Biden’s Latin America policy will be constrained more by weak regional leadership than by Florida’s electoral politics

Biden’s experience and appointments signal an interest in Latin America, but there are few leaders in the region with whom he can advance his policy goals or multilateral approach, writes Tom Long (University of Warwick). It is something of a cliché that there can be no “US policy toward Latin America” because there is no single “Latin America”. The region is too large and too diverse to be addressed by a single policy. Normally, this refrain is a helpful reminder that US policy should be attentive to variation in the region. But when the foreign policy team of the newly inaugurated President Joseph R. Biden looks to Latin America and sees that there is no “Latin America there”, this will reflect the central problem they face: a tremendous deficit of regional leadership.