Barnac President Ma Cortiso with Blinken
Image source: Twitter @presidenciapma
On April 19, local time, US Secretary of State Blinken visited Panama, accompanied by US Homeland Security Secretary Majorcas. This is Blinken's first visit to Latin America this year, and it is also one of the few high-ranking ministers since the Biden administration came to power to visit Latin American countries together. In the talks with Panama President Ma Cortiso, in addition to bilateral content, Blinken also spoke highly about the upcoming ninth "Summit of the Americas" in Los Angeles in June, and Cortiso also actively expressed his willingness to participate. Not only that, the United States has recently mentioned the Summit of the Americas in many recent visits by senior officials, and the Biden administration even intends to organize and organize the "first" meeting of heads of state of Latin American countries during the summit. The seemingly unrelated two seem to be inextricably linked to russia's growing war with Ukraine and biden's massive hosting of the Summit in the Americas.
Ukrainian President Zelenskiy said on the 23rd that Blinken would visit Ukraine
Why the Summit of the Americas?
The Summit of the Americas, known as the Summit of the Nations of the Americas, was the first series of international meetings initiated and organized by the United States and held among the leaders of almost all countries in North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Since its first session in 1994, the Summit of the Americas has been held at a triennial frequency. The reason why it is "almost all the leaders" is because Cuba did not participate in the vast majority of the meetings, and the reasons for this are obvious - the Inter-American summit organized by the United States, with strong ideological overtones, excludes Cuba and is obviously a brutal "bullying act" against the anti-American countries in the Western Hemisphere.
It is worth mentioning that the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama is still considered to be the most important and fruitful meeting, precisely because the then US President Barack Obama held a historic meeting with Cuban leader Raul Castro at that meeting, and the United States and Cuba launched a resumption of diplomatic relations, initially achieving "breaking the ice in diplomatic relations". But since then, with Trump and the Republican Party coming to power, the Democratic administration's "return to Latin America" plan has been shelved, and Trump's alienation and exclusionary policies toward Latin American countries have also reduced the importance of the Americas Summit, which the 2018 Peru Summit has been evaluated by the American media as "fruitless and extremely boring."
After the Biden administration took office, it gradually restarted the Democratic government's "return to Latin America" plan, and the Americas Summit was an important part of it, and the United States will become the host country for the second time since the first meeting in Miami in 1994. Judging from the current state that the secretary of state himself is actively "wandering and selling", the Biden administration's ambitions for this summit are really not small. It can even be said that whether the Democratic Party can straighten out the U.S.-Latin American relationship that is gradually out of control can be seen at the Los Angeles meeting.
U.S. President Joe Biden
Biden is in a hurry to hold the meeting, and the root cause is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict
Even if "returning to Latin America" is one of the important agendas of the Biden administration, rushing to organize the Americas Summit at a time when the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has not yet subsided may seem inappropriate, but it is actually another consideration. To understand this, it is necessary to analyze three contexts in which the United States hosted the Summit of the Americas:
The first is the strong momentum of the collective return of left-wing forces in Latin America. Affected by the impact of the new crown epidemic and the lack of economic growth, the right-wing parties that previously came to power with the wave of "Latin American rightward turn" have not achieved remarkable results in national governance, coupled with the poor performance of many right-wing governments in the epidemic, Latin American left-wing forces have returned to power in a series of general elections in recent years, including Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and other countries Left parties have won elections, of which Chile is the first time after the restoration of democracy to usher in a left-wing government. Regardless of whether the left can govern smoothly and restore the country's economy, this trend of sweeping most of the Americas and occupying all the major countries is enough to make the United States nervous. During Blinken's visit to Panama on the 19th, when talking about promoting the development of regional democracy and human rights and dealing with the Russian issue, he said that Panama "can play a role as a regional leader", which already has the meaning of "there is no general in Shuzhong, Liao Hua is a pioneer". Biden's intention to restrict the power of the regional left is obvious, and during the preparatory meeting, he took the lead in communicating with right-wing ruling countries such as Brazil and Panama instead of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and other countries.
The second is the security panic caused by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict to the United States. Shortly after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the United States actually sent a high-ranking official delegation, led by Juan Gonzalez, senior adviser on Latin American affairs in the White House, to visit Venezuela, which had stopped high-level exchanges for a long time, and held a meeting with maduro, the "sworn enemy." This meeting is obviously directly related to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: after imposing sanctions on Russia, the United States re-negotiated oil trade with Venezuela in order to seek a domestic energy supply alternative, and the United States also knew that Russia, which had imposed financial sanctions, could no longer facilitate oil trade transactions with the Maduro government, so it pinched Maduro to negotiate with him, which was naturally one of the main purposes of the US delegation. At the same time, however, the U.S. delegation's visit to Venezuela has another important purpose, that is, to test whether Maduro will respond to the Russian-Ukrainian war and launch a "coordinated action" in the Americas. According to people familiar with the matter, the arms trade between Russia and Venezuela for many years has long aroused the vigilance of the United States, and Biden is particularly worried about Maduro's recurrence of the "famous scene" of the Cuban missile crisis at the behest of Putin. As a result, the delegation initially ensured the security of the United States, but coordinating relations with other left-wing countries and ensuring its own long-term security became another priority for the White House.
Barná President Ma Cortiso often attracted public attention for his onslaught against the previous Barrera administration
Image source: GETTY IMAGES
The third is the continuous improvement of China's influence in Latin America. For the Biden administration, any kind of conflict in the international situation can always be boiled down to the competitive market with China. At a State Department press conference on April 15, a reporter asked whether Blinken's visit to Panama would discuss Panama's relationship with China, and Nichols, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, replied that these issues would indeed become part of the US discussion in Panama, and he also claimed that the United States still advised Latin American countries to "be more careful and see the conditions" when cooperating with China.
U.S. Secretary of State Blinken
Regardless of whether the United States has delusions of being victimized in its assessment of China, the united States' careful thinking not to increase China's influence in Latin America is clear from the perspective of the trump and Biden administrations' continuous containment of China's pragmatic cooperation with Latin American countries. Since the Summit of the Americas has been held, it has rarely talked about economic and trade cooperation as the most criticized issue, but the current agenda set by the Biden administration, in addition to traditional regional multilateral issues such as regional democracy, immigration control, refugee management, and climate change, has already included "economic recovery in the post-epidemic period", which is undoubtedly a way to curb the expansion of cooperation and influence between China and Russia in Latin America. Of course, Biden thinks a lot, how much can be implemented is still difficult to determine, whether the US business community can really let their own interests to win over the United States has always been called a "metaphysical topic", even in the period when Trump vigorously co-opted right-wing allies, the impression left by the United States on Latin American countries has always been "lip service but not reality". Biden really wants to "return to Latin America", and the first thing to balance is internal interests.
Author: Zhang Junrong (Wen Wei Po correspondent in Brasilia)
Editor: Lu Shuwen