Conservative Donnybrook

I know I keep playing this tune but its only because I see the gravity of the situation.

After delivering humanitarian supplies to Nicaragua, the Russian navy continued its tour of the Americas and the Caribbean by setting sail for communist Cuba.  The Russkies will put in for five days at the island nation a mere 90 miles for U.S. shores.

More distressing is the conference taking place in Brazil,  the Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development.  “Why is a conference taking place in Brazil distressing,” you ask.  Because the U.S. was not invited to attend.   Joshua Goodman, writer for Bloomberg News, interviewed top U.S. diplomat, Thomas Shannon on the apparent snub.  Goodman writes:

The U.S. ‘didn’t ask to be invited’ to the summit, he says, although it had discussed with Brazil and Mexico ways the meeting’s agenda could be used during the U.S.-backed Summit of the Americas, in April in Trinidad and Tobago.

‘We don’t subscribe to the hydraulic theory of diplomacy that when one country is up, the other is down — that if China and Russia are in the area our influence has somehow waned,’ Shannon said in a telephone interview.

So, like the bully on the block we weren’t invited to a birthday party but we had our friends do some reconn for us.  Lovely policy, I am sure that will get us very far.  Just look what Brazil’s ex-Foreign Minister had to say.

While the U.S. remains aloof from a region it no longer sees as relevant to its strategic interests, other countries are making unprecedented, serious moves to fill the void.  Countries in the region are more aware than ever that they live in a globalized, post-American world.

This is the real point of leaving America out of the summit.  Nations is the western hemisphere feel neglected and taken for granted by the United States.  All the while the Chinese and Russians commit time and resources to the area.  Our neighbors to the south snubbed us like a high school girl trying to get her beau’s attention: she went to the prom with someone else.  It is not too late to save our hemisphere and ourselves.  This doesn’t mean our neighbors are not interested in working with America to safely and securely develop the two continents, it simply means they are trying to get our attention.

Again, I call on the President to pay more attention to our own backyard, to make friends with our neighbors not to just treat them like younger step-children.  Re-activating the fourth fleet is a fine start but the purpose to which it is put must be constructive.  Sure, the Navy is a war fighting machine, but maybe it can also do some humanitarian work