After trying “tirelessly” for months to secure a meeting with President Joe Biden, Argentine President Alberto Fernández finally met with his U.S. counterpart at the White House today, in hopes of obtaining his support for Argentina’s renegotiating the terms of an onerous $44 billion IMF loan. A very preliminary reading from the meeting revealed a certain desperation on Fernández’s part to come away from it with a firm commitment of U.S. support for Argentina’s IMF renegotiation which he also needs for internal political reasons. “We look forward to your continued support as you have done so far,” he told Biden.
Fernández’s need for U.S. support on the IMF front is such that he has even shifted his previous neutral rhetoric on the Ukraine war, now pointing to the “grave problems that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused,” referencing Argentina’s voting at the UN to “condemn this invasion,” and vowing to work with the U.S. to do everything possible to achieve peace. That will be a feat since the Biden administration has no interest in peace. Fernández blamed the global financial crisis entirely on the Ukraine war as well and agreed that “democracy” is the key pillar for economic growth. While Fernández also participated in a session of Biden’s ballyhooed “Democracy” summit, Secretary of State Tony Blinken arranged for Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero to participate in a zoom meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But it’s Argentina’s relations with China that have most alarmed the Biden administration, and it is deploying aggressively, with its own personnel and in collaboration with cooperative members of Fernández’s government, to sabotage, downgrade or stop Argentine-Chinese cooperation altogether. That means interfering with projects associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which Argentina has already signed agreements worth billions of dollars, and offering low-technology, no-growth U.S. “alternatives” instead. The U.S. is totally opposed to Argentina’s planned nuclear cooperation with China, including the agreement by which China will build the country’s fourth nuclear reactor, Atucha III.
