If any data could measure the political strength of President Joseph Biden in his Ibero-American security zone, without a doubt it would be the failure of the IX Summit of the Americas held from June 6 to 10.
The most important conclusion would lead to the perception that the United States lacks a proposal to establish a new world order in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The geopolitical results –which are the most important today– were the product of the lack of sensitivity of the US president and the dialectical trap that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador placed on him by conditioning his attendance on the invitation — and was not present– of the presidents of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and the reduction of restrictions on the presidents of Guatemala and Honduras.
If Biden invited them, he lost; if he didn’t invite them, he also lost. And in the end, in either of the two scenarios, Biden appeared as a geopolitical leader without force.
In previous Summits of the Americas, there was the presence of leaders with non-democratic governments; In the extraordinary event that took place in Mexico in 2004, President Vicente Fox brought together President Fidel Castro and President George Bush Jr. at the Summit, although with a clumsy handling of the invitations because he asked Fidel Castro to be at the meeting, but that after eating he will return to his country.
The Summits are meetings with a political effect, not with a programmatic search for projects and results. The impossibility of agreeing with countries of different political, economic and social levels in Latin America and the Caribbean has always remained in formal acts that usually have some conjunctural political importance.
The true power relations take place in bilateral presidential meetings and, in Latin America and the Caribbean, in the extraordinary and very high-level relations between the heads of the armies of the region.
The sensitive issues that interested the United States could hardly have had a space for definitions and decisions: drug trafficking, migration, and trade have separate agendas and meetings and, of course, they obey different motivations.
For example, the United States perceives drug trafficking as a problem of production and trafficking coming from countries south of the Rio Grande and has never recognized — nor will it ever recognize — that drug trafficking and the existence of criminal organizations are a consequence of the high demand for drug from American consumers, that is, without demand there would be no supply.
Migration has been the product of the economic, political, social and security crisis in Latin American and Caribbean countries and in recent years has been exacerbated by the consolidation of cartels, bands and gangs tolerated and even supported by the security structures of local governments.
The White House has never been able to process its co-responsibility in the stability crisis of the countries south of the Rio Grande, despite the calls for attention produced by the Cuban revolution, the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution and the Salvadoran guerrillas. The official US response was to finance counterinsurgency projects and train police and armies in repression and torture techniques.
The waves of Latin American and Caribbean migrants and now the incorporation of refugees from other European countries accelerated as of 2020 due to the economic crisis and the pandemic crisis and the United States only reacted in an authoritarian manner by sealing its border with walls and forces military forces and forcing Mexico to move the US southern border from the Rio Grande to the Suchiate River on the Chiapas state border with Belize and Guatemala.
However, from 2020 to 2022 any calculation is valid and it can be said that there have been more than three million migrants who want to enter the United States, when official figures indicate only around 200 thousand visas for the American region.
Trade was confronted with treaties signed by the United States with Latin American economies, but found the existence of non-competitive productive structures, concentrators of wealth and without equitable labor relations.
In this context, the production capacity for export has been lower than expected and only Mexico maintains a level of productive integration with the United States.
The IX Summit of the Americas showed not only President Biden’s misunderstanding of his American region, but also evidenced the total ignorance of the geopolitical reality of those countries, and even less has he been able to process the recent trend that has revealed the existence of populist governments anti-Americans who came to power democratically and who have tightened democratic rules to prevent the modernization of their systems of government.
The result of the IX Summit of the Americas was a geopolitical failure, but the most serious thing was to perceive the strategic inability of the White House to understand the Latin American and Caribbean area as an important security zone for the United States.
In separate information, the White House would be organizing a regional military summit to build a NATO-type organization that strengthens the bloc of regional armies in favor of US approaches, given what they called the geopolitical expansion of Russia and China in Latin America and the Caribbean.
But most serious of all, it is perceived in the lack of understanding of the United States regarding the general crisis in the American region and in its inability to offer a proposal for regional reorganization that goes beyond the American obsession with communism, which only represents an impact irregular politician and zero revolutionary concern.
The content of this column is the sole responsibility of the columnist and not the newspaper that publishes it.
#lost #leadership #America #Summit #failure