During the June 6-10 Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made the preposterous assertion that the embarrassing collection of initiatives the Biden-Harris administration presented there—a Partnership for Economic Prosperity, a flimsy plan to address the “root causes of migration,” building “resilient” supply chains, combatting climate change with low-tech green technology and other such nonsense—would be far superior to anything China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has offered the Americas. China’s projects are purely “extractive” Sullivan insisted.
What? Former Chilean Ambassador to China Jorge Heine had this to say about the Biden-Harris proposals. In comments published June 10 by Washington Post columnist Ishan Tharoor, whose column was entitled “Biden’s Hemispheric Summit May End Up a Dud,” Heine was quoted: “it all looks very thin.” Keep in mind that China is now the first or second largest trading partner of most nations in the Americas. “When U.S. authorities visit Latin America,” Heine said, “they often talk about China and why Latin American countries should not deal with China. When Chinese authorities visit, all the talk is about bridges and tunnels and highways and railways and trade.” Certainly this is a more attractive vision, he assessed.
Then there’s the fact that Biden had promised to reverse Trump’s destructive policies toward the region, which didn’t happen. Biden ignored the region, adopting what Heine called a “Trump-lite” approach. Rhetoric “has been toned down but the policies have continued very much along the same lines.” To a region hit hard by the COVID pandemic and economic dislocation, this was a big disappointment, he pointed out. Heine told Tharoor that while most regional governments might prefer the U.S. model, due to shared democratic and cultural values, “the real challenge is development…. When China comes and offers trade and financing, that is welcome. That is the main priority. Latin Americans are not in the business of international great power competition.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/10/biden-summit-of-americas-south-dud/)
