questions about Mr. Biden’s approach to Latin America have piled up while his attention has been focused elsewhere, most notably on orchestrating the Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The president’s travel to northeast Asia last month was part of his administration’s push to refocus overall U.S. foreign policy. China’s rising power is widely viewed as Washington’s foremost long-term challenge in the region.
Many analysts say a more clear-eyed focus on the U.S. relationships and economic investments in the Western Hemisphere would strengthen Washington’s hand in addressing that challenge.
Alternatively, neglecting Latin America could undermine Mr. Biden’s goals, said Ryan Berg, a senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, given moves by China to make economic and diplomatic inroads in the region.
“It’s always been difficult for Latin America to get its due,” Mr. Berg told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “But we’re pretty close to being in a geopolitical situation where Latin America moves from a strategic asset for us to a strategic liability.”
Mr. Shifter generally agreed, although he suggested that Washington faces an uphill battle countering Chinese investment in the region, particularly when it comes to offering alternatives to “huge infrastructure projects that China is supporting.”
“A lot of Latin Americans are basically pragmatic and will take advantage of opportunities that emerge — whether from China or the United States — if it means growing economically,” Mr. Shifter said. “I don’t think the very strong anti-China discourse coming from both parties in Washington really resonates with Latin Americans who feel the U.S. is not really offering something more attractive economically.
“It’s not that the Latin Americans embrace the Chinese model; it’s just pragmatic necessity,” he said. “Latin Americans are seeing that China is very active and has a clear strategy and that the U.S. is not as present and committed as it claims that it is in the region. That’s a credibility issue.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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