Beyond the Summit of the Americas: Resetting U.S. Policy in Latin America
By P. Michael McKinley - May 25, 2022
Despite
the Biden administration’s efforts to outline a new, positive vision
for engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean, old fault lines are
likely to come into play at the upcoming Summit of the Americas, which
kicks off in Los Angeles on June 6. Both U.S. domestic politics and
governments in the hemisphere with a more skeptical view of Washington
and its intentions contribute to these tensions. A new U.S. perspective
is required — one that takes into greater account the region’s
diversity, priorities and political complexity. Without such a shift,
the perception and reality of declining U.S. influence are only likely
to deepen.
The tri-annual regional summit is in trouble. The
heads-of-state of Mexico, Brazil, many Caribbean countries and other
nations are threatening to boycott — largely, but not only, because of
the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. While the softening of
sanctions legislation on Cuba and Venezuela is welcome in the region,
it’s being viewed as a belated effort to respond to concern over their
exclusion. Whether or not a widespread boycott of the summit ultimately
materializes, the stresses in U.S-regional relations will have been
exposed in an unflattering light.
Observers and analysts are also
pointing to longer-term concerns over U.S. policy in the region,
including decreased U.S. influence and interest; growing regional ties
with China; the failure to check Ortega’s Nicaragua, Maduro’s Venezuela
and Cuba; and the “ambivalence toward democracy” and the “pink tide”
trend in Latin American elections.
The administration is
responding. Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented an ambitious set
of objectives in a May 3 speech to the Council of the Americas focused
on “growth with equity.” The assistant secretary for the region, Brian
Nichols, has mentioned reaching agreements on “clean energy transition, a
green future, and digital transformation.” First lady Jill Biden
visited Ecuador on May 19 and spoke about “achieving an equitable and
sustainable future, building health and pandemic resilience, and
strengthening democratic government” in the region. The importance of
like-minded nations working with Washington should not be discounted.
The summit could yet be salvaged.
Despite promises of a wider
agenda, however, issues like irregular migration, nearshoring and the
state of regional democracy may dominate at the summit and will likely
be perceived as Washington setting priorities. Most Latin American and
Caribbean governments are concentrating instead on post-COVID pandemic
measures to restart their economies and address the problems created by
slow growth, inequality and political fragmentation. The summit in Los
Angeles is unlikely to resolve these differences. The uncertainties
surrounding the summit, however, are a wake-up call for the United
States. Like the last period of serious redefinition of our hemispheric
relations at the end of the Cold War in 1989, when Washington forged
closer ties with a newly democratic hemisphere, the U.S.-Latin American
relationship going forward must evolve.
Time for a Change
Commentators
like Eric Farnsworth, Brian Winter, Patrick Duddy, Christopher
Sabatini, Daniel Runde and Todd Chapman, Ryan Berg and the
Inter-American Dialogue, have underscored the seriousness of the moment
for hemispheric relations. They have also made recommendations on how
the summit could still set a new course and highlight regional
priorities. The latter would include a greater cooperative focus on
economic growth, digital transformation, investing in education and
health services, building civil society, addressing climate change,
negotiating new trade agreements and addressing inequalities.
Given
the crisis in Ukraine, domestic pressures in the United States and
global economic strains, however, it will be a challenge to deliver on
this scale of ambition. A good outcome would still be an agreed vision
and agenda for regional cooperation in the coming years.
Building
out that vision with substantive policy commitments, however, will
require a change in how the United States views and deals with the
hemisphere. Here are three ways the United States can get started.
1. Washington should recognize and respect that the region is not uniform.
The
United States does not treat Germany and France or South Korea and
Japan as indistinct when it comes to policy toward Europe or East Asia.
Yet successive administrations have not done as much as they could to
differentiate among the experiences and cultures of the more than 30
nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Instead, it is “the
region” that faces threats from migration, transnational crime, weak
institutions, illiberal democracy, corruption, the growing influence of
China and interference from Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. Over the years,
Washington has lumped governments into camps, filtered through its
perceptions of where they fit on the sliding scale of corruption or of
ties with its global or regional adversaries.
