Leaders from the Western Hemisphere are gathering in Los Angeles for next week’s ninth Summit of the Americas, ostensibly to ensure more effective engagement between the United States and its neighbors. As he prepares for the triennial conference President Joe Biden should do something seemingly counterintuitive — make it the last such summit.
Originally envisioned as a vehicle to advance U.S. interests in the Americas, the Summit of the Americas is a fatally flawed forum that doesn’t serve its purpose and limits our country’s focused attention on its closest neighbors to a once-every-three-years event.
Since its inception, the meeting has failed to deliver. Its most notable milestones are either doomed initiatives such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 1994, or misremembered breakthroughs such as the “first’’ handshake between President Obama and Cuba’s Raul Castro at the 2015 Summit in Panama (they first shook hands in South Africa in 2013 and announced the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba in December 2014).
