White House plays up summit initiatives amid no-shows
LOS ANGELES » The White House on Wednesday pushed back against the notion that the absence of several key leaders from this week’s Summit for the Americas amounts to a backslide for democracy as administration officials sought to play up efforts on food security, climate and other areas to be discussed at this week’s summit.
As President Joe Biden made his way to Los Angeles for the summit, top advisers argued that the summit wasn’t a lost cause just because Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and other leaders have decided to stay away from the gathering over the U.S. excluding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — all countries that send large numbers of migrants to the U.S. and neighboring countries — because they are led by authoritarians.
Among the new programs Biden is expected to unveil in the coming days are a $300 million in food security financing initiative, a new Caribbean climate partnership that will help Caribbean countries access low carbon energy sources, and a program to train 500,000 health workers in the Americas over the next five years.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the White House “will be putting specific dollars into producing tangible results.”
“When you tally all that up and look at the practical impact of what the summit deliverables from the United States will mean for the public sphere, it is significantly more impactful on the actual lives and livelihoods of the people of this region than the kinds of extractive projects that China has been invested in,” Sullivan told reporters Wednesday while aboard Air Force One.
Migration has taken center stage at an assembly of Western Hemisphere leaders, reflecting its emergence as a top foreign policy issue at this week’s summit, but it has largely been overshadowed by differences over Biden’s invitation list.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a summit event Wednesday called differences in political outlooks a “strength” of the region.
“We have democratic governments of the left, of the right, and of the center. But despite what political differences there are, if the fundamentals are there, we’re going to be able to work very, very effectively together,” Blinken said.
The “Los Angeles Declaration,” to be announced while Biden meets with his counterparts from North, Central and South America Wednesday through Friday, are a brief call to action that supporters hope will guide countries on hosting people fleeing violence and persecution and searching for more economic stability.
“We regard this as an unprecedented set of statements and actions by the of the region to deal with a hemispheric crisis,” Sullivan said.
The United States has been the most popular destination for asylum-seekers since 2017, posing a challenge that has stumped Biden and his immediate predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
But the U.S. is far from alone. Colombia and neighboring South American countries host millions who have fled Venezuela. Mexico fielded more than 130,000 asylum applications last year, many of them Haitians, which was triple from 2020. Many Nicaraguans escape to Costa Rica, while displaced Venezuelans account for about one-sixth the population of tiny Aruba.
“Countries are already having to do this, so rather than each country trying to sort this out and figure it out for themselves, what we’re doing is saying, ‘Let’s come together in a coherent way and construct a framework so we can all work together to make this situation more humane and more manageable,’” said Brian Nichols, assistant U.S. secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.
Biden was scheduled to arrive at the summit Wednesday, trailed by questions about how much progress he can make on migration and other issues when some of his counterparts from the region are staying home.
The controversy has undermined the start of the summit, which is being hosted by the U.S. for the first time since the inaugural event in 1994, at a time when China has been trying to make inroads in the region.
Although Biden was heavily involved in Latin America while he was vice president, his focus has largely been elsewhere since taking office as president last year. He’s been trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward Asia while also rallying allies to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Some concrete measures may be announced, perhaps funding for development banks. Nichols said in an interview Monday that discussing any specific initia