Noise and Disappointment
By Alan Stoga*

Presidential summits used to be extraordinary events held for extraordinary purposes. The 1945 Yalta summit shaped the post war world. The 1975 Rambouillet summit gave birth to what is now the G-8. The 1978 summit meeting between President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin produced the Camp David Accords.

In contrast, the recent Mar del Plata summit produced nothing but noise and disappointment. That should not have been surprising, since the only obvious reason for the meeting was that more than a year had passed since the last hemispheric summit in Monterrey. There was no larger purpose and no larger urgency. This was a summit driven by nothing more important than the passage of time.

The result was a failure. There was no agreement on a formula to advance the FTAA. There was no consensus on how the region could grow faster and create more jobs, although that was the alleged theme of the meeting. And, there was no agreement on how to make the region more globally competitive or, even, relevant.

Instead, the Mar del Plata summit will be remembered its for poor organization, the usual anti-globalization violence, and — most notably — President Chavez’s histrionics. It is practically unprecedented for a summit participant to be the headliner at a mass anti-summit protest, and to use that venue to attack another president. That Chavez’s undiplomatic behavior was not condemned by the summit is a measure of the weakness of the region’s leadership as well as the widespread antipathy towards the United States.

The basic fact is that President Bush is wildly unpopular almost everywhere south of the Rio Grande, which makes it politically easier to oppose him than to make the kinds of diplomatic compromises that are essential to a successful summit. Combined with the weak political standing of most American presidents and the reality that almost half of the countries in the region are facing elections, the summit had no political basis to succeed. Moreover, with most of the South Americans representing left leaning (if not actual socialist) tendencies, the odds of seeing eye-to-eye with the U.S. delegation, which had nothing more to offer than its tired agenda of trade and security, were close to zero.

The good news is that there were four bits of silver lining to the storm clouds that blew out of the summit in Uruguay.
First, 29 of the 34 participants supported the US vision of the FTAA. Even if those numbers are a bit exaggerated, it is probably true that most countries in the region are willing to move forward on some kind of free trade agenda, depending on the terms.

Second, Chavez made such a fool of himself, that he might have sowed the seeds of a backlash among those in the region — including Presidents Lula, Uribe, and Lagos, among others — who have insisted for years that they could control him. It is just possible that these leaders are starting to realize that his demagoguery and radical populism are much more threatening to Venezuela’s neighbors than they are to the United States.

Third, President Fox, a lame duck with nothing to lose, demonstrated that there is space for a centrist in the Americas. He emerged as the straight talking advocate of reason and a champion of free trade. He argued that the goal was not to make the hemisphere safe for capitalists — as Chavez and his sympathizers insisted — but to create jobs, which NAFTA and other regional trade agreements had demonstrably done. And, he effectively made the case that free trade within the Americas was the only way to fight the onslaught of cheap Chinese products, which is displacing jobs everywhere in the region.

Fourth, the Brazilians did not actually turn their backs on the FTAA. Their consistent position has been that a regional free trade agreement must include a substantial reduction of US agricultural subsidies. Virtually everyone acknowledges that this is only likely in the context of a successful global trade round. So, the Brazilians, with their own politically weakened president, merely reiterated that the key to the FTAA lies in Doha.

They did not go forward, but they did not go backward.

In short, the Mar del Plata summit was fated to fail. The real act of leadership would have been to postpone it until shifting circumstances created some space for creative diplomacy.

*Alan Stoga is president of Zemi Communications