In general,
Americans rarely take the trouble to understand the profound differences
between countries as disparate as Mexico, the Caribbean nations,
Colombia and Brazil. If they did, they would be less likely to paint
political developments in binary colors and accept the complexities of
the region’s democracies. The United States should recognize that it can
work with left-of and right-of-center governments, and centrist ones
too. Washington can more pro-actively engage with sub-regional
initiatives, like the Pacific Alliance of Colombia, Chile, Peru and
Mexico; or the similar efforts of the Dominican Republic, Panama and
Costa Rica. And the United States should commit resources and embrace
working with governments in Colombia, Ecuador and Chile invested in
fighting climate change.
A blanket U.S. policy approach must give way to one that differentiates opportunities and challenges.
2. Washington should recognize that Latin American and Caribbean nations are looking for a dialogue, not direction.
Former
National Security Advisor John Bolton’s 2019 comment that “the Monroe
doctrine is alive and well” still reflects the mindset of many in the
United States regarding its right to lead the region. This perspective
is badly outdated.
In today’s world, the United States should not
attempt to decide hemispheric priorities. Recent initiatives on
regional migration and nearshoring are, fairly or unfairly, seen as
addressing primarily U.S. concerns about its borders and supply chains.
Warnings about China can play poorly in a region that has a mind of its
own on global developments.
Latin America and Caribbean countries
have lived with democracy, market economies and globalization for the
past 30 years. They know they face political polarization and multiple
crises that require policy responses — but these issues are
differentiated depending on the country and will be decided internally
by very distinct governments.
They would welcome real dialogue
with the United States. Whether citizens choose right-of-center
governments, as in Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay; or populist alternatives
as Salvadorans did; or left-wing presidents as Peruvians, Hondurans and
Chileans did, the United States could do more to listen to and work
with these democratically elected governments and their priorities —
difficult as it may sometimes be. The failure, for example, to reach out
to Colombia’s and Brazil’s leaders over the first year of a new
administration because of political differences led to lost time in
building common ground on common challenges.
3. Washington should recognize that it’s time to look past ideological differences and move to a new era of engagement.
Latin
America is not looking to Washington to define yesterday’s or
tomorrow’s ideological wars. Almost the entire world rejects the U.S.
approach to Cuba. Latin American and Caribbean countries are also
deciding their own next steps on Venezuela and are no longer as strongly
aligned with Washington. We can agree to disagree on these issues
instead of using them to drive a wedge between the region and the United
States.
The pushback on the administration’s decision to exclude
dictatorships from the Summit of the Americas is emblematic of these
differences of approach. It is problematic how the region deals with
undemocratic governments, as Brian Winter and Andres Oppenheimer
suggest. The United States is also correct that the 2001 Inter-American
Democratic Charter commits the hemisphere to protect democracy. Many
Latin American countries share the U.S. concern about authoritarian
trends in the region. Washington, however, meets with autocrats in the
G-20 format, in the U.N. Security Council, at the recent U.S.-ASEAN
Summit and elsewhere. It may have to consider working on compromises
with Latin America and the Caribbean, precluding the threat of boycotts
in the future.
Washington’s efforts to transpose broader U.S.
geopolitical concerns to the region are not prospering either. As one
author put it, “Latin America does not want another Cold War.” China’s
growing economic ties to South America are seen as a significant threat
by many in the United States but may in fact simply reflect a pragmatic
approach by many in the region to their most important market. On
Ukraine, like most of the world, Latin America has not followed the
U.S.-European sanctions regime. The United States could nonetheless use
the current uncertainties to develop a new strategic relationship in a
Latin America concerned about a world of emerging trade blocs — and
incorporate the U.S. objective of nearshoring. Countries in the region
would welcome investment for their own development, as Colombian
President Duque made clear in Davos on May 23.
Looking to the Future
A
year ago, I presented a detailed and overly optimistic outlook for a
forward-looking agenda for this year’s Summit of the Americas. It
included a recommendation for greater assistance flows from the United
States. Successive administrations spent almost three trillion dollars
on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and almost $40 billion in Ukraine in two
months. By comparison, the Biden administration’s 2022 request for
Latin America and the Caribbean — the global region that arguably has
the most impact on Americans’ daily lives — was for $2.2 billion.
As
we look to the future, and past the Summit of the Americas, it still
does not seem too much to ask for U.S.-Latin America relations to be
recast to reflect the current political realities and priorities in the
region. The countries of the hemisphere, as Patrick Duddy correctly
notes, “are not likely to wait around until the United States gets ready
to take their concerns seriously. They will seek new partners, new
markets and new ideas elsewhere.” In an era of global strategic
competition, this is an outcome that the United States can ill afford.