Word: summits
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...irritating it must have been for Sarkozy to read French press reports last month that revealed Bush's successor Obama had written a private letter to Chirac ahead of the London G-20 summit. In it, Obama tells Chirac he anticipates their chances to "collaborate together in a spirit of peace and friendship in order to build a safer world." Most French pundits interpret the letter as Obama giving Chirac credit for correctly opposing the Iraq war as a looming strategic and diplomatic calamity - a position Obama shared. According to French press reports, Sarkozy was livid at seeing the star...
Hugo Chávez owned the last Summit of the Americas, in 2005. Thanks to rising oil prices, the Venezuelan President, who controls the hemisphere's largest crude reserves, suddenly had the petro-wherewithal to spread his gospel of a more socialist Latin America free of Washington's imperialist interference. At that summit, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Chávez led large and raucous demonstrations against President George W. Bush and U.S. plans for a hemispheric free-trade pact, which effectively died at the gathering...
...carry the same swagger into this weekend's Americas summit in Port of Spain, Trinidad? At first glance, his decade-old Bolivarian Revolution (named for South America's 19th century independence hero, Simón Bolívar) seems as potent as it was four years ago. Chávez, still Venezuela's most popular political figure, just won a referendum that will let him run for re-election as long as he wants. His small but radical leftist bloc of Latin American nations (including Bolivia and Nicaragua) has helped blunt U.S. hegemony and ushered non-hemispheric allies like Russia...
...contrast to the summit in Mar del Plata, Chávez isn't expected to hold the regional reins in Port of Spain or breathe the same anti-U.S. fire. More moderate leftists like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are regarded as Latin America's standard bearers today. Even if the global economic crisis has borne out Chávez's condemnation of capitalism, it has also sent oil prices plummeting - and his populist largesse along with them. At the same time, some supporters worry that as Chávez accumulates more power at home...
When U.S. President Obama stops off in Mexico on Thursday on his way to the annual Summit of the Americas, he will be visiting a nation that is in the news - and not in a good way. The war that Mexican President Felipe Calderón has waged against his nation's drug cartels has predictably been marked by horrible violence. Washington analysts, watching the mayhem in some Mexican towns as cartels settle old scores, fight turf wars and take the fight to overmanned (and all too often, deeply compromised) police forces, have compared Mexico to failed or failing states...