Under Biden, America is losing influence in Latin America

One of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign themes was that under Donald Trump, the U.S. had lost friends and influence in the world. Biden would restore good relations with our allies.

Europe was the main example Biden pitched, but his supporters also cited Latin America, a part of the world where, as vice president, he had tried to promote regional engagement.

Actually, U.S. relations with Latin America weren’t bad under Trump. The two most important nations in the region to the U.S. are Mexico and Brazil. Trump had good relations with both, not an easy feat considering that Mexico’s president is a leftist and Brazil’s president leans strongly right.

As to Mexico, even the Washington Post acknowledges that its left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador “drew close to Trump despite his 2019 threat to impose stiff tariffs unless migration was contained.” (Or maybe because of it.) “The Mexican president gave in, deploying hundreds of military and national guard members to detain U.S.-bound migrants.”

There was similar cooperation when it came to the war on drug cartels. The Trump administration, under the leadership of William Barr, was able to work effectively with Mexico to attack these cartels through extraditions, for example. Unfortunately, the pandemic brought an end to this, though Barr says Mexico was always a reluctant partner whose cooperation was mostly the result of pressure from the U.S.

As to Brazil, Trump’s relations with its president, Jair Bolsonaro, were excellent. The Post attributes this to Bolsanaro’s admiration of the U.S. president’s “no-holds-barred approach” which, for that matter, also appealed to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.

The common theme here is that strength wins friends, or at least respect and cooperation. With Mexico, it was Trump’s threats that worked. With Brazil and El Salvador, it was his persona.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden projects weakness and the U.S. is losing influence in Latin America.

This was evident at the Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles earlier this month. Obrador, the Mexican president, didn’t even attend — a remarkable snub that even CNN had to admit “revealed Biden’s struggle to assert US leadership in its neighborhood.”

Obrador’s stated reason for the boycott was the Biden administration’s refusal to invite Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. They weren’t invited because they are dictatorships.

I commend the Biden administration for this decision. It may be that Trump wouldn’t have invited these countries either, although it’s possible he would have (most likely, Trump wouldn’t have hosted such a summit).

It’s fair to wonder whether, had Trump held the summit and not invited the authoritarians, Obrador would have boycotted the event. Snubbing Biden is one thing. Snubbing Trump is another.

And imagine the outrage if Trump had refused to invite authoritarian leaders to a summit and Mexico had boycotted as a result. The mainstream media would have ripped Trump for undermining relations with our neighbor through a Bush-like obsession with promoting democracy and a Cold War mindset regarding Cuba.

Biden received no such media condemnation.

Obrador’s boycott was significant, but the summit was largely a sideshow. The real story out of Latin America is the recent electoral victories of the left in Chile, Peru, and Colombia, and the fact that in Brazil, Bolsonaro trails his leftist opponent in a race to be decided later this year. This development means that, in the words of the Washington Post, the U.S. might “take a back seat” or even be “sidelined” in Latin America. And that back seat might well be to China.

Joe Biden isn’t to blame for these election results. The pandemic and the response to it crushed Latin American economies. According to the Post, it “kicked 12 million people out of the middle class in a single year.” Voters are now punishing the governments that presided over this ruin.

The lesson for the U.S. is that other countries don’t tilt towards or away from our orbit because our president is a nice guy or a meanie. They tilt the way they do because of internal considerations and their perceptions of national interest.

What a U.S. president can do is arrange the playing field so that it becomes in other countries’ interests to cooperate with us — the way Trump did with Mexico. The president can also instill confidence in America, and one way to do that is by projecting strength — as Trump tried to do and Biden has not done (see Afghanistan).

I’ll conclude with a few paragraphs about what the future may hold for Latin American countries that recently have elected leftists. The successful leftist candidates had to overcome fears that they would behave like Hugo Chavez and his successor. They accomplished this by looking and sounding different from the traditional communist strongman.

The problem is that their policies don’t seem all that different. In Colombia, for example, the newly elected president is big on economic redistribution, as all leftists are. His major deviation from old-time socialism is an emphasis on fighting “climate change,” which has caused him to ban new oil exploration.

With his combination of redistributionism and obsession with climate change, it’s as if the new president is out to wreck the economy he was elected to fix. But even without these perverse policies, the new leaders in Colombia, Peru, and Chile wouldn’t be likely to deliver on the economy. The deck is stacked against them, just as it was with their predecessors.

If they don’t deliver, the only way for them to retain power will be to seize it, Hugo Chavez style.