The Ninth Summit of the Americas, hosted by President Biden last week in Los Angeles, was in trouble even before it was convened. Planning was erratic, with no clear theme or agenda set until the last minute. The invitations they were sent just a few weeks before the event, delayed due to a very public controversy over whether Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela would be included. In the end, they were not invited.
senior US officials hinted from the beginning that the Summit would be restricted to “democratically elected leaders”. That caused the rejection of several Latin Americans, including Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Although the host nation sends the invitations to the Summit, some Latin Americans considered the decision to exclude the three governments as an abuse of the prerogatives of the host.
To appease López Obrador and others who raised similar concerns, the White House toyed with the idea to invite Cuba to send a lower-level official or participate as an observer. Not surprisingly, Cuba rejected this second-class citizenship even before it was offered. López-Obrador politely refused to attend the Summit and sent his foreign minister in his place. The presidents of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador also declined. At the Summit, other heads of state criticized openly to Washington for not inviting all the nations of the Americas.
Irregular migration was a main focus of the Summit, but between them, excluded countries and those whose presidents stayed at home accounted for 69 percent of migrants. accounted for by US Customs and Border Protection in April: almost 180,000 people. Attempting to formulate a strategy to stop irregular migration without involving the governments of the migrants’ countries of origin is a recipe for failure.
Other issues on the Summit agenda—environmental protection and climate change, public health, organized crime—are also transnational problems that cannot be effectively addressed unilaterally. Therein lies the flaw in Biden’s Wilsonian willingness to engage only with democracies. Sometimes you have to compromise with governments you don’t like in order to deal with urgent problems. President Obama understood this; During his last two years in office, his administration signed 22 bilateral agreements with Cuba on issues of mutual interest. Trump severed major diplomatic ties with Cuba, and Biden has yet to resume them on an issue other than migration.
Biden has a longstanding faith in democracy. Like President Woodrow Wilson before him, he believes that the United States has a mission to support and foster democracies abroad. To further that cause, he called a Summit for Democracy in December 2021, with delegations from more than 100 countries (again excluding Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, along with El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Bolivia). There, he announced new foreign assistance programs aimed at promoting democracy around the world. “Democracy needs champions”, said in the opening session, calling the defense of democracy “the defining challenge of our time.”
Biden’s commitment to democracy is laudable, but Washington always views democracy through the prism of its own self-interest. It is no coincidence that the three countries that Washington excluded from the Summit of the Americas are governed by self-proclaimed leftist governments. Biden, after all, is a politician who came of age at the height of the Cold War, when Washington rationalized alliances with right-wing authoritarians as necessary to fight communism.
Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, and Haiti, right-wing governments with questionable democratic credentials, authoritarian leaders, and poor human rights records, were invited to the Summit of the Americas.
The controversy surrounding the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua is eerily reminiscent of the controversy over the exclusion of Isla de la 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia. At the time, Latin American heads of state publicly scolded President Obama for insisting that Cuba be excluded, warning that they would boycott the next Summit unless the island was invited. That rebellion against US leadership contributed to the decision to Obama to start normalizing relations with Havana in 2014. Will Biden draw a similar lesson?
In all the Summits since the first in 1994, the US president has extolled the virtues of cooperation, assuring his Latin American counterparts that the United States wants a new society based on equality. But Washington’s perennial demand that Cuba be excluded, despite the overwhelming Latin American consensus to the contrary, belies that beautiful sentiment. For Latin Americans, the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua is a symbol of the continuing “hegemonic presumption” from Washington, as scholar Abraham Lowenthal put it. In announcing his decision to skip the Summit, Lopez Obrador described Washington’s insistence on controlling participation as “a continuation of the old policy of interventionism [y] of disrespect for nations and their peoples.”
Biden’s problem is that the United States no longer enjoys the political or economic dominance that allowed it to dictate the terms of hemispheric relations, and Latin Americans are no longer willing to simply accept Washington’s priorities as their own. Rebuilding US leadership in the hemisphere will require Washington to consult with its neighbors and genuinely listen to them rather than dictate to them. From time to time, it will be necessary for Washington to take the unfamiliar and uncomfortable step of giving in to them.
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This article was originally published in English at Responsible StatecraftSpanish version is published with the express authorization of its author.
Translation: OnCuba
