In 2008, President Barack Obama had a clear idea for Latin American foreign policy. The Bush administration, distracted by events in the Middle East, had pursued a harmful hemispheric policy of blustering unilateralism and neglect; Obama, conversely, would pursue a “new partnership” with the Americas, one marked by cooperation and mutual interests. His subsequent election was heralded throughout Latin America as an opportunity to repair the dam...
The somewhat grandiosely titled the “Summit of the Americas” (SoA) concluded this week in sunny Cartagena, Colombia. The regional meeting included 44 of the Western Hemisphere’s heads of state – with the awkward and controversial exception of Cuba. As we have learned to expect from these large-scale, feel-good summits, little was accomplished. The meeting ended without a formal joint declaration – which is not to say that it was bereft of its sh...
Anyone remember the FTAA? Probably not. The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) was supposed to be revolutionary. Lowering or eliminating tariffs on thousands of goods in every country between Canada and Argentina, the treaty was heralded as a breakthrough in Western relations when first announced at the 1994 Summit of the Americas. But today, the FTAA is dead in the water. Instead, as a result of domestic and international hand-wringi...
...ted the dynamic from discussions of “peak oil” to a future in which traditional energy resources appear to be plentiful and can come from very different places. The future of oil exploration and production has shifted to the Americas, and the United States is now projected to be an energy exporting country within the decade, shifting the balance of trade, providing the country an economic re-do and reducing the strategic significance of oil-prod...
...hrough with their threats. Colombian Eye Candy Currently, 11 Secret Service agents are being investigated for allegedly hiring prostitutes in their downtime before President Obama arrived in the country for the Summit of the Americas. The alleged misconduct was found out when there was a payment dispute and one of the prostitutes complained to the hotel manager, according to the New York Times. All of the agents were suspended and are currently...
In July 2009, President Barack Obama made his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa and took his wife and daughters to the Cape Coast Castle, a ghostly whitewashed fort in Ghana that was used to hold and ship Africans to the Americas during the time of the Atlantic slave trade. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Obama compared visiting Cape Coast to visiting Birkenau: “The experience of slavery is like the experience of the Holocaust...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments