The End of the Americas, or a New Beginning?

Barack Obama came into office promising to renew American leadership around the world. In his first months in office, he has confronted a series of urgent international crises and, at the London global economic summit, began his campaign to refurbish the American brand. But his first big test in a tough regional setting comes this weekend at the Summit of the Americas.
It’s no secret that the United States’ standing in Latin America suffered a precipitous decline in the Bush years. Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and his allies have steadily increased their numbers and their influence within the shrinking number of moderate nations. The Chavistas have repeatedly challenged the United States and its remaining allies with gleeful impunity. Meanwhile, those Latin leaders essentially in line with the U.S. agenda have found it damaging to their political interests at home - and unhelpful to their international reputations - to be seen standing too close to Washington.
The first Summit of the Americas convened in Miami in 1994 - a time when nearly the entire Hemisphere was proud of its emerging democracies and more open markets. It was clearly a Clinton-Gore show, and other leaders competed for pride of place next to the region’s uncontested leaders.

How far we have come from that glorious past! The most recent Summit, in Argentina in 2005, was a visible disaster, with the Chavistas mounting a loud “alternative people’s Summit” in the streets, and President Bush unable to persuade the other leaders to sign even an anodyne final communiqué.

A second failed Summit, in Trinidad, would signal the definitive collapse of American leadership in the Western Hemisphere. It would also have severe implications for Obama’s campaign to regain lost ground throughout the developing world – for if he cannot win where the United States has home court advantage, what are his chances in East Asia and the Middle East?
The Americas Summit will be an inflection point for U.S. power – the place where Obama’s promise will truly be put to the test.
Obama’s capacity to combine leadership with listening, an expansive humor with a cool demeanor, his ready deflection of criticism with gentle jibes, will serve him well in the Latin American setting. But if he is to reassert U.S. influence in the region, he will have to set forth a forward-looking and concrete agenda of action that addresses the current economic crisis and promises progress in reducing the region’s desperate poverty and stark inequalities.

The London Summit’s pledges of $1 trillion in emergency financing for the developing world should be matched with another $1 billion in regional fiscal stimulus packages – which go beyond what London accomplished, developing programs that integrate spending, to link transportation infrastructures and to coordinate anti-poverty programs. The region can agree to establish common educational standards and share plans to use carefully targeted subsidies that help to keep poor kids in school even as both of their parents go to work.

Concrete initiatives such as these provide the United States with powerful new weapons in the strategic struggle against the resurgence of an anti-U.S. authoritarianism. This rejectionist alliance prefers alignment with its ideological bedfellows in Moscow and Beijing rather than with Washington, and has forced democratic capitalism onto the defensive.

The United States’ objective in Trinidad, accordingly, is to reshape the strategic landscape in Latin America -- transforming it from one where the United States and its potential social-democratic allies are afraid to openly affirm their values to one where the U.S. is again seen as the standard bearer of a fair and open democracy that seeks social justice. Only then will the U.S. have seized the mantle of change from Chavez and his camp and regained the strategic initiative.

Obama needs to demonstrate that the United States is the better source of ideas for an effective campaign against poverty. He also needs to give our natural allies in Latin America – business leaders and moderate politicians – a renewed sense of confidence that they will have a place in the new social order, even as they adjust to a fairer distribution of wealth.

Strong American leadership means that nations that share our basic values see it in their interest to work closely with us, in setting inspirational goals, in embarking on concrete initiatives of mutual gain, and, yes, in simple photo-ops. Strong American leadership also means that nations that oppose our strategic goals see it as not being in their interest – because the costs are too high – to brazenly counter our diplomacy. The U.S. must be perceived as more appealing and more enduring than the alternatives.

Success in Port of Spain will be evidence that the American ideal can regain its ascendency, beginning in our own Hemisphere. Failure, however, will give credence to those who are predicting the permanent demise of U.S. influence worldwide.

Richard Feinberg, a professor of political economy at the University of California, San Diego, was Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs on the Clinton National Security Council. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.