In the United States, the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) summit has been held without fanfare. As a matter of fact, the goals it outlined are totally out of tune with Washington's true intentions. The White House has posed as willing to "develop democracy and mutually beneficial trade" while trying to engage countries of the American continent in its Western Hemisphere fight against China.

US President Biden presented the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity program at the Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles back in June 2022. It was supposed to mark US pivot back to Latin America and avow relevance of the 19th century Monroe doctrine proclaiming the Western Hemisphere a zone of Washington's strategic interests. However, the LA summit turned into a riot in US own "backyard", with a number of leaders having declined the invitation in protest against ignoring Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua by the forum hosts. A number of countries have downgraded their summit presence to the level of ministers or even ambassadors.

The point is that only ten (not counting the USA and Canada themselves) out of the 30 countries that took part in the Summit of the Americas agreed to become part of Biden’s APEP program — through compulsion, mind you. And now presidents of these ten countries have been invited to Washington for the first APEP summit as if to remind of the United States’ diplomatic fiasco last year. The current summit has been attended by the leaders of Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay (again, apart from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden himself).

The Washington forum’s final declaration has been a meaningless double talk, a set of phrases that can be inserted into any declaration summing up the outcome of any international event. Leaders of APEP countries turn out committed to a common vision of "an open, fair, inclusive, and prosperous hemisphere" and foresee a brighter future of all the peoples of America, with a dynamic economy to build a fairer society, and democratic governments to benefit everyone through effective institutions.

This declaration, invented by the State Department, serves as a front for Washington's true intentions. The Axios information portal has clarified the message. Citing sources in the Biden administration, it indicates that the United States is "trying to counter China’s growing influence in Latin America by offering regional partners the opportunity to coordinate more closely with the United States on a range of issues." Washington is seeking to rally a coalition of American continent states that would agree to hamper China's financial and economic penetration into Latin America in exchange for cheap handouts. American Partnership for Economic Prosperity is certainly not a traditional trade agreement to let parties lower tariffs on their goods and services and thus gain access to a common regional market. This does not refer to any real trade and economic partnership between the United States and Latin America but appears as a phony attempt by Washington to keep not only China at bay. This is also an attempt to throw a spanner into the machinery of BRICS — an association that has a tremendous impact on the continent thanks to its active Latin American partner Brazil that engages the neighbors in implementing the idea of a multipolar world free of dollar hegemony.

In fairness it must be said that the final declaration of the first Americas Partnership summit does not urge blocking financial and trade activity of China or other BRICS countries in the region. But one must understand that things of the kind are discussed "on the sidelines" and in course of face-to-face contacts with heads of state. Biden, by the way, did meet with some of them, so Washington has no reason to declare this sort of goals officially on paper.

What the US offers under Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity is a creative evolution of the Monroe doctrine, which asserts that its national interests extend to the whole of America, including its southern part, and countries of other continents have no right to challenge those. Earlier, everyone else was equally prohibited from invading the US "backyard", and now China has been granted a special "honor" to become its first economic rival.

However, the formal attendance of ten Latin American countries at the Washington summit or their signatures to the final declaration do not guarantee their unconditional subordination to Washington. Times change, and there's no way to stop China today. The entire Americas Partnership summit has been brought about by American establishment’s hopelessness and hysteria as it loses control of both Latin America and the rest of the world.