Qué pasó, presidente Biden?

For some reason, although the topic was Mexico’s strained relationship with the defacto government of Peru, The lightening visit of Ukrainian President Zelensky to Washgton came up. In a veiled slap at US imperialism … as demonstrated by it’s hasty support for the (ummm) “irregular govenmental reorganization” in Peru (former CIA offical and US Ambassador Lisda Kenna, tweeting out warm support for “stabilization” (i.e., shooting peasants, and declaring a state of seige) … AND the arrogance of imperial powers, riffed on that annoying faux-pas people from the US are all too prone to commit.

Yesterday the president of Ukraine arrived and “my president” – and I really love the guy– of the United States, who also constantly tells me that we must have a relationship on an equal footing, on is Twitter feed says to the President of Ukraine: ‘Welcome to America.”

What happened [more in the sense of WTF?] President Biden? With all due respect, America is all of us. It’s common in Europe and other places that when people talk of “America” then mean the United States, but America is Peru, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico… And I’m not saying that a [foreign] president shouldn’t be welcomed, what I don’t like is the asumption behind this. Welcome to where [or by whom] in America? Let’s start now to change that. We need to keep moving forward – as the old song says, “custom is stronger than love” — has been around now for two centuries, the Monroe Doctrine, and the idea that America for the “Americans”.

I doubt it even occured to Biden (or to most “USAnians”) that there was anything at all controversial about the US President’s tweet. But AMLO is making two important points. First, that the United States (ok, and Canada) are not only NOT all America, but are alone in this hemisphere in their obsession the Ukrainian situation, but more importantly, by his unwitting assumption that the US represents “America” (all 35 independent nations?) and can set the agenda and policy of the other 34, the United States is “losing” it’s hemispheric dominance, or relevance, at a time when it both trying to counter the influence of other powers (like China, Russia, the EU) when it could be strengthening mutually beneficial economic and social ties, while at the same time accepting that those 34 other American nations have their own political positions and might see affairs in their own hemisphere (like in Peru) as more their concern than those half-way around the planet.