Under Biden, China Has Widened Trade Lead in Much of Latin America
Under Biden, China Has Widened Trade Lead in Much of Latin America
A busy U.S. domestic policy agenda and the war in Ukraine have kept President Biden's focus elsewhere, said AS/COA's Eric Farnsworth to Reuters.
China has widened the gap on the United States in trade terms in large swathes of Latin America since U.S. President Joe Biden came into office early last year, data show, underscoring how Washington is being pushed onto the back foot in the region.
An exclusive Reuters analysis of U.N. trade data from 2015-2021 shows that outside of Mexico, the top U.S. trade partner, China has overtaken the United States in Latin America and widened the gap last year. […]
Eric Farnsworth, a former White House official now at the Council of the Americas think tank, said soaring commodities prices had boosted Latin America-China trade figures, but acknowledged that a busy U.S. domestic policy agenda and the war in Ukraine had kept Biden's focus elsewhere.
"There's bipartisan agreement that the U.S. just hasn't been at the table," he said. "The Summit is part of solving that but there needs to be something concrete that comes out of it."
