Keeping in mind Barack Obama’s famous warning that one should never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to “f*** things up,” the Summit of the Americas opens today in Los Angeles.
This event has been held every four years somewhere in the Western Hemisphere since its founding in Miami in 1994. This year’s edition marks the first time the Summit has returned to the United States. Administration organizers had claimed their goal was to consolidate America’s influence in the Americas and repair damages allegedly done by the Trump administration to U.S. relations with its neighbors. Others suggest the intent is to (1) enlist unanimous Latin American support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia and (2) to force Latin America to choose Washington over Beijing. More on that below.
Previous meetings, however contentious, did not need to address such problems. They primarily consisted of the U.S. exhibiting that it did in fact hold a continuing powerful influence over its neighbors. Those days are gone. If anything, what this year’s gathering shows is (1) the overall incompetence of the Biden administration (as if we needed more evidence) and (2) the extent to which many countries are re-considering their long-standing ties to the northern behemoth.
For example, look at who’s not coming. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, tops the list of foreign leader no-shows. López Obrador announced on Monday that he would not attend, in protest to Biden’s decision not to invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. “There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all countries of the Americas cannot attend,” the Mexican president declared.
Following suit in declining their invitations were the chief executives of Honduras, Uruguay, and Bolivia. Argentina’s president announced he would attend but complained about the three exclusions. And Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is apparently coming only with reluctance and only after Biden was forced to send a personal envoy to Brasilia with a special plea. (Bolsonaro, a Trump supporter who has labeled Biden’s 2020 electoral win “suspicious,” has gone on record as saying his country’s relationship with the U.S. was better under Trump.)
While the countries whose chief executives are boycotting may still send lower-level delegations, their absence takes a good bit of the summitry out of the Summit. Sixty-eight delegations will attend the event but only 23 heads of state.
The admin’s struggles to put on a show have not gone unnoticed, even among Democrats.
Brett Bruen, who served in the Obama White House, called the summit “an unmitigated disaster for American diplomacy. . . . The fact that we could not figure out the most basic things like who is coming, what are the major deliverables to be announced, is a national embarrassment.” [Emphasis added.]
Those who do attend Biden’s Summit are likely to address what NPR declares will be the meeting’s biggest topic: migration. In fact, Biden has promised to unveil an “unprecedented and ambitious” plan to solve the region’s migration crisis. No doubt this plan will involve lots and lots of U.S. dollars. To start things off, his reluctant immigration czarette VP Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday a grant to Central America of another $2 billion, allegedly from private sources among whom she’s been passing the hat. There’ll be more to come on that front, of course, and don’t expect America’s high-rolling corporations to be participating for free.
As America’s neighbors re-think their long-time reliance on the United States, her chief adversary, China, is watching gleefully. The Global Times, a Communist Party organ, has published a number of articles leading up to the Summit, mocking the hapless efforts of the administration to salvage the meeting. The event will show, they declare, that “Latin America is not a ‘backyard’ of the U.S.”
Judging by the numbers of Latin Americans and others crossing our southern border, soon it will be impossible to distinguish who’s the backyard and who’s the front.
For more, see Breitbart.