Trump’s Summit Offers More Deference Than Details |
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Right-wing regional leaders attend a summit in Florida, Colombia holds legislative elections, and Latin American cinema gets the red-carpet treatment in Spain.
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Right-wing regional leaders attend a summit in Florida, Colombia holds legislative elections, and Latin American cinema gets the red-carpet treatment in Spain.
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Leaders from 12 Latin American countries traveled to Doral, Florida, to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday. It is rare for so many heads of state from the region to gather in person, and the event was an opportunity for Trump to voice a common agenda with them.
The summit, which Trump dubbed the “Shield of the Americas,” revealed itself to be light on policy commitments. The joint declaration signed ahead of the summit was half a page long. Still, the meeting offered signals about Trump’s evolving approach to the region and how leaders are responding to it.
Trump was the only head of state to give a formal speech at the event. In it, he said that the “heart” of the coalition represented a “commitment to using lethal military force” against drug cartels. He praised U.S. strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats—attacks that have killed at least 157 people since September.
That focus “aligns closely with Trump’s law-and-order narrative at home,” Diego Area wrote in Foreign Policy.
For all of Trump’s pomp, he did not announce new funding toward these aims from the United States or from partner countries. The U.S. military has already run anti-narcotics cooperation programs with militaries across Latin America for decades.
Though several Latin American leaders were expecting meetings of at least four minutes with Trump, he shortened those to roughly one-minute photo-ops, according to Bloomberg’s Eric Martin.
It is possible that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran distracted the Trump administration from making more........