We Can Play a Smarter Game in Latin America and the Caribbean | Opinion
By John Feeley and Scott Hamilton - August 1, 2023
The
Miami Herald’s July 28 editorial, “While EU woos Latin America and the
Caribbean, the U.S. plays hard to get” wisely called for greater
Biden-administration strategic engagement with Latin America to rival
the European Union’s efforts. It was timely and correct.
However,
its message was inconsistent, referring to the explicitly
anti-strategic policies that Sen. Marco Rubio and others promote,
cheerleading for unilateral, “get-tough” policies that consistently
fail.
The value of the EU’s strategic thinking about Latin
America is manifest, and its effort to promote universal engagement,
including inviting all Latin American countries to attend bi-annual
summits regardless of political differences reflects the smart approach.
This is what strategic thinking involves, separating permanently vital
interests from annoying, yet transient, diversions. The Herald
appropriately contrasts the EU approach with the paucity and episodic
nature of of U.S. regional engagement and its narrow domestic focus on
migration and suggests the United States is losing ground. We can tell
you that we are.
Yet the suggestion that, in response to the EU’s
stepped-up engagement, the United States should rely on the advice of
Rubio, offered as an expert, whose prescriptions are tired and literally
anti-strategic, involving sanctions, marginalization and division, begs
credulity. Those approaches are global bywords for strategic failure.
Tried and tested, they have only entrenched authoritarian regimes in
power and created space for malign external actors like Russia and China
to meddle.
How has this political straitjacket on Latin America
policy harmed U.S. interests? First, Sens. Rubio and Rick Scott have
personally withheld Senate confirmation of no less than a dozen U.S.
ambassadors to the region since 2020, based on their view that President
Biden is “soft” on dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Arguing
foolishly that the United States legitimizes authoritarian regimes if
they engage diplomatically with them, Florida’s politicians prefer to
performatively sanction and denounce these regimes, in response to
moneyed exile communities that fund their reelection campaigns.
Currently
10 of 24 American embassies in the Western Hemisphere are without
ambassadors. Many who are in place waited over a year for confirmation.
Panama, with its strategically important canal, was without an
ambassador for over four and a half years. Chile for three and one half.
You don’t influence a region when your diplomatic team plays absent its
team captains.
Second, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart has proposed
zeroing out all U.S. assistance to Colombia in 2024 because he doesn’t
like the democratically elected president’s social agenda. This will
severely impact a bipartisan partnership that has resulted in an
undisputed turnaround in a country that was once on the verge of
becoming a narco-failed state.
Third, Rep. Maria Elivira Salazar
held a congressional hearing on July 27 entitled “Colombia’s Descent
into Socialism,” portending a Cuba-style demise of Colombia.
Administration witnesses and Democrats on the panel forcefully and
factually pushed back on her Cassandra-like vision of Colombian Carnage.
Yet she stubbornly asserted Colombia’s democracy is teetering on the
brink when nothing could be farther from the truth. Like in our own
country, political polarization runs deep in the Andean nation, but no
serious observer would conclude there is to be a wholesale destruction
of the Colombian state by the left or the right.
These are just a
few of the counter-productive policy positions assumed by Florida’s
congressional delegation, which anger regional leaders and make U.S.
policy in the region both counterproductive and weak. As one Latin
Foreign Minister watching Salazar’s hearing commented to one of us, “Is
this about Colombia or about U.S. domestic politics?”
To be
clear, we see much that is wrong about the Biden administration’s
miserly approach to Latin America. It has failed to rally support for
serious U.S. investment by the private sector. Its sclerotic assistance
budgets for basic health, education, broadband expansion and health
programs in the Americas reflect the low priority it gives the region.
Israel alone receives more U.S. assistance than the entire region
combined.
But unless and until South Florida’s influential
legislators recognize that diplomacy, development, along with judicial
and security cooperation must respond to mutual interests — and not
unilateral U.S. diktats — the United States will be handicapped as it
looks for genuine partners in a regional vital to us in every
conceivable aspect of peace and prosperity.
And while the Biden
administration plays that losing hand, China, Russia and the EU will
wisely seek expanded opportunity and partnership in Latin America and
the Caribbean, putting their domestic politics behind their national
interests.
John D. Feeley was the U.S. ambassador to the
Republic of Panama from 2015-2018. He is the executive director of the
Center for Media Integrity of the Americas. Scott Hamilton is a retired
senior U.S. foreign service officer. His most recent assignments were
consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, deputy chief of mission and
chargé d’affaires in Cuba, and director for Central American Affairs in
Washington, D.C.
ICYMI: Rubio Rebukes Call to Appease Latin American Dictators
Press Release by the Office of Senator Marco Rubio - August 8, 2023
In
their Aug. 1 opinion, “We can play a smarter game in Latin America and
the Caribbean,” John Feeley and Scott Hamilton attack me and other
Florida lawmakers for holding dictators and narco-terrorists
accountable. They call our efforts “anti-strategic” and instead promote
the same strategy Democrats have advanced since the Obama era: grant
concessions and hope for change.
But
regular diplomatic visits will not change a criminal regime’s selfish
calculations––especially when those visits come from ambassadors unfit
for the job. The last 20 years of “engagement” with China enabled
Beijing’s threatening rise and weakened the United States. I will never
apologize for withholding resources or legitimacy from the regimes in
Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to avoid repeating that mistake.
If
Feeley and Hamilton want productive diplomacy, they should lecture
President Biden for nominating unqualified ambassadors and alienating
regional allies. This White House never misses a chance to criticize
relatively pro-U.S. leaders like those in Ecuador, El Salvador, and
Guatemala.
That is the type of ideological behavior that
“handicaps” our efforts abroad, so the next time these retired diplomats
target me, my colleagues, and what they call the “moneyed exile
communities” of South Florida, they should bring more accurate
arguments.