Suppose you announced you were pivoting toward a different direction, stopped in mid pivot and wound up right back where you were in the first place? That is what happened with the Obama Administration’s much-heralded Pivot to Asia 15 years ago. This meant East Asia and the Pacific (Hillary Clinton wrote about America’s coming “Pacific Century”) but the Obama people spent a lot of time right back where they started – focused on the Middle East and Europe. Those were the years of the failed nuclear deal with Iran, of the rise of the Islamic State and of #UnitedforUkraine. Today the incoming second Trump Administration talks much of a pivot to the Americas, from Greenland to Argentina. This is a refreshing and much needed refocus and was reinforced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first foreign trip, which was to Central America and the Caribbean. President Trump has publicly engaged, at least rhetorically, in the early days of the Administration, on Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. In 2001, Colin Powell’s and George W. Bush’s first foreign junket was to Mexico but that Administration wound up spending most of its time focused on the Middle East and the Global War on Terrorism. Latin America was forgotten. In the early days of this administration, Trump and Rubio find themselves in a familiar place, spending a lot of time and energy on Europe and the Middle East as they try to stamp out interminable wars begun under the previous Democratic government. Can they really pivot – to the Americas and to Asia – as they want and what could they hope to accomplish?
MEMRI VP Amb. Alberto Fernandez on The New Pivot To The West | MEMRI
