Leadership: President Obama didn't get much at the Summit of the Americas for normalizing ties with Cuba. After bailing out the failed Castro regime, he's been drawn into a fresh spate of grievances from other Latin states.
The specter of the president of United States being bullied and pushed around by the likes of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver who almost certainly holds office due to election fraud, is one sorry sight.
As president of the shambling, oil-ruined regime on the verge of bankruptcy and deeply mired in the drug trade, Maduro managed to flip the entire sentiment of the hemisphere's other 33 leaders at the annual Summit of the Americas in Panama City his way after Obama imposed minor sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials.
Maduro got them to back petitions through other groups, such as Unasur, calling Obama's piddling sanctions a coup attempt and an intolerable interference in Venezuela's internal affairs. Venezuelan leaders claim they've gathered 10 million petition signatures through a Twitter campaign.
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| Obama listens during the CEO Summit of the Americas panel discussion. AP |
What again did Obama do to get this massive slap in the face? He froze a few bank accounts in the U.S. and yanked the visas of seven drug-linked Venezuelan officials, effectively ending their trips to Disneyworld in Orlando and Miami's shopping malls.
Yet there's little doubt Maduro won and Obama lost, given the groveling retraction Obama made on Tuesday, when he declared the narco-state was a threat to no one, thereby nullifying his statement a month ago that Venezuela was a "national security threat."
A few petitions and the wall of solidarity of Latin America's presidents in a region he has long neglected was all it took.Read the rest of this IBD Editorial HERE.
